others

This story is by my friend Katie Angermeier. She will likely be annoyed that I posted it because I am not sure if she is finished. But I like where it took me. and how through misery, a sort of warmth is reached. Check it out. Katie- Say the word and I will pull it. Sorry it took me so long to read it, life has been, well, manic. There is an Austin trip a-brewin... I might cry when I see you. I wonder what a character named after me might sing about...bunnies?


Bodies Pool 

Paul pokes the dead body with a stick. It's the sixth one this week and a full-body floater.
"Full-body floater!" Rachael yells.
"Duh," I say.
At the knee-level, currents drift the dead body's hand into cupping Paul's calf. He has strong legs for someone so young. I compare them with my own.
Across the river some white-shorts kids toss a fresh tennis ball softly to one another. One, a sunny-faced girl, dips a toe from the dock and squeals.
With the stick, Paul pushes the dead body over so we can see the swell of its face. Alive, it might have been a mother. Or might have been a father, one of those. Rachael hides her face because she doesn't like seeing dead lips: says she never gets used to their waxy want for color. I think about all of the dead lips that I can remember offhand: plump ones, cut ones, ones that had begun to die before the person had, shrunken into hard tracks across a face. I'd seen some dead lips not in the river, but they were lipsticked in their coffins. Even the boys and men. Weird to think about. I can't remember where I've seen some of these so it must have been before this time.
Some birds have been disturbing the day as spots of black and noise; squawks and chirps back and forth, meaning to mate with one another. One bird's small sound, separate from the rest, pulls my thoughts back to the mud. Like he tugs a thread from his beak to my shovel.
I'm only strong enough to fill a third of my bucket with one shovelful of mud. Paul can fill his halfway. We each have a lifetime of experience.
"I wish I was a hothouse flower," sighs Rachael as she watches the white-shorts kids who now have two tennis balls. I imagine being part of the wind in Rachael's breath, twirling into controlled sounds that form curves of letters then passing from her mouth to shape those words. I think Paul's imagining something similar. We've both been in love with Rachael since time began.
"You'll never be a hothouse flower," I tell her. I've only recently started saying things like this. She hardens at them; somehow her entire face gets pointy. Affecting Rachael thrills me and I know I'm rooting some sort of trouble inside of her, but at least there's that. Better than nothing.
I fill another bucket with mud and balance myself between their weights. I walk to an escalator. Around here on the harvesting bank, each escalator leads up a tree and the manager needs mud in the trees to begin building some new fortress. At least that's what we've heard. Once, Rachael asked the manager why and he answered, "I just work here!" Then, he made her work through dark for her insolence.
Paul ignores his harvesting duties and wades out further into the river to turn the dead body back over so Rachael doesn't have to see its face. I think that's nice of him. I love Paul, too. He's beautiful with eyelashes flattened against his rounded cheek, spread like bug legs. We're all three so new to being orphans that we haven't reached orphan status yet. They call us Others. The orphans say that when we remember why we're here, then we'll look like them, then we'll be orphans.
During each day all of us—orphans and Others—harvest the mud at the river bank where only a small grave of pine trees separate us from the orphanage. On sunny harvest days, we see glints off the orphanage roof, gleaming like fish scales.
For a second there are no noises. All three of us Others notice. I can tell because we look towards the sky in one lift, but the white-shorts kids must not treasure the raging silence and the birds must not treasure it either because they all start their squawking at the same time, like an ugly instrument playing an ugly chord. The sky has turned into a layered dessert and Paul pushes the dead body away from us with his stick.
"Mud kids!" A white-shorts kid throws his fresh tennis ball at us but it lands in the river. Good arm. Paul sucks a shovelful of mud from the bank. He fills more than half his bucket. Paul's stronger than me, with long arm muscles.
Down the river the dead body floats smaller against the layered dessert sky. It stays near our banks, meandering through the reeds, far from the white-shorts kids.
I'm able to wade nearly to the middle to retrieve the tennis ball because the river is shallow. The season's been dry. With my ear close to its surface I can hear the rocks on the floor shifting and rubbing together, somehow vibrating through me like neck pops.
Paul says a manager is coming; he says this by using our secret cicada call. I stay where I am because I've nearly reached the tennis ball that's turning brown near our side of the river; it's shifting and spinning like someone underwater is bringing it to us, playing a game between the banks. I know I won't make it to the bank before the manager comes down, so I wade to the ball.
Paul cicada-noises again. Rachael is now mucking out shovelfuls like she hasn't all day. Most days she can't quite pick up a full bucket so she either drags it to the escalator or only fills the mud halfway. To each tree with an escalator there are shallow trenches from her dragging. It's comforting to know Rachael's paths.
A manager lowers himself from a branch with a complicated pulley system. He slings his tie over his shoulder. The gum he chews snaps purple.
"May have to outsource, kiddos!" He looks down on Rachael as he says this. "This mud isn't going to harvest itself. Crunching numbers up there! Don't want to put any orphans to death!" He tugs on the pulley system a few times and sways out of sight.
"I hate him," Paul says. He finds a spot with soft mud and digs. The white-shorts kids get called in by a grown-up voice.
An orphan runs from the trees umbrelling its head with a sopping pillow. All the other orphans look alike. Girls and boys. They've been orphans forever.
"It's raining on the other side! Some orphans are fighting!" the orphan yells, then runs back into the woods.
I'm now closer to the middle of the river where the water reaches my hips. The current sways me. I throw the dirtied ball and it bounces from the white-shorts dock back into the river then floats after the dead body.
Rachael screams. Her scream is slow and loud like air pinched out from a balloon. This scream is honest. Because her shoelace is getting sucked into the bottom escalator step, the bucket of mud has tipped, speckling her torso. Paul had begun to run after the other orphan when Rachael's scream stuck him in place. He pivots. I run heavy through the river; I want desperately to save Rachael. I want to swaddle her and cover her completely with only me. The water is thick like jelly. Her sneaker toe disappears under the step; a mechanical groan gives way to inconsistent clicks while the movement of the escalator steps falters and I'm not sure if it's from her shoe or the coating of mud like chocolate. Her entire foot is swallowed. She's splattered to the neck. I'm nearly to the bank.
She reaches for Paul.
"The manager might punish me in order to insure quality performance," she says. Blood trickles with mud down her ankle and her freckles look bold across whitened cheeks. In a soft voice, Paul shushes her.
"Management doesn't matter," he says.
He scoops her in his arms. Neither Paul nor Rachael notice her shoe has been swallowed by the escalator, which chokes and groans because they look only at her body, and Paul wipes her ankle with his shirt, revealing a long, thin cut. It's not bad. She cries with relief that her foot is completely intact. She giggles her relief directly onto Paul. Her relief covers him like a membrane, encapsulating him completely until he laughs, snug in her cover of relief. He rocks her.
If all of me could drip with the water from my skin, I would like that.
Something bumps the back of my knees. They buckle into the current and I splash unexpectedly, kneeling into some nice, soft mud. Easy to shovel mud. It's another dead body—a half-body floater, the legs are sunken into the muddy water and the arms bob in front of hair that moves like smoke. I punch it away.
If there's one thing the orphans know, it's how to organize a fight. Dozens of orphans will form a circle while they sing the fighting song; it's a song that I can't understand because I'm not an orphan yet. Honestly, none of us Others are even interested in the fighting but we like to be near the orphans. The two orphans who fight seem to know the rules and move around each other, hardly touching but anticipating punches.
On the other side of the woods, it rains. An orphan draws a circle in the mud by dragging his toe and the two fighters stand back-to-back in the center. The orphans have told me that it's important to separate and fight on purpose if only to remember not to do it on accident. Paul and I crutch Rachael between us even though she says she's just fine. That it doesn't even hurt one bit. As we approach the circle of orphans, amassing into a thick ring, Paul drops his side of Rachael. The rain glosses his face. He stops blinking. The orphans sing loud.
The rain slows.
"I've remembered," he says. He says he understands the song now. Some orphans can't help but scream-sing and some sob while others only hum and Paul says the refrain is that love will return home. Will return home. He says that it will break any heart, even if the heart isn't lonely to begin with. The heart will just turn in on itself and twist like a screw into a board, getting resettled in a tight way. "Melody," he says, "bridges from my cracked open chest to the orphans."
Paul leaves us to sing with the orphans. The fighters nuzzle, bat and eventual embrace one another. One tries to force the other outside the circle. He totters but punches other orphan's jaw, forcing his own weight back into the circle. The punched orphan wipes a smear of blood across his cheek. Rachael sighs and leans closer into me. The song blankets them all tight together. Like a sheet tucked in around and pulled snug. All their voices in one song, I imagine each heart breaking. There's a oneness in that. As if the sound of all hearts breaking at once is somehow a comforting sound. To me, to Rachael, this is not comforting.
Her side touching my side is only a little bit satisfying. It's different without Paul.
As the orphans sing, the fighters fight. Both of them are striped with blood and move around each other in tired stances. It's nearly dark by now. I mistake Paul for any other orphan as he's now part of the fence around the fighters. I pull Rachael close and she shivers, pulls away and walks away from the fighting.
The shape that I know as Rachael shadows against the back orphanage wall. Her side view is all angles and I recognize her pointed shoulders as her stress stance. The more pointed Rachael is, the more brutal the day has been to her; it's when she's soft and round that I know she's happy. I've known this since the beginning of time. If I got sharp the way she did, I'd be all angles tonight as well. Without Paul made us different and further apart. Anyway, she hunches tight to the concrete slab, her hands like spades; she crouches and hobbles close to the ground. She looks like an angry duck. It is obvious, I think, that she is trying to catch something. I hear a cicada. Paul jumps with the fighters so I know he isn't chirping. The hopping of a frog or toad is silhouetted on the wall as well. The shadow of Rachael catches the shadow of the toad and throws the toad over the banister before approaching me.
"That toad was chasing a cicada," she says and points to the wall.
"The cicada would die anyway," I say. "What's the use."
She knuckles me and the orphans shout but not at us. They shout because one of the fighters has won. An orphan huddles outside the circle and the other slumps inside the circle. The rest of the orphans press around both fighters and draw them into their fold. Paul is with them somewhere.
Later, Rachael sleeps cradled by a deck chair's arms as light clouds cover a slivered moon.
The next day, a hot one, Paul harvests with the orphans. He's remembered and they'll be working as a group. He looks just as beautiful, but more like the rest of the orphans. He assures us that we'll remember, too. "Don't worry," he says, "we'll be more together."
Rachael and I shovel in distant silence without Paul to pillow the space between us. It's the middle of the severe afternoon and the white-shorts kids are throwing tennis balls again. Their laughter tinkers across the water, close and far away all at once. "Hey mud kids," one boy calls, then throws the tennis ball. It lands nearest to Rachael but we both wade out towards it. Underneath the ball, a dead body rises from the disturbed riverbed and the tennis ball catches in the body's hair that the water has combed into a halo. After Rachael pulls the ball from the body, she keeps wading so I keep following. The water near the white-shorts kids is the same temperature as the water on our side of the bank. It's easy to cross.
Rachael tries to give the ball to the girl on the dock, but the girl backs away, shaking her head so Rachael hands the ball to a white-shorts boy.
"Is it true that your side of the river has dead bodies?" he asks Rachael. "I've never seen a dead body," says the white-shorts girl.
Sharpening her stance, Rachael tapers her mouth to a point and edges her shoulders upward. A hair is wrapped around the tennis ball. Even her eye lines meet at a sharp point at her temple. Nothing I've ever said has done this to her and I'm glad.
"No," she says.
Someone calls the white-shorts boy; he turns towards the call -- the peak of a house in the distance. I see that his shorts that are stained and yellowing in certain spots. I hand him the tennis ball and my muddy fingermarks stamp his arm. The calling gains clarity with shrinking distance.
"My dad is coming," he says.
Approaching us, his dad could be any dad, but close-up, I see he is a manager. His tie hangs slack below the top few buttons, his sleeve cuffs are rolled above his elbows and his smile is natural — kind and soft. But it's still the manager. His face stays relaxed as he drapes an arm around his boy.
"Well hello there. New neighbor?"
He doesn't recognize me.
The white-shorts boy reaches across his body to take his father's hand.
And suddenly I remember. Before time began, I had a sister that matched my two parents. We ate dinner of several colors in a warm silence. In the darkening kitchen window, I saw our reflection. Behind that reflection a tree was losing its leaves to the season, stepping out of its skirt. In this moment of remembering, I become an orphan and the manager recognizes me as one. He pulls his boy closer to him.
"Go on!" He pushes me and I fall to my knees in the water. His son drops the tennis ball and I see some dead body hair wound around his finger. Rachael's edges have softened and she reaches to me, but I am moving to the orphans, to find my people. Closer to our side of the bank -- the dark part of the river -- two more dead bodies float facedown, their limbs intertwined. The rustling of the cattails calms me. Once I reach our bank, I look back at Rachael in the middle of the river, being lapped with tiny river waves. Speckles of mud dot her face. As if she knows how I see her, she cups some water and cleans her cheeks, watching me from across the river.