The Discovery of Honey by Terry Griggs

Author:Terry Griggs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2017-03-24T20:03:42+00:00

Juno Pluvia

My cousin? Nile? Never mind, file him under women’s troubles and forget about him.

We have other coronary matters to consider. For instance, the unnamed man who washed up on the beach, and who provoked what is called an ‘equivocal death analysis.’ Of course, it was Nile who found him, no getting around that. With his verminous instincts, he managed to upstage the flies, which came tumbling after him in a busy buzzing mass. The lake coughed up the man and served him on a bed of dried marsh grass, an impromptu nest that would have crackled with his sodden weight, a sound that no one heard, no one human. Unless Nile, owl eared, had been listening with his usual predatory acuity.

This surprise stiff was very well preserved for someone who had been dead for five years, a statistic determined by the forensic analysis, I’m not making it up. The cold water had kept him relatively fresh. The guy didn’t look that much different than Aunt Faith, who, regrettably, was still alive. He’d been on an epic journey, an underwater Ulysses cruising like a wayward flesh torpedo along the lake bottom, sliding smoothly past schools of fish and over logs, shooting into the broken hull of a sunken schooner. A nightmare man months snagged in the tumbled rigging, then exploding out of a porthole.

He owned a cottage on Lake Michigan, a black Speedo bathing suit, and a gold chain. Early morning, a quick dip, that was the plan. Coffee, a healthy knob of butter glistening on a stack of pancakes (or flapjacks, this being the States), and a Lucky Strike cigarette—irony at its most gauche—smoked down to the filter and flicked into the crapper with a gratifying hissss. Simple pleasures for what may or may not have been a complicated man. Crossing a watery border into another country had not been on the day’s agenda. Somewhere along his circuitous trip to the morgue (and I have a very good idea where), he lost the gold chain. But not the Speedo. Nothing like a bit of bloat to firmly secure such a slinky scrap of cloth. How many people said, I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing… before realizing and choking it off with a laugh.

Our mystery man—underwater ambassador (of considerable puffery) and self-made raft borne in on a swift succession of bright waves—eventually acquired a scanty if disappointingly dull covering of detail. Who, how, where. But at first his whole provocatively intact body gleamed with possibility. In his silence, he seemed to insist that we cobble our rural wits together in order to grant him an identity worth all the trouble taken on his incredible journey. Plus the cost of the fare.

Fine, fine. Honour the dead, however unwelcome, sing his praises, if unearned (anyone can drown—how hard can it be?), build him a cairn out of a disassembled fire pit. Go crazy. What I wanted to know, the sliver of truth to be plucked from this corporal hunk of driftwood, was the real reason for Nile’s opportune presence.

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