Shirley

We stumbled across a body in the woods. I think we had gone there to fuck. It’s been so many years. Instead of a back etched with lines by tree bark and grass staining the white linen of my dress, I received a corpse that night. I had stormed out of the diner because he had lied to me, telling me I was the first one he had said I love you to. He corrected himself, revising his statment to the first person he had said it to and meant it. I told him there was still a difference between first and second. Second wasn’t special. And I threw my basket of fries at him. They bounced off of his rounded shoulders. I hoped they’d leave some grease stains on his shirt. I liked him because he looked at me without looking at me, in a way. He was shy initially, and slow to move our relationship along physically, and I relished in the importance I felt when he finally did lay his eyes on me.

 The body was disgusting. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. There was a lingering aroma of cigarettes and alcohol. I figured they must have done something bad and this was the consequence. We lived in an area remote enough at that time that we were taught about sin and what good girls did and didn’t do. I saw a vibrant red dot trailing down from the closed left eye. I almost puked up the burger still stirring in my stomach. I couldn’t eat any beef for years after that. The texture, the stringiness of the red flesh, reminded me of the body.

I remember Charlie but not as clearly. He’s hazier and less corporeal in my mind. I remember floating in the ocean, ogling his bare chest. The salt stung at the cracks in my lips. A wave swelled in the distance, and I watched him dive under the sparkling, cerulean water. The years merge together now in my mind, but I remember that moment. A few months before we found the body, we drove nine hours to get to the beach and argued about Lolita the whole way. He thought it should be banned but of course he had read it, just as I had. He had more of a rebellious streak in him than he would ever admit to. Charlie pretended to be like my parents, said he didn’t like that I read Naked Lunch. I told him what I told them, that I didn’t even like it. But that didn’t matter.

Sometimes I think all of those years have collapsed in on themselves. We are in the water and another wave is cresting. We are in his parents’ basement and I am shirtless and there are footsteps coming down the stairs. He dives under before I do. He runs into the other room, leaving me naked and scrambling to get up. He forgets that I prefer vanilla milkshakes to chocolate and buys me rose corsages before school dances. He doesn’t look back for me as his head emerges from the water. I feel as though I could still spit out the sand from that wave bowling me over, I can taste the grains nestling in the spaces between my teeth. I wonder which of his parents almost walked in on us that night. He did lie to me quite a bit in that relationship. I don’t think I minded.

Charlie was shouting something about the body. He nudged at the ashen arm with his foot then turned towards the woods and puked. He said that we couldn’t call the police because then we’d be prime suspects, or something to that effect, and that we should bury it instead. I didn’t quite believe that, knowing we were innocent and having nothing to hide myself, but he had worked himself up so much that I nodded and reached for his hand. It was clammy. He withdrew and moved towards the body again, pacing around it, examining every angle. I felt the urge to laugh. I wanted to tell him he looked like an art critic in a gallery. Streaks of blood from the macabre brush strokes of the killer’s knife dripped down the corpse’s torso. The laugh that was caught in my throat bubbled up and out of my mouth as a sob. I just wanted the body and it’s gaping neck and exposed muscle tissue out of my sight. It reminded me of the first time a boy had kissed me, in the eighth grade, hidden under the school’s bleachers. He stuck his tongue into my mouth and, when I pulled back, he bit my neck hard enough to leave a mauve bruise. The sharp contrast between the mark and my skin didn’t escape my parents’ attention. That night, though, shrouded tree bark and the body’s pale exposed skin smudged over each other to form a watercolor. The blurriness of those edges, the boundaries between human flesh and wilderness, was dizzying.

 “Maybe we should go back to the diner,” I said, head turned towards the constellations I could make out in the cloudy sky. It might have been our prom night, or some other dance. I do remember I had on heels that were sinking incrementally into the forest soil. Charlie was trying to hoist the body onto his shoulders. I heard the thud, bones and leaves cracking against each other, before I dared to look again. The body was posed ignobly now, neck bent in a perpendicular angle and arms and legs splayed like those chalk outlines in crime dramas. I didn’t have that frame of reference back then, though. To me, at the time, it looked like a ragdoll that a parent had forced their daughter to abandon at play.

Charlie’s best solution was to lift the corpse by its shoulders while I grabbed the ankles. It was most definitely a woman. I could see the lipstick smeared on faintly now that I was closer. Berry red. Both shoes were missing from her feet, but I saw callouses where a stiletto strap had rubbed repeatedly. Charlie was directing me, telling me to turn right, then left, then step over a log, but I was busy piecing together this woman’s life. I’d never seen a dead body before, let alone touched one. It felt too intimate, impolite. I knew more about her than I ought to. I knew someone had taken a knife to the soft skin of her throat and tore at other parts of her body as well. I wondered how anyone could be that angry. I had felt rage myself, not that I told anyone about it. I knew I wasn’t supposed to feel it at all, of course. Anger was for fathers and teachers, people with power. I didn’t have any claim to it. My mother cried a lot, and drank a great deal, especially when my father slept in their bed and not the couch. The mornings after those nights, only my father would leave the bedroom for breakfast, and, sitting at the dining table across from him and his plate of bacon and eggs, I would have to clench my fist until my nails dug crescent moons into my palms to keep still.

I pitched backwards after I hit the log. Charlie lost his grip on the body, and the woman and I laid there, the faint white of the stars reflecting off her glassy eyes. I reached over with a shaking hand and used two fingers to drag her eyelids down, like I had seen in movies. I closed my own eyes and thanked God that we had found her body in one piece. I didn’t think I would have been able to bear seeing her fragmented into limbs, a torso, bones. Charlie announced he would be digging a whole right there with only his bare hands. I told him how stupid that idea was. I told him we would have been better off calling someone about the body right away. He shook his head and told me I didn’t understand the workings of the world yet. Charlie was already balanced precariously on his knees, hands pawing at the soil. I turned my face back towards the body and imagined I saw her smiling. I rolled my eyes towards Charlie, hoping she would understand that I was apologizing. Even as an inanimate body, she deserved better than us.

Crazed women are overdone in fiction. I am very aware of that. I kept away from it when retelling this story for years. But I liked talking to her that night. I named her Shirley, after Jackson. Shirley read the same books I did. She had read We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I kept my back towards Charlie so he couldn’t see my lips moving. We agreed that you couldn’t be sure who in the story was dead and who was alive. I was similarly confused lying there. My skirt was spread across the grass, one pleat resting against the body’s leg. If I didn’t move, I thought, who could tell the difference? If we lived in a big house like the sisters in that story, Shirley wanted to cover all the mirrors. I nodded. I didn’t think the cuts on her body would ever fade but would instead provide a constant reminder of the night her body was taken from her control. No glass at all in the house, I promised her, and a library full of every scandalous book that a worried father would not approve of. No one could hit us for wearing a skirt too short to mass. No boy could reach his hand under that skirt as we passed by in the hallway. It would be wonderful, almost as if the two of us no longer had bodies. Shirley shook her head, a small, rueful gesture, in response. I looked to Charlie to see if he had noticed. He was pacing around a shallow hole, not even a foot deep, kicking rocks and twigs in his path.

There is a legend among the Irish about women who transform out of seals. Of how slippery their skin is, how they try to escape the arms of men and return to the sea. I knew because my father was a raging alcoholic who cursed his Irish blood as often as he could. The morning before we found Shirley, he had thrown an empty whiskey bottle across the living room towards the television. I cleaned up the glass in the dustbin I always used, careful to stay far out of his reach in the process. I asked Shirley if she was one of the seal women. If she had been caught before she made it back to the water. Her face morphed into a sly smile.

A few years later, Charlie would write me a letter. He wanted to know if I hated him, and I didn’t. He was married by then. He did not catch me. I asked Shirley who killed her that night, if it had been a stranger or the guy she was seeing. If it had been someone I lived down the street from and would see in the park with a child on his arm the next weekend, a hand resting gently on his wife’s shoulder. If he had lied to her like all men did. I must have said it out loud because Charlie responded, telling me I was being ridiculous. There was a slight gust of wind, and then Shirley spoke.

I didn’t know if the scream I heard was bubbling up from my lungs or not. I ran. Shirley’s face was burned into my retinas, a shadow filtered over everything I could see. I reached the river and sank down, bits of leaves catching in my hair and twigs forcing themselves against my shoulder blades. Charlie called out to me. I didn’t answer. I could hear her voice echoing out across the water. John did, John did, John did.

I was shivering when Charlie found me. I sat with my arms wrapped tight around my knees, images of the life shooting out of Shirley’s neck onto the forest floor rattling around inside me. There was a faint laugh hidden among the chirps of cicadas. Charlie couldn’t hear. He didn’t even tilt his head to try to listen. He thought a body was only a body. He told me I had heard an owl calling. He said I was too easily spooked. That the killer was long gone and the body was lifeless and that there was nothing to fear. I looked up into his eyes, wide and brown, and couldn’t bring myself to tell him he was wrong. We both knew. The night air smelled like the blood, now drying solid on Shirley’s skin, and the blood reeked of danger. But I humored him. I stood back up and walked with him to where Shirley lay waiting.

We took it upon ourselves to give her a funeral. He didn’t call me for weeks afterwards and when he did it was only to tell me I was no longer invited to his family’s upcoming barbeque. I shifted Shirley’s legs into the hole first, letting gravity take the rest of her from my arms. I had taken off my dress and shimmied it onto her. I made Charlie turn around for this part. He had seen me naked before, but this was different. I didn’t think he ought to see Shirley naked then either. She was taller than me, with a bigger bust, so the hem of the dress grazed her knees and the straps of the bodice pressed down into her clay-like shoulders. I gave her a eulogy standing in my bra and panties, hands grabbing at either side of my ribcage for comfort and stability. I swayed a bit as I spoke but didn’t faint. Charlie faced away from the two of us the whole time. That felt right.

I gave it a better ending in the stories I wrote, of course. Shirley was buried far from any water, in a coffin lined with velvet, with a headstone with her true name. Her killer was caught. He was a man she hated, not one she trusted, and he had hurt women before. He was obvious. No one wants to be left without an answer. A mystery is only tantalizing for so long, and I thought Shirley deserved a better story than what she got. Charlie was never tormented by these thoughts at night, I’m sure. But they kept me awake for nearly a decade. We had buried her so haphazardly. We had told no one. I knew that I owed her for this.

My body was grotesque when I reached my house that night and stood in front of the bathroom mirror. I prodded at the flesh beneath my armpit, where it bulged out of my bra, and at the pale, spotless skin of my neck, so different from the gaping red of Shirley’s throat. No one saw me come in the door that night, thankfully. My mother asked where my dress was the next time she did laundry, but she didn’t question me further, only giving me a disapproving glance. She told me it would be best if from then on I said that I had given the dress away out of charity. It was after Shirley that I started spending hours looking at my reflection. I could never shake the picture in my mind of my own body thrown across the ground so indelicately and spliced open like hers. Another girl died that year, in the summer near the woods. I don’t know how. I didn’t want to ask, and I left after that. I landed in a city, with people pressing in around me on all sides, all through the night. I went out to bars frequently in that first year, finding others after Charlie who liked my body, liked what I only saw as a walking corpse. A matter of time. Shirley had been killed, and her body was sturdier than mine.

I am telling all of this because I have come back to the lake. I can point you to the exact tree where Shirley ought to be, if you wanted to see it for yourself. I doubt we buried her deep enough to protect from hungry animals, though. She may only be bones by now. I do not check because I do not want to see her that bare. I walk closer to the water, the night sky the same pure blue as that night. The grass barely grazes my feet. It sprouts out of the earth like baby hairs. I do not know if I know a story worth telling besides this. Once Shirley was full of life. For the time being, so am I. If I dove into the water right now, I would feel myself cut open and raw, buried in blue. But somehow, after all these years, I am still dry.

Originally from the D.C. area, Lydia Mathews is a recent college graduate and current graduate student living in Massachusetts. When not reading for school, she enjoys reading and writing fiction and playing with her two cats. She has not previously been published.