Serenity Macklynn Dupree

She drowned in the bath. I thumped away on her chest for thirty minutes right between her titties and water come rushin out her eyes and made the mascara run down her purple turning cheeks like she weren’t already done died and hadn’t already been done dead and could still cry cry cry cry cry. Water come out of every fuckin hole there was to come on out of, out her nose and her mouth. I thought water come out her ears but it was just dripping down to ‘em from her soaked up sopped up hair. The water was collecting in the little part of the ear that serves as a cup when you lie flat on your back with your head tilted back. I listened to her lungs while filling them with breath sized amounts of air and I could hear the water in thems too, waiting for a hole to come rushin on out of. It was like when you hold a big pearly pink shell to your head and you can hear the waves washing up on the beach real loud except I wasn’t at the beach, I was just here with her and the beach inside her, waiting for it to come out and slop onto the floor.

I checked her sugar, just for fun. I wiped her fingertip with an alcohol swab, she didn’t have no nailpolish on. I stuck her finger with a little blue lancet and squeezed the tip of her finger but the blood was real slow coming out and she didn’t have no rings on neither. The glucometer only read 50 so I gave her some sugar water through the needle we’d drilled in her leg. I made a man hold the bag up over her and I thought about hummingbirds and how they kinda get a little bit tricked by flowers into being pollinators cause they just want the hidden nectar that is down at the bottom of them flowers they stick their long tongues way down inside. I thought about how flowers might be con men and decided it weren’t none of my business what flowers might or might not be up to cause they’re getting their needs met either way. I checked her sugar again and her sugar level was even lower, she wasn’t sweet no more, not for me, not for no one, not even for herself.

Someone covered her poor useless cooter up with a folded white sheet from her roommate’s bed and when we was done working her we covered the rest of her up too. We don’t need to see her lying here on the cold, cold, cold, cold tile no more. We can walk away now and let the beach run free. I don’t like leaving, I feel dirty, I feel like I didn’t do a good job. I feel like I let the beach take over, there was so much bad water it made a corpse cry. I say we can just wait a little while longer and maybe see her wake up cause she could maybe come back if we want her to bad enough and everyone looks at me with long monster faces and they all say “no.”

I say “fine” and “I guess it don’t really matter” cause whether we up here standin or down there layin it’s actually only a little bit different and it’s maybe just a little bit slower or something like that. I sit in the ambulance and I feel ugly. I think about how when we gets to heaven and all the dogs of heaven come running and howling and sniffing around looking for their long lost masters to surprise us with a sharp tongues’ lick to the face we will need to feel grateful and say thanks. We don’t need to see her here, laying out like spilled milk, turning purple, yellow, brown banana, battered gold. Her cheeks dappled like a pony from all them blood vessels bursting and heart still yearning showing a little blip on the monitor with every god damn push of epinephrine before the line goes flatter then the flattest thing there ever fuckin was. I think flatness is probably based on being dead cause it is what it is after you done die. It’s just flatness, not empty and dark, just tiny and flat and narrow and so, so flat. Full of salt, you can float forever in flatness and pretend you’re falling backwards through time on a cold tile floor, and the waves roll in and the waves roll out. I go home and try to sleep, but there’s water everywhere. It’s in my shoes and on my sheets, it’s coming up from under the bed and pouring off the ceiling fan like a waterfall but silent like a tiny newborn baby lamb. I can’t yell for help right now cause water come out my mouth slow and thick like honey and my tongue done washed away too. I didn’t pack no swimsuit and I’m crying just for you.

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Rebekah Morgan is from Appalachia.