Mayflies by Sara Veglahn Read Free Book Online Page B

She slipped away and circled a beam. It is the same every time: she closes her eyes and counts to one hundred, there is a great and heavy vibration, and she emerges from below transformed. She cannot stop it from happening. No one can.

    When she came back from the séance, her ladies were waiting for her at the door. They stood there blocking her way with arms akimbo and stern stares. They were silent until she tried to make her way through to get inside the small apartment with its bottle-green walls and pale furniture.
    â€œWhere have you been?”
    â€œJust out. I went for a walk.”
    â€œBut you’ve been somewhere else, too.”
    â€œI went to the river and stayed for a while. It’s a beautiful evening, warm, not too muggy. There were more bugs than I expected…”
    â€œYou went to see that medium, didn’t you?”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?”
    â€œDon’t lie. We know about that girl.”
    â€œWhat girl?”
    â€œThe one who drowned. We know you tried to contact her.”
    Her ladies were ruffled hens, their hair was a mess, all the shiny curls going every which way, their thin crepe-de-Chine wrappers pulled tightly across their bodies. Their feet were bare and looked cold. How long had they been waiting? How long had she been gone?
    â€œI don’t even know who this girl is! I made her up! I just wanted to see if it were really possible to contact the dead, so I played a trick. I don’t know why. I don’t even know how I got there!”
    Her ladies spoke severely in unison, “We don’t believe you.”
    â€œNo! I don’t know her! How could you? She’s a lie!”
    â€œOf course we know her. We always have, just as we’ve always known you. Don’t you remember? Try to remember now.”

    It is early. It is late. I have to find my way home.

    They are dragging the river again. Everyone stands on the banks, watching and waiting. It is excruciating—waiting for the lost to be found. Secretly, everyone hopes that the lost stay lost. They do not want to see the face bloated, the skin green and gray, they do not want to see what the river has taken and left. It is horrifying, the transformation. The implements used to retrieve the drowned. The noise, the spectacle. There is a marked contrast between the noise created to find someone who has drowned and the relative quiet that occurs when drowning.

    I sifted sand through my fingers and sat silent. Like anyone, I stared at the water before me. I was every person there that day. It was overcast and the clouds were heavy. I was drawn to the water but couldn’t muster enough energy to wade near shore. I never learned to swim and so I was rarely alone near rivers, oceans, ponds, or seas. I kept safe, kept watch over myself.
    I wasn’t alone. My ladies wandered in the near distance. I saw them gathering shells into buckets, lifting their skirts to avoid dampening them. Earlier they had somehow managed to make a floating table in the river. They stood playing cards with water up to their waists. The cards were much larger than normal cards. I could see each hand clearly from shore.
    I sat staring. A gun shooting blanks. I became this blankness. I felt nothing.

    She kept herself dry, her feet moving swiftly around her rooms in which she stayed, counting out crackers onto a plate, counting eggs. When the power went out there was a hum. For a whole day, the low sound inside her head. And all the waters gleamed, the trees waving like seaweed, her hair waving like seaweed. Beneath lakes and rivers the waters intermingled, ethereal, an account of floating past, hands brushing the banks, a return to the world, seized.

    In this photograph, a woman sits in a pale dress on a dark sofa. Her hands are gloved and her hair short and wavy. She does not look directly into the camera and her expression is distracted, as if she wasn’t ready for the picture to be taken. On