Seething in the Marrow

“Fuck off!” I yell at the muskrat. 

I hurl a river rock and it strikes the metal I-beam of the trestle. The deep gong muffled by rust and ancient algae. The muskrat jerks its nose out of the popsicle wrapper and waddles away.

Shyanne breaks the surface of the nearby eddy, hair plastered to her lumpy head and points at the trestle, level with the treetops. 

“Not much left to worry about.” 

Red syrup drips into the river from the punctured wrapper. Flies and gnats drone. We watch the sun shine through the drops as they fall, soaring, an unexpected spectacle.

“I was saving that!” I yell, shaking my fist at the sun.

Shyanne splashes me and I dip under the water, emerging in the red cloud, an awkward otter in a garish orange sparkle one piece. 

“I’m Carrie!”

Shyanne giggles and swims closer, only half of her head above water she hums the Jaws theme music. 

“Chum!” She burbles and dive bombs me. 

We swirl through streaks of brown and green and gold. Bubbles flash, the chill intensifies as we near the bottom. Sand friction burns my shoulder already raw from the sun. Algae slick stones slide along my thighs. My lungs and eyes sting. I push against the muck to get air, fighting Shyanne’s weight. 

Then I see the monster, blurred by motion and bedazzled with twinkling bubbles. Bass organ music plays in my inner ear as it streaks by in murky green and brown. 

Shyanne’s hands on my straps pull me up. 

I cough and shake and gasp and burn inside. The surface is deafening with cicadas and woodpeckers and catbirds, the rush of water and the sighing of trees. Even the sunlight is loud behind my seeping eyelids. 

“What were you doing? We weren’t having a hold-your-breath competition stupid!” She pounds on my back and I push her hand away weakly, collapsing into the muck of the sandbank. 

“There’s something down there.” I croak between wet coughs.  

“No duh, did you get bit by a crawdad or something?” 

“Bones.”

“Yeah, animal bones. No reason to drown yourself.”

“Get away from it.”

I’m crawling through the sand now, muscles weak from wading. I stand and immediately sink up to my ankle in the sand, going back to pull her away.  

But she’s already vanished in a wreath of bubbles. The red cloud spreads.  

I count one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. A horsefly bites me and I slap a red handprint into my arm. 

Come back. 

Come back Shyanne. 

She breaks the surface. The whites of her eyes are red and bulging.

The popsicle drips over the spot where the monster lives, minnows swimming out of its empty eye sockets. I can hear it all the way back at the house, through the hollow, weeds and nettles that cut my ankles and calves as we ran. It’s in my head while I rub calamine lotion into my oozing poison ivy glistening like tree sap. 

It’s been all night and half the morning and we haven’t talked about it. We’re stuck inside with Jim while it rains. The river is high and flooding for sure. Will it wash away the monster? No, something has been weighing it down. Long enough for the water to hollow it out. 

After a lunch of canned soup and fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches Jim puts his slicker and waders on to get cigarettes from the bait shop. 

We don’t have a phone in the house but we have to report the monster, the bones. So we cut holes in two garbage bags, slip them over our heads, and steal a few quarters from the change jar. The pay phone is a mile in the opposite direction of the bait shop. We might be home before Jim and we might not. One outcome will mean a dirty look, the other belt marks on our backs for a week or so. 

The traffic whizzes past the maul of the woods. The organ note vibrates from my tailbone to my skull. Phantom of the Opera on the VCR with Mom and Shyanne the same endless crazy quilt stretched over our laps littered with popcorn. Mom spitting unpopped kernels through her chipped tooth. The phantom’s face revealed, skeletal, terrified to see and be seen. 

Shyanne yanks me down the shoulder, where the payphone stands in a lonely truck stop. My arm squishes in the joint. Why didn’t we tell Jim? Why did we wait this long? Something about the monster. Something we both know but don’t know at the same time hidden under the water.  

I pull back. Shyanne, caught unaware, stumbles onto the asphalt with me. She struggles against me but we need to cross over. Through the woods, back to the trestle. A truck swerves around us as we tug of war one another over the median.

When we wrestle, the person who’s right always wins. The argument settles itself. Something in our meat knows what the right answer is. The muscle gives way to the sister with the stronger intuition, always there but impossible to reason with, seething in the marrow. 

We don’t speak or sing or whistle on the way back to the trestle. We hold hands and squish in our holey tennis shoes. She knows I was right. It’s settled. 

The wrapper and the red cloud are gone, the sandbar too, swallowed up in the brown tide. Tree branches and beer cans stream past. A sinewy maple as thick as my ankle bends into the water, leaves stripped from it’s skinny branches. The roots hold fast in the turfy bank. 

Shyanne grabs it first and I follow. The water, thigh deep in the shallow is now up to our shoulders, the gentle tug now a brutal wrenching. 

We feel our way with just our feet, once clear water now brown with sediment, a wet sandstorm. We surface twice to reorient ourselves with the trestle. The tree is thinning out, the branches brittle in our clenched fists. 

In the muted underwater world a hundred horror soundtracks play in my head, and then the organ notes. That last night, that last movie. Mom  flinging the screen door off the hinges and Jim following her. Him, coming back late, telling us she’d left us again. Like it happened all the time. But it was just once. And she came back the next day. She came back. She was going to come back.  

My foot grazes something round and smooth. It has to be a boulder. It’s so big, strange bumps on the side. I tap it again with my toe. Even underwater it feels hollow.

The length of our makeshift rope gives out. I let go for a moment. Clasping Shyanne’s hand, I reach with the other.

And slip. 

We barrel roll through the murk, me and the hollow boulder. My lungs burn, clawing at me from the inside. The organ music crescendos. The vibrating in my spine is real, the gong of my bones against the trestle’s I-beam. We cradle in the hollow there the tide eddying around us. My bones and it’s bones. 

Not it’s bones. Her bones. I cut my thumb on the chipped tooth and hug her to my chest. Somewhere far away my sister screams.