This is the Water by Yannick Murphy Read Free Book Online Page A

advice. Instead she goes right into the warm-down lane, her head sunk low between her shoulders. The killer sighs. He was looking forward to the way the blade of his knife would cut through that throat, sending all of that red blood that would be pulsing so hard from her athlete’s strong heart down her shirtfront. (He couldn’t understand why that strangler out west bothered to strangle. What a waste of an experience, not seeing the blood, not letting the blood do what it most wants to do—flow.) Especially, though, he was looking forward to how she would look, all of the excitement and satisfaction and energy in her eyes from having beat her record suddenly leaving, suddenly his for the taking.

CHAPTER SIX
    S itting in the bleachers, trying not to turn around and yell at the parent sitting behind you who yelled at you in the first place, you imagine the sounds of the air conditioner that was in the house you rented on vacation at the equator almost a year ago. You close your eyes and imagine also the calm blue light that would come on the control panel of the air conditioner when it was turned on. You think how you loved that trip. Thomas surfed with you then. He wasn’t thinking about his failing lab on the trip. You would see him riding a wave and then falling over backward when he had ridden the wave as far as he could, landing in the water with a yelp and a hoot at having had such a good ride. He walked with you on the beach at night, then stopped and held your arm. He was smiling, amazed, holding out a flashlight into the shrub-covered dunes, where hundreds of orange and purple crabs crawled, their movement sounding like pattering drops of unceasing rain. But now, since you’ve been back, and the problems at his lab haven’t disappeared, the bacteria still aren’t growing, the planes by his office at the airport are stilling screeching on the tarmac out his window, he hasn’t reached out for you once, and what does it take, you think, to make him reach out to you again? This is when you hear, “Hello, Annie.” It’s Chris, with the perfect breasts and rear. “Hey, have a seat,” you say. You then proceed to move your purse and your book to make room for her. Chris has no bags with her, not even a purse, as usual. Because you have known her a few years now you know most of her clothes. She is wearing her faded blue Levi’s jeans rolled up to the ankles, tennis shoes, and a white V-neck tee shirt. Her hair is kept back with a simple black ponytail holder, and she wears no makeup. You think she is the most beautiful woman at the meet today, and then you turn around and look at all the other women in the bleachers and think you are right. Chris always smells faintly of mint, not like toothpaste mint or breath-freshener mint, but like the real mint, the kind that grows wild in your field by your house. Whenever you take a walk to the stream through the fields, you break a leaf off and pinch it and smell it.
    â€œCleo just told me she wants one of those suits,” Chris says. “Like the ones Alex and Sofia have.” With a lift of her chin she points to your girls, who are on deck.
    â€œOh, those,” you say. “They are the biggest marketing scam. The least expensive of them costs a couple of hundred dollars, but do they really make the girls swim faster? They’re so tight the girls sometimes say they can hardly breathe, but without them the girls don’t think they can win the race, and if they don’t think they can win it, then sometimes they don’t,” you say. Chris nods. You feel as if you’ve hurt Chris’s feelings somehow. “I mean, that’s great that Cleo’s that into swimming that she wants one. Now you too can experience the joy of having to help pull, tug, squeeze, and jam your daughter’s rear into a suit in time for her first event when her body’s still wet from having swum warm-ups.”