You can’t hide, you said, standing in my doorway. And I thought it was a joke, you with the tentpole in your hand, the way you grasped it, caveman, club.
I didn’t tell you no when you asked me to come with you. But I did not yet know what was in your heart.
We didn’t walk far, you intent on mad circles, swinging that tentpole into trash cans, trees, whatever came in your way.
You said, I know I’m drunk, but I wanna show you something.
And I thought, Is this going to be it? Will this be how it goes?
When we came under one of the streetlamps, you looked at me, your face shadowed. You said, Is that my shirt, girl?
You were more beautiful than ever that night. Your face angel-lit under all the streetlamps.
That’s why it happened, if you want to know.
We tramped across campus, all the sculptures and statues of important men. You didn’t seem afraid of me, despite all the noise that came from me, my mouth uncontrollable, and my arms too.
Watching you take that errant tentpole from my hand and twirl it like a baton, like you were a twirler, and weren’t you? The way you wielded your weapons, after all. Blue stick, love’s arrow, that warm spot between your legs.
And where did we end up anyway, roaming the campus near and far, the great bronze hands of the mentor instructing her flock in the rose garden?
Finally landing back where we began, at the foot of Sorority Row long after midnight.
All those white pillars, there must’ve been a hundred of them, all gleaming in the moon, and on the pond that lay there, silver and shimmery like a mirror laid flat.
Oh God, don’t you see I had no choice?
When I took the pole from you, everything turned. But I had to, don’t you see?
Return my sword, girly, you said, your voice gone high and strange. And you yanked it so hard, I fell back.
You may ask me how I knew you were going to raise high that tentpole. But I never didn’t know.
Except I do wish I could have stopped you.
It was the two things at once, you see. It was you holding the pole and you wearing the shirt.
You could spin and flip it in ways that seemed miraculous. All while wearing my shirt, fluorescent-green and too big for you by half, dragged over your head like you owned it. Or me.
Under the shirt, your belly, the thing inside it — well, I thought of that too.
I know you! I said, shouting now. I know your kind! Because you’d pretended to be a country girl who never heard a word of sin, a girl who would make me — make me — behave. And be good.
I never met a country girl, and it turned out you were from Batesville.
My, oh, that tentpole in my hand felt like it swung itself, swinging with such a whirring sound and the terrible, suctiony thunk as it hit your pretty, perfect head.
Oh, my girl, my girl.
The swirl-slap of the alcohol, gallons of it, suddenly cleared away, like the seas parting and receding like the old, bright-colored movie I watched with Gran every Easter my whole life till she died last year.
I saw it then. I saw it. Like everything else fell away and you were praying in church, by the tallest window.
Alas, it was now too late.
This is it, I thought.
Yet I felt no danger.
High above your head, that pole glinted under the streetlamp, swinging it like a mighty ax, a giant in a fairy tale.
I felt a crashing in my brain. I think I saw stars. And I was hearing something like beads shaking inside my head, like in the woods, my brother showing me how to shake the cocoon we found in the branch.
If the caterpillar is alive, it’s heavy, you hear a thud.
If it’s dead, it’s light, and all you hear is a rattle.
I wonder what you heard when you shook me, frat boy. Oxford boy. My beloved.
Did you hear our baby rattle?
Remember how you fell?
Landing on your knees with such an awful smack, the pond like a black hole behind you, the black hole spreading in my brain. Oh, how you looked up at me, your eyes shining.
Please don’t, you said.
But I saw what the pole had done, your temple sunk deep as a cave and your eye bulging.
You didn’t know it yet, but you were nearly gone.
Your face, I watched you watch me, my head spinning so.
It was that face I knew from the twelve times in your darkened room. The face that told me you had big visions of life in your head, the way you were shivering, standing above me, that same lovely way of shivering you had each of the twelve times we did it before I died.
I don’t remember falling, but the red covered my eyes and I could see nothing.
Someone was crying.
They say the light goes out of the eyes when you pass, but it didn’t with Gran at Baptist Memorial and so not with you, my country girl.
I saw the shining as I carried you from Sorority Row straight to the edge of Silver Pond.
I saw it as I dropped you in the water, and my sword too, which was nothing but a tentpole, bent upon itself.
I saw it long after you sunk to the shallow bottom, my shirt billowing, a bright lily pad, and your body making ring after ring after ring.
I wasn’t gone yet, but you were dragging me. Down that grassy slope I went, like a sleigh ride, the leaves curling and cutting my legs.
I grabbed at you, clawing at your ankles, nails sunk deep, but you have near a hundred pounds and a foot of monster blood and bone on me.
My hair knotted in your hand, I looked up at you and my head kept knock-knock-knocking on the ground, the blood coming wet and soft from the open hole in my head.
He will come with nectar on his tongue.
I guess I always knew that shabby-hatted man would prove true one day.
But he will send your head spinning, seal you up in silver. Swallow you whole.
You were well under.
There was stirring briefly, glugging bubbles. Once, your head came up, your eyes glassy, arms grabbing, wanly, the surface of the water. Then your head tilting backward, disappearing.
Finally, you stopped.
Then I went home.
I did find my bed, my ankles and shins slimed up from the pond, and my face speckled red as Raggedy Andy.
I showered at three, no one heard. Then back to bed, a heave and horror in me, where I commenced crying.
Before that, I’d never even noticed Silver Pond. But the next day, and the next, Silver Pond was all I could see, from wherever I stood.
As there was no escaping it, I sought it out.
I even lingered at your house, hand on one of the pillars, like a wedding cake, wondering, missing you.
In the water, I sunk. I felt the thing blooming at the top of my chest, spreading down and in. The thing was the darkness of you, and what we shared.