Gloria.
None of us were looking for her to be the bravest, the first. We took it as certain that she would go last, she was a girly girl, rich family type. But before Rudy could turn around and tease her for it, Gloria was sprinting. A blur of red dress and red hair as she ran for the rope, kicking up brown leaves, sending them skimming the water. I remembered her swinging high, letting go, shrieking and disappearing into the lake, then popping up like a mermaid, hair dark red and stuck to her head, laughing and calling us all sissies. From that day on Rudy said you can never be sure with Gloria. Momma thought the same when I told her the story. She’ll grow up to be a quicksand woman, Momma said. Careful of that one, John Royal, she’ll have you running circles you don’t even know about. Be the death of you, she will.
Gloria always did what nobody expected.
So that Friday when we were fishing for perch in Big Lake, it was Gloria, wandering, not fishing because she thought it was boring, who found it. Tangled in the roots of a ripped-up sycamore, half-sunk in the flooded wood.
‘Come look,’ she shouted, stick in her hand for prodding. ‘Get over here the lot of you.’
Rudy, on the other side of the lake, ran.
Jenny trailed behind me. ‘But the fish, Johnny.’
‘It’ll just take a minute. Hook’s in the water anyways.’
Gloria pointed with her stick. It was just out of arm’s reach, the thing in the roots. But it wasn’t a thing. The closer I got the clearer I saw. Rudy stopped running. He saw it too. Gloria’s face was frowning and pale. Rudy looked back at me with hard eyes that said, keep Jenny back. It wasn’t real, it couldn’t be, not here. It was grey skin and hair once blonde like Rudy’s. It was bloated but not unrecognisable. Gloria’s stick left impressions in the skin.
It was a woman and she was dead.
We didn’t tell anyone about the body, at least not at first. A mixture of fear and fascination silenced us. It fizzed inside us, this knowledge, this secret, so colossal and strange we thought it would crush us if we put one toe wrong, one word in the wrong ear.
The four of us stood silent and staring for I don’t know how long. Just as dusk was settling and the starlings began their wheel, we decided to pull the woman out of the water and roots and lay her alongside a fallen tree trunk. We thought it kinder, to have something at her back, some comfort.
The woman, in my head I named her Mora, for the sycamore tree, was the first I’d seen naked. Mora’s were the first breasts, the first swatch of hair between the legs, the first bullet hole.
Gloria couldn’t look at her. Jenny couldn’t stop.
Rudy swore in a whisper and leaned into me. ‘What do we do?’
But I didn’t have an answer.
‘Who do you think she is?’ Jenny said but nobody wanted to guess.
‘We should tell Sheriff Samuels,’ Gloria said and I heard a tremor in her voice. Usually so steady, her tone, rich like knocking on oak, shook at the sight of death. Rudy was quiet, a deep frown clouding his eyes, as if were he to concentrate hard enough, he would bring a storm rolling across the cornfields.
‘Not yet,’ I said. It was a terrible secret, I realised. One that could change everything, and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to run home, to Momma. She’d know how to handle it, what to say, she always knew best, but I was rooted. Momma wouldn’t be home this time on a Friday night and, besides, how could I explain it?
Jenny stepped closer, looked at Mora as if she’d come upon a rat snake taking in the neighbour’s dog. The serpent’s jaw dislocating and reshaping itself so unnaturally. Something that small ingesting something far too big, you can’t help but watch, a jumble of curiosity, revulsion, an urge to help surpassed by a want to know if it would succeed in its swallowing. I’d never seen that expression on Jenny’s face before. Something happened to her that day. Changed her from the girl who would lazily kick her feet in the river, breathing in the sun and scent of evening primrose, to a girl who couldn’t sit still, as if she had electricity running through her, twitching her muscles, itching beneath her skin.
‘Why’s she naked?’ Jenny asked.
‘Maybe she was swimming,’ Rudy said.
‘Swimming and then got shot,’ I said.
Maybe they didn’t see the bullet hole. Maybe they thought it was something else, something innocent, and this poor woman had simply drowned while taking relief from the sun. Maybe it was and I saw a gunshot where really there was a hole made by a branch after she was already dead.
I bent down and lifted a lock of hair from Mora’s face. Everything about her was grey. Her hair, between my fingers, was wet and coarse, grainy with silt. It didn’t have the softness of living hair, it hung wrong, it looked wrong. She was deflated, absent of rushing blood and air. It was human as I’ve never seen human.
‘Johnny,’ my sister’s voice, a frantic beat. ‘Johnny, look.’
The dead woman’s chest moved.
I yelped, stumbled backward, hit my elbow on a rock. Gloria gasped and Rudy swore and Jenny’s eyes widened.
A spike of fear pressed against my stomach. Same place on my gut as the hole in hers.
‘She’s alive, she’s alive, oh God oh God, do something,’ Gloria said, tugging on Rudy’s arm, backing away.
Mora’s chest rose then fell in a strange breath. Her eyes didn’t open. Her hands didn’t move.
‘We have to tell someone,’ Rudy almost shouted. ‘We have to get help.’
Her chest rose again but lower, not high beneath the rib cage. A bulge formed at the top of her abdomen, it shifted, squirmed. The breath was not a breath.
I pressed my back against the fallen tree, scrambled up.
‘Jenny, get back,’ I said.
But she’d bent over, put her face inches closer to the movement.
A shape formed in Mora’s skin, defining itself against the weight of her flesh like an arm stretching out beneath a heavy blanket. My pulse echoed in my ears and chest, drowned out everything but the soft squelching sound of the body. Nobody moved. Gloria still clutched at Rudy’s arm and he at hers. Jenny still stared, bent slightly at the waist, her top lip hooked up in pleasured disgust. I backed up, moss and bark flakes sticking to the sweat on my t-shirt, resisting the urge to grab Jenny and run.
The pink edging the inside of the hole in Mora’s stomach pushed and turned outward, a black something appeared. Wet and shining, it forced itself free, a thin sinuous tube. I felt sick, I wanted to hurl up my breakfast, my lunch, those few biscuits I’d eaten after class, I wanted to be empty. My head told me it was an eel or catfish, my eyes said demon, devil, alien.
Jenny backed away as the creature wriggled free of the hole and flopped, writhing and slick, on Mora’s stomach.
‘Kill
