The red glow of the setting sun lights up one side of the lake like a fairy tale. The rest of the sky begins to darken. Ohio wonders what a real girlfriend would say. Don lights a home-rolled cigarette. He inhales, holds it in, slowly exhales. Stinky blue smoke hangs in the air. He passes it, and she copies him. It pinches her throat worse than the vodka. Makes her choke. Is she smoking pot?
“Why’d you dress like that?”
“Dunno.” Ohio looks down at the skin folds bunching on her stomach. She sits up and they disappear.
“How old are you, sixteen? Seventeen?”
Ohio takes another puff so she doesn’t have to lie, or worse, tell the truth. She’ll be fifteen next spring. Her mouth is dry. She reaches under the vest and unties her shirt, smoothing the fabric. She does up the buttons. After Don flicks the dead butt away, he puts his oil-stained hand on Ohio’s thigh. He has a silver serpent ring and hairy knuckles. Ohio’s heart beats so fast she might barf. Thoughts stutter in her mind: Will I ever get boobs? Did I say that out loud? Did I already think that?
“Get your friend,” he says, pointing to the crest of a large wave.
Ohio hops off the rock. She runs, leaps. Her body feels strong; her arms slice through time and space, windmilling the warm air. She laughs. Slaps bare feet on wet sand, then into the cold lake. Water rushes her toes, freezes her ankles and higher up her calves, splashes her thighs. Shadows twist and reach from inside the curled wave. Somewhere in that murk a clam-crowned princess is living a life meant for Ohio, magic and free. Hair tangled and billowing with tide, skin pale and tantalizing as a trout belly, arms undulating hypnotically. Ohio dreams her almost every night: that tinkling ghost wail and the beckoning fingertips. Mary Louise flops closer and clasps Ohio’s hand. They jump whitecaps, leaning their bodies to take the hit. Ohio knows there are no cowards underwater, only the softened, gnawed-upon bones of sailors, fishermen, and rum runners, cradled in ritual piles in the lake’s darkest, coldest crook.
Under the surface all men want.
Under the surface all men love.
Don slides one hand around Ohio, the other around Mary Louise. An old man with two dripping girls shivering on a rock. “Let’s show her what we did the other night.” Don works the hand that had been on Ohio’s leg inside her wet shorts, into the crotch.
That’s not what we did, thinks Ohio.
Don’s fingers push her goose-fleshed thighs apart. They press and flick a lightning rush of heat.
“Uh,” she says.
Someone is walking a dog down the beach, so far away the dog is a leaping smudge on the horizon, the person a short stick.
“Don’t worry, they can’t see us,” he says.
Ohio feels good, like something might happen next.
Don’s other hand is busy with Mary Louise. Mary Louise leans forward. “Bor-ring.”
Don says, “We do other things, too.” Don pulls his hand from Ohio’s shorts. His left hand resurfaces and rests on Mary Louise’s leg.
“Like what?” says Mary Louise.
Don smiles at Mary Louise until she tilts her head and really sees him, until she starts smiling, too.
Ohio’s tingling crotch spot is forgotten. Tossed over the gunwales with fish guts, net trash. Upstaged by a twelve-year-old with a crappy haircut. Ohio rubs off her lipstick with the collar of her shirt, smearing the cotton pink. “I’ll show her.”
Don turns back to Ohio. Her skinny legs swing from the knee, feet wet with grit. She wriggles her toes.
“Look at you,” he says.
Ohio tugs on the buckle of his thick belt. When she stands she feels woozy, so she leans against the rock. She rubs him the way he showed her. Mary Louise quietly slides down and runs back to the water. Don frowns. They watch Mary Louise jump into foamy waves that purr onto the hard-packed sand.
“She okay out there?” he says.
“Of course. This is our lake.” Ohio squeezes until Don faces her again.
“Careful,” he says.
This time Ohio keeps her eyes open. Three stubbled chins bob in time with her hand. She can see right up Don’s wide nostrils, see the grey hairs inside. His breath comes in hot blasts. White fluid shoots into her fist, drips from her fingers.
“Taste it,” he says.
It is sea salty, the runny part of an undercooked egg, and when she swallows, the acid trails her throat.
“Like it?” he says.
Ohio falters, smiles.
“That’s a good girl.”
Don gives himself an extra shake and zips up. He lights a smoke and leans on the rock. A mosquito bites Ohio’s temple. She swats, scratches, and a drop from her hand gets in her eye, stinging. She rubs it, making it worse. Don says something about a club meeting, says he’ll see her around soon, he hopes. He leaves a crisp twenty-dollar bill on the rock beside her, “For a little treat, for you girls,” and walks toward his bike.
Ohio’s eye burns and waters. She slips the bill into her pocket.
The further Don gets on the darkening beach, the less Ohio sees. His head is a blur. His clothes blend with the night. A few more strides and he disappears.
Mary Louise jogs up from the water’s edge. “Now you see him, now you don’t. Like his thing.” She cracks up.
Ohio says, “That’s not funny.” But it is, and she laughs, too.
Mary Louise yanks Ohio’s arm. “His Thing,” she shouts.
Ohio stumbles, tugs Mary Louise back, spinning her in the sand.
They shriek, “Thing Thing Thing!”
They spin like fireflies, whipping each other in circles until they collapse in a gritty pile, panting, hysterical.
Don’s engine turns over once, twice; it roars. His headlight clefts the beach and lights up a circle of churning water.
“Look!” says Mary Louise, pointing.
“What? Where?”
Ohio hears it first: a tidal suck, the shrieking gale, the whizz and pop of meteorites. The hissing of a thousand jagged voices. Finally, Ohio sees her in the bike’s spotlight—the legendary lake mother, bare-breasted with weedy swirls of hair. Suckling fish cloak her in open-mouthed kisses, flit at the swell of her barnacle-spackled hips. She dives. Dorsal fin splashes. A shimmering ripple—an iridescent web binding her legs, slick captives in silver scales. Here, the levy queen: she who exacts a toll for safe crossing. She who lures the friendless and the forsaken.
“Take him,” says Ohio.
Ohio could feed him limb by limb to the surf; Mary Louise would help. Together, they can do anything. But Don’s headlamp is already cutting an arc, lighting the pier, pointing toward the road. The dark settles. Just the motor whining quieter and the red brake light growing smaller, smaller.
The Drain
Lynn Coady
She wasn’t worth killing, that was the problem. Because Marietta was not liked. Fans joked online about wanting to shoot themselves, or someone else, the moment she entered a scene. It wasn’t the actor’s fault. Well, it was, kind of. But it was Annie’s fault in conjunction with everyone else—the show, the collective Us. In some mysterious whim of TV alchemy, Annie’s energy ended up not gibing with ours. She’d been great on her last series—a supporting role on a show about nurses. She’d been an audience favourite, was cute yet tough yet vulnerable—everything you’d want in a TV nurse. I hadn’t watched it, but the clips had been good. And she auditioned well and did a sizzling chemistry read with both our male and female leads—which was important because Marietta was going to be our show’s first bisexual about which the network was, initially, very excited indeed. But both the chemistry and the excitement sputtered when she came up opposite the show itself. The suffocating Us-ness of it all. Annie had arrived beaming and freckled, with buckets of charisma, and somehow our show had tipped those buckets over, dribbling all that charm away.