Island Rule by Katie M. Flynn

Author:Katie M. Flynn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery/Scout Press
Published: 2024-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

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Silence, no one in the showroom, no one upstairs. The girl imagined a storyline: Would they call the police, mount a search, put her face on milk cartons? Would her father drive all the way up from Tulsa to find her? Her socked feet tingled with the thought of it. She thought about the hours it would take her father to drive up from Tulsa, about asphyxiation, and she lifted the coffin’s lid a few inches, feeling the cool flood of outside air, the new rush of chemicals. She couldn’t see the woman on the table, though she felt her all the same and decided not to look. Privacy, they could each have that, couldn’t they? She whispered into the air, “My father’s a liar.”

Her cousins were out front and she dared to pull the curtain aside far enough to see the neighbor boy from before, no bike this time, running, her cousins giving chase. They were faster and pushed him down, and when he hit the ground, his eyes found hers in the window. She did something uncharacteristic: she blew him a kiss—why’d she do that? Then she closed the curtain, the coffin’s lid. Even so, she could hear the beating her cousins were giving that boy, and she found herself offering a reflex prayer of protection, she was so afraid for him. At some point this had ceased to be a game, and when she came out she’d be held responsible. Running her fingers over the embossed letters of the yearbook, it hit her, Otaknam—Mankato backwards, duh. How had she not seen it? She closed her eyes, suddenly very tired.

Her father’s apartment had been perfectly quiet. The butterscotch tucked in her cheek, she went to the fridge and cracked a cola, wandering into his bedroom, sifting through his dresser, where she found an open box of condoms, stuffing them back into his drawer.

She lay down on his bed, balancing the cola on her stomach. Why had she come here? Because she could. Because she knew she’d be alone. There was nothing to find, no secret to unearth. He’d been unhappy, and he’d left.

For no reason she understood, she sat up and spat the butterscotch onto her father’s pillow. Then she flipped the pillow over and fluffed it out. She was fixing to go when she heard a woman humming and followed the sound to the bathroom, pressing her ear to the door.

Go, she told herself, but she couldn’t possibly—she had to know. She pushed the door open, she saw a woman in the tub, her face covered in a clumpy clay mask, the water gray, cucumbers over her eyes.

The woman smiled. Her breasts, her heat-inflamed skin, the flare of dark pubic hair between her legs—the girl saw the woman in parts, in quick blinking flashes, naked in her father’s tub.

“Are you just gonna stand there?” the woman said. To the girl, it felt like a taunt; she was most certainly not going to just stand there. She picked up the first thing she saw, a bar of soap, and threw it into the bathwater.

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