The Swamp Killers

by Sarah M. Chen

  Donora was fired a few days later.

  The last of Donora’s work that was used in my final form plays out before my gory end, a spiritual dawn breaking over swamp, Melody aware she has spent the night communicating with beneficent spirits, only now figuring out their urgent message: that she is in danger, that her boyfriend has just murdered her mother, only now about to take the suitcase of jewels, as Timmy enters the shotgun house after his sojourn, seething like a muddier Stanley Kowalski, with blood-wet hands and a grin that implies his insatiable hungers.

  I was born at a premier at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on the kind of Southern California afternoon that can convince anyone that paradise-on-Earth is all around us and attainable to anyone who simply reaches out his or her hand. The Director was honored with his hands in concrete that afternoon, and the Lead Actress Instagrammed herself comparing the size of her hands to Marilyn Monroe’s. The New Screenwriter was photographed with grease in his hair and shades over his eyes, his arms around the waists of smiling starlets who seemed to bask in the glow of his genius. Donora Kovic wasn’t invited to the premier, and although Javier was invited, he refused to go. He looked at photographs of the premier on People magazine’s website, during lunch break from his new job as a copywriter for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. Those who were at my premier, however, filed into the theater and were bathed in the darkness, experiencing together the shared dream of my birth as I flashed across the screen for the first time. They congratulated one another once I finished, minds already drifting to other projects, other concerns, leaving me behind for more distant dreams, future dreams.

  I am not beautiful, and I often wonder why I exist. Why when Cleo from 5 to 7 exists, when La Dolce Vita exists, when Persona and Andrei Rublev exist, why, why I’m allowed to live at all, why I’m allowed to play, why anyone would watch me, why anyone would spend a moment of their lives with me. Why did the Director and the New Screenwriter smile so widely at my premier, when I disappointed so many people? Why did they smile, why did they pose with actresses in glittering dresses and actors casual in tuxedos, why flashbulbs, why fans, why am I allowed to live at all, why? Why is it my face that fills dark screens at night, that fills cell phone screens and laptop screens, why does my face shine whenever lonely people in the middle of the night flip through channels, why am I born again and again on streaming services, why am I resuscitated, why am I born and reborn, when other films, films of tremendous beauty, silver dreams that cut to the core of humanity, that exult in the desire of love, that break through the frozen hearts of desperate men, are rarely seen at all?

  I am useless and long, I am schlock and unbeautiful, I make the world worse for my existence, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…

  I am the black screen.

  Black screen to black screen.

  Our little lives rounded with sleep.

  Back to TOC

  Red Delicious

  Shannon Kirk

  Vicky Windsong lives in minutia. In every fiber of touch. In each molecule of scent, of taste. In individual decibels of sound. In strands of her favorite softie blankie from childhood, the block of time when her father was alive—the Before Melody Duplass era. She can sink to almost catatonic upon the vision of the darkest blotch of blood red on a Red Delicious apple, the patch beneath the curve, the one an artist would render in shadow. Time for Vicky is slower than for others, for, with eyes closed, she tracks the trickle of juice, rivering along her jaw, after a bite of a plump Red. Most others chomp, chomp like witless gators in the swamp, spraying apple mist of indiscriminate disease. They open their maws while clomping away from Vicky’s fruit stand, moving on without any thought to the texture in their mouths or the wind on their skin, so as to buy bait or books or booze or porkroll sandwiches in Nana’s shops out back—blocks of beautiful outbuildings wedged within the cypress and veils of draping moss. The Book Tower & Potluck attracts a whole host of Florida tourists. Locals refer to it as the B-TAP.

  Here now, Vicky listens to the one, two, three fingernail tap of one of the swamp’s ubiquitous cricket frogs, a sound that is, to everyone else, an active arcade of a billion pinball machines, a blended echo of rolling and clinking metal balls. But for Vicky, a single click, and then another, and so on. The frogs pause and resume. Pause and resume. Vicky stops counting clicks so as to sway in a west wind that ruffles the draping moss above her roadside fruit and citrus stand. Cars pass Vicky in the elbow bend at the entrance/exit; she stands under her cart’s attached green awning. Her produce, organized in the colors of a rainbow, fills the angled top trays of her refrigerated cart.

  The B-TAP closed an hour ago, and Vicky has remained at the exit to capture departing tourists who need fresh fruit for long car rides or lemon rinds for drinks in hotels. Their tires roll the rocks of the dirt drive in a constant swoosh. Some stop, select a few apples, maybe some citrus, a cursed pineapple, avocados, and pay Vicky cash. Everything they do is too fast. They make mistakes of speed, turn their worlds into a blurred-brown, muddled soup, when they should slow down. Sure, she judges them, maybe she’s confused by them, but, if she’s being honest, she’s also envious of their oblivion and ability to move freely in the world from one thing to the next, which, Vicky must admit, amounts to an act of bravery. A bravery she used to have, but Melody Duplass stole. Better to live in the slow lane, to not miss any beats, any clicks, any single strain of scent in absolute present, for these individual elements bring a natural high; endorphins from Vicky’s condition provide a protective shield from the horror of the past and the anxiety of the future.

  It’s six p.m., an hour past closing. The B-TAP is cleared of customers, so Vicky drops the rods that hold her fruit in place. She snatches a Red Delicious, lifts the brakes on the cart’s wheels, and begins to wind her way into the cypress-banyan-moss-filled campus of the B-TAP. She hears the rumble of the current of the river, which borders the B-TAP and empties into the endless tentacles and trenches of the swamp, just beyond the bridge a half mile down. She sets her Red Delicious in a jug nailed to her cart and pushes forward, pausing every few steps to close her eyes and appreciate the west wind that brushes her freckled cheek and to take slow bites of her apple.

  The group therapist for highly sensitive people (“HSP”) says Vicky’s condition is rare because her hyperawareness of the senses gives her a euphoria and not what some HSPs have, a physical pain. Since the thing with Melody two years ago, Vicky has given all of herself to her rare strain of euphoric HSP.

  She meanders along, pausing to appreciate the wind and the juice of her Red Delicious. These unchangeable opening and closing times, the precision of wind to join her just right, just right, the juice splash in her mouth, the blood-red patch on the apple with the thin leather hide and fibrous slush inside, all of it leads to a satisfaction within Vicky. She grins. The sensation is as sensual as when Granval slides his slick wet tongue down her neck and between her breasts to a destination south of her hips. She makes him go slow; she makes him take his Southern-gentleman time. She’s always viewed Snow White, with her sinful apple and seven dwarves, as no more than an intellectual’s sly porn. Sounds like a good time to Vicky. She’d bite Snow’s apple too.

  One could say Melody Duplass bit Vicky’s tempting virtual apple, followed Vicky’s breadcrumbs, so to speak, leading her here, close, so close now, to the B-TAP.

  At eighteen, Vicky stands her life height: five foot six inches mostly due to thin pole legs. Just like her sweet daddy, Clarence Windsong, and just like Nana Windsong, who is walking up a windy path, circumnavigating cypress and a couple of dominating banyans, making her way to Vicky. The west wind picks at the pieces of Nana’s dyed-blonde hair that escaped her one fat braid.

  Planting herself in front of Vicky’s cart, Nana forces Vicky to stop. Nana angles her knobby right knee askance. Her catalogue hiking shorts abide all manner of movement, remaining unwrinkled throughout her shop-owner workday.

  “You done for the day?” Nana
asks.

  Vicky nods.

  “So it’s time then. Time for Melody,” Nana says, more as a demand than declaration.

  “Can we talk by the Book Tower?”

  Vicky pushes forward, forcing Nana to join her and walk alongside the rolling cart. Winding around the trails, they pass Nana Windsong’s temperature-controlled outbuilding with industrial metal roof, where she cooks the books. They meander and pass the chef locking up the Porkroll Shack (not a shack, a commercial-grade foodie cafe). Closer to the river, Nana pauses to check the What’s In Stock chalkboard at the Bait 4 Days building to see that an employee had crossed out Everglade Worms and added Chicken Innards. Last, they ensure the marshmallow buckets, left for tourist children to feed baby gators, are emptied in the baby gator pool. They reach the B-TAP’s pièce de résistance, the Book Tower, in front of which, riverside, Vicky parks her fruit cart and locks the wheels, so it won’t tip sideways and roll down the steep slope. She’ll recharge the underbelly refrigerator in an outdoor plug and draw the canopy and zip up her fruit once she’s done talking with Nana about the plan for Melody Duplass.

  Behind Vicky and Nana looms the five-floor Book Tower. Four floors hold the staff best picks and bestsellers, all displayed front-face for easy, vertical, floor-to-floor perusing. Customers use an external spiral staircase. Vicky’s workspace is the fifth floor. The B-TAP is the “Most Eclectic Swamp Experience” according to local papers. And Nana Windsong is Overlord. Laws are what Nana says they are at the B-TAP. All the townies respect her command.

  “So,” Nana says.

  “So,” Vicky says.

  “It’s time then.”

  “Guess so.”

  “Bring her to me. It’s got to be tonight.”

  Vicky closes her eyes, waiting for a trickle of juice from her latest bite to tickle her dry throat. Nana will wait. Nana is one of the few who tolerates, enables, perhaps even capitalizes on, Vicky’s condition.

  Vicky opens her eyes, ready to engage. “At this stage, it’s got to be manual. No more social engineering,” she says, looking to the top floor of the Book Tower. She envisions her space up there, curated with a blue suede chair, smooth leather beanbags, and her silver computer, which is her eye, her corkscrew into, literally into, the mind of Melody Duplass. Vicky feels like a Goddess in her room in the Tower, controlling the actions of Melody out in the world. Some call it hacking, but that’s far too benign a word, an insulting undersell, too clinically technological to describe Vicky’s high-level manipulations, which are more like splitting Melody’s skull and rewiring her brain. Nana follows Vicky’s eyes to the top floor of the Book Tower.

  “Whatever you need to do, Vicky. Just bring the bitch here tonight.”

  At her answer, Vicky removes her phone from a pocket, the silver metal rectangle a satisfying cool in her hot palm. In reading the screen, she says, “Granval will be here soon. And we’ll be on our way.”

  Nana nods. “Good then. Good.” She looks over Vicky’s rainbow of fruits and citrus: a pyramid of the reddest and shiniest Red Delicious apples, surrounded by fat pomegranates, a slide of oranges, a circle of plump lemons, a pile of bananas, perfect limes, a square of avocados, blue is skipped, and straight on to a mountain of purple grapes. A row of pineapples serves as a backdrop, even though Vicky detests pineapples. They are there to serve as her reminder of horrible things past with Melody Duplass; she sprays a line of fire from her eyes over the pineapples.

  “My perfect rainbow girl,” Nana says.

  “But no blue,” Vicky says, frowning. It troubles her, like a constant, low-grade itch, that she has no blue for her stand. She needs a blue, but what blue fruit would do? Maybe, Vicky admits to herself, as she looks to her shoes, focusing on missing blue fruit is a ruse, a mind trick to avoid acknowledging her very serious role in delivering Melody to Nana. As if Nana’s grief is the only grief that requires action, the only grief worth attending to, no matter how wrong. Am I in a cloud? Is she really going to make me do this? Is this wrong? This is wrong. But Melody is evil. Look at the fruit, focus on the colors. And so she does, she’s back to a laser focus on the textures and the colors of her produce and the missing blue. Everything else in the world dissolves, the past, the future, the pain, the hate, the grief, and the guilt. A frog clicks. She waits. Another click. Ahh.

  Nana snaps her fingers. “Vicky, Vicky.” She scoops her face into Vicky’s, snapping her fingers. “Vicky. Hello. Melody. Tonight,” Nana says, staring until Vicky responds.

  “Okay, okay,” Vicky says.

  “Alright then.” Nana draws back. She turns on her heel and waves a get going. Vicky plugs in her cart and zips up the canopy and sides. She looks to the top floor of the Book Tower, where she’s been burrowing into the brain of Melody Duplass for two years. Melody is an empty body, Vicky the zombie parasite driving her. Little, tiny details she feeds her, minutia and memes and sly social cues, hundreds of posts that Melody sees as no more than flotsam in the mass river of social media, but which posts Vicky uses as individual weapons, each one a virtual cattle prod—Melody the unwitting cow, being led subconsciously from Atlanta to Nana’s river-swamp in Florida.

  But maybe I’m a mindless zombie too, and Nana is the driving parasite. Maybe Melody and I are a double zombie. Who manipulates who in this world? Who is the ultimate lord and master of truth?

  Vicky considers the items she’s posted over the past two years. Click, clack, typed and programmed in total concentration, as if all of her mind were breathing in time with the electrical signals of her computer.

  A Facebook post a year and a half ago from Melody’s fake “friend,” Chenile Howerbach (people blindly accept friend requests from any yahoo, Vicky’s learned):

  I’m so tired of the same-old, same-old borrrrrriiiiiiiing tickity-tack tourist traps. Want something strange, eclectic. Suggestions?

  An Instagram post a year ago from fake account (which Vicky ensured Melody followed) @WildGirlTravels: Check out the mad-crazy Black Vultures at the uber eclectic B-TAP, and all that moss, yo! Jacksonville is legit medieval! #Florida4eva&eva!

  Several strategic photos thereafter, timed sparingly, of black vultures posted across social media accounts, including Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook.

  A tweet six months ago from fake user @TheMattChallenges, which Vicky ensured got retweeted several times by other fake Twitter handles Melody followed, and which Vicky engineered to get thousands of likes:

  I never knew a place so full of secrets and hiding places as #Jacksonville. Whole town has this many shadows and nooks. Ain’t nobdy know nobdy. #hideout #swamp #tranquilescape #shadowsofshadows #challengeaccepted

  So on. So many fake memes too. Buried within the hundreds of thousands of social media posts Melody Duplass has mindlessly scrolled and trolled in a constant, eyes-glued brain-melt over the past two years, Vicky has filtered in three hundred twenty-nine strategic breadcrumbs to lead Melody to Jacksonville, and lure her specifically to Nana’s trap at the B-TAP. Hook. Line. Sinker.

  Vicky knew Melody would subconsciously take the bait eventually. She just didn’t think, although she had an inkling of the possibility, she’d be on the run when she did. Vicky’s burrowed into Melody’s email and private Snap and Instagram DMs too.

  In finishing her apple and watching Granval pull up in his green Ford truck, punctual as ever out of respect for Vicky’s need for punctuality—otherwise she’d stay swaying in breezes—she longs to be as brave as Granval in controlling his condition, the same as hers. Granval isn’t taking directions from anyone anymore, and he isn’t losing himself in the molecules of the environment. He’s listened to their group therapist on ways to take control, lift himself up and motivate beyond the senses; Vicky has struggled with the group therapist.

  Vicky walks to the passenger door, pulls the cool steel of the handle, stretches to enter, and sinks into the worn leather which warms her legs, bare beneath the hem of her shorts.

&nbs
p; “Hey, babe,” Granval says, as he leans over to kiss her cheek, slow like she likes, slow like he likes. His and Vicky’s natural states are to enjoy nothing more than to pass an apple after sex and watch the way the falling sun changes the shape of shadows on his sheets.

  She closes her eyes to let the wetness of his hot lips sink in.

  “Got the papers for you. For Vermont Art & Literature. And yes they do have one of the best poetry courses in New England.”

  Vicky nods.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know.”

  “I know,” Granval says. “I know you can do this. We can do this. Vicky, you know I have to accept my spot at Vermont Technical.”

  “We have to deliver Melody to Nana today, or I won’t make it to breakfast tomorrow, forget about Vermont.”

  “Then we’ll deliver Melody, and we’ll leave for Vermont. The end.”

  Vicky moon-eyes Granval as he stares back, no blinking, so self-assured, so direct in his simple convictions. They take off for town, knowing Melody is hiding out in a local motel.

  They drive down the road, parallel with the river that empties into the swamp, just beyond the bridge up ahead. It’s like they’re surfing a smooth, unending coil of the longest green wave, what with the curling of the cypress and banyan canopy over the road.

  Why?

  Why has she lost her courage to live in the speed of the real world? Why has she lost herself in the happy trap of her condition, not allowing the challenge of blending present reality with past and future and moving at everyone else’s speed? What started it all?