by Chloë Moore ’24
Birdie Keller is a freshman Creative Writing major from Saint Paul and Florida. She enjoys writing queer speculative fiction and fantasy, and has a pet yellow lab named Apollo.
content warnings: alcohol addiction, child abuse, death
drowning
“How the fuck did I end up with a weak ass girl like you?”
That was years ago. I imagine now he’d be asking a far different question. If he was asking anything at all.
Nineteen:
His hair splays out on the grass like fallen leaves in a still pond. It’s summer, and we’re hot, the two of us. Boyfriend. Did I ever think such a thing would be mine?
I’m in Florida now, and I like it, but it can do this, suck you so dry that you don’t have enough moisture to spit, despite humidity heavy in the air. I want to kiss him, hold him against me like a salve that can fix the heat cracking me deep inside. I want him to make me believe in love. But we’re two baking bodies, sweaty in the sun, and there isn’t an inch of room in the fiery air.
High noon, and nowhere to go.
Born broken, drowning in my own lungs, all blue and yellow. Prophetic, my father later called it.
My mother wanted a strong child. One to love in all the soft ways she could not with my father. One to stand up to his rages. One who could make her smile.
My father wanted a son.
One frigid winter day, snow piling against the windows, he showed me his military medals from the second world war, all gleaming in a row.
Honor to our country, his words said. But his eyes said: violence.
Violence.
The bruises around my wrist. The way my mother flinched when he wrapped his arms around her waist.
I’m making you strong, he told me.
I love you, he told her.
I could not protect her any more than I could make him proud.
My boyfriend doesn’t want to go inside. I don’t ask why, don’t protest when I move to stand and he pushes me back down. This is a painting, a still-life, and I don’t want to shatter the peace. His profile, staring up at the endless, cloudless blue above us, is bathed in gold. His eyes are closed against the sun, and in that moment he looks like an angel, like what I used to pray to before I stopped believing in miracles at all.
Five: I sit in the grass, gazing up at the stars. They are a blanket in the sky, and the cold wraps around me, a comfort. The bruise on my cheek is the first of many wounds.
My mother still believes that I am strong, cradles me in her arms and murmurs a lullaby, but my father looks at me and sees the truth I hide behind a shattered mask.
Eight: children spill outdoors as the world thaws, wielding sticks like swords. The violence tastes like copper on my tongue, and I do not join them.
Ten: my father shows me the army’s enlisting application. “One day,” he says.
Twelve: I see death in person for the first time, in the face of Miss Helen. She lives two houses over. With the blue door. Her eyes are cold and her skin is ice and my father is watching, so I hold the tears inside.
Later, I throw them up right alongside that morning’s breakfast.
Irony is a funny thing.
Sixteen: It’s 1967, and I’m marching for freedom. Flowers adorn my hair and the banners we wave. It’s like I’m flying. Here are others who understand.
But hope can shatter like a dropped glass.
Seventeen: Robert Kennedy is shot.
and
Seventeen: my father kills my mother.
Her body on the floor. Love is not a beautiful thing.
He turns to me at one point, nose tipped against the scorched ground, eyes chips of fallen sky. “I love you.”
I love you. My father said that to my mother the night before she died. I heard him, the words murmured into a kiss. They sounded beautiful at the time, but now I know better. They are poison, nothing less.
It’s a hot summer, dry summer, dead summer, and this boy just told me he loves me. I am frozen.
“Do you?” In his voice is the persistence of the fearful. The ones who know what it is like to be forgotten. I know the song well.
I’m rotting, decaying slowly. Burning, drowning.
And now his hand is around my wrist. Am I imagining the tightness of his grip? I can’t breathe. “Do you?”
And here I thought that love could be for me.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Good.”
We lie there.
I can’t be like my mother, or myself at seventeen. Silent and quiet until my last, until it’s too late.
I sit up. I would kill for ice water, but the only things in this swampy wasteland are parched mouths and dried-out dreams.
“Let’s get a drink,” I say.
He doesn’t go to jail. Because it looks like an accident. Because I’m too afraid to say a thing. I live with him for a year. I’m not eighteen yet. I don’t know if I’d have the courage to leave regardless.
I try to hide the simmering rage the way I hide the hurt, beneath long sleeves and a placid expression, but it’s too bright. The injustice of it all eats away at me.
I can’t look at him without seeing her blood on his hands. Can’t breathe without dark smoke eating at my lungs.
And then: a Budweiser tipped in his hand, drunkenness smeared across his mouth. He slurs, “She had it coming. Useless bitch.”
That’s it.
He wants me to be strong? To savor the taste of pain?
Fine.
I will watch him burn.
And after, I hitch my way across the country. Live where I want, eat when I can. It tastes like freedom and sweat. In the beginning, I saw my mother’s cracked skull dripping beer in my dreams, but those nightmares have long since faded, leaving behind only the sour taste of a girl who no longer believes that love is real.
Finally free. Beholden to no one.
Except—
Except when I meet him, a beautiful boy framed in sunlight, a Florida tan on his skin, smiling at me over his book, I wonder if perhaps he is everything I thought could never be.
I have a fake ID. (For hitching purposes; I don’t drink.) I buy a six pack, and we sit outside on the scorched parking lot pavement. He drinks one and, over the course of hours, another. The smell and sight and sound of it slurping down turns my stomach. I push that aside.
When he finishes his second, I silently hand him a third. He drinks four in total.
We walk to the lake then under the darkening sky, leaving behind the empty six pack rings. Fog and mist puff around our feet. He sways, staggers, leans on me for support. Completely plastered. Revulsion rises in my throat, but I force it down. This will be over soon.
Maybe I’m plastered too (I’m not, I can’t be, I’ll be just like him) because nothing makes sense. His hair is wet against my fingers when I brush it away from his face, and his eyes are all hazed over with drink.
I wonder if I’m dreaming this, dreaming him. He looks like a mirror, or perhaps a window to something long past.
I can’t let it. I can’t let him.
I laugh, hug him, ignore the way my skin crawls. All it takes is a shove, a shifting of balance. He laughs too, until he is tipping off the dock, plunging into the lake.
Shouts. Thrashes. Gargles.
Silence.
The bubbles rise from the depths like ash raining from the sky.
I sit and watch and—
I didn’t know. That’s what I tell them, when they ask me why I didn’t stop him, didn’t realize that a boy that full of alcohol wouldn’t end well in the water. I didn’t know that he was drunk, I don’t even know where he got the beer.
I don’t tell them that death follows me like a ghost.
Instead, I tell them that he could swim. Damn well. Florida boy.
They ask: Were you drunk too, miss?
I don’t know. That’s what I tell them, when they ask why my father is nothing more than a cracked, cooked corpse. I don’t even know how the fire started.
I don’t tell them that it felt like a dream, the spare beer from the counter in one hand, the match in the other. I don’t tell them that my father’s final, surprised look when everything shattered and roared to life felt like a victory.
Instead I tell them that I loved my father. That I’m sorry he’s gone.
They ask: Are you drunk, miss?
Of course not.
Because that is what you are supposed to say.
There are a thousand little things, really, you’re supposed to say. When your boyfriend drowns in a lake, when your family home burns to cinders, and you are the only witness, when you are a girl with no history they can track who hitchhiked to Florida, a girl whose arms are mottled with bruises and old scars.
When all this is true, you are not supposed to tell the truth. Not when the truth is what it is, and the world is what it is.
Some reasonable answers, instead:
I don’t drink.
I didn’t know he would drown.
I didn’t start the fire.
I don’t drink.
He could swim.
I loved him.
I don’t drink.
I’m sorry he’s gone.
(If I drank, I’d be just like him.)
I’m sorry.
I don’t drink.
Somewhere, the lies become something else. Maybe now they are for you.
I didn’t know, you say again, and the flashing sirens beat out the heart of the truth.
Were you drunk?
Of course not.
You lie until you believe it.
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The Words thanks Birdie Keller for sharing her wonderful work with us!