A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims

Author:Bennett Sims
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Published: 2013-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

IT’S MID-AFTERNOON, AND RACHEL AND I HAVE found a nice patch of grass by the water. We’ve spread out a blanket on the northern shoreline, right beneath the shade of a live oak, where we’ve both been trying to clear our heads of thoughts of the infection.

I’m sitting with my back to the broad oak bole, legs spread out so that Rachel can nestle between them. She’s reclining into me, her own legs straight before her and her head resting on my chest. My arms are crossed over her waist, her arms are on my arms. Ahead of Rachel’s feet the muddy shallows lap at some agapanthus stems, and farther out, in the middle distance, the lake is bisected by an overpass of I-10, its concrete support columns grown mossy where they meet their reflections in the water. Beyond the freeway is the southern shore, its gravel strip shimmering in the sun like a beach. The cypresses along the side banks, emerging from the shallows, stoop over the brown water, and their branches are bare except for where ibises roost in them. When they flap their wings in the branches, the ibises resemble pale hearts in empty ribcages. Bordering the right shoreline, Park Boulevard is busy even now: traffic steady in both directions.67 But the tarmac jogging path circling the lake is empty, and there is only one car visible on the opposite shore’s parking strip. The only vehicles on the overpass are eighteen-wheelers. Their passing trailers are rectangular and blank. The car on the opposite shore, I see, is a police cruiser. Atop its glinting roof, against the bright air behind it, there is the winking of its lights—blue-red, blue-red—as they strobe sirenlessly. It’s a quiet day. The people who would be here normally (the sorority girls jogging along the path, the grizzled black fishermen fishing the fishless water) appear to be avoiding the lake, even though it isn’t technically closed to the public. Standing a few yards ahead of the police cruiser is a single undead silhouette, staring in our direction. It has been standing like that without moving or making a sound since we got here. The officers in the cruiser appear to be supervising the creature, ensuring that it stays put until an LCDC van arrives to detain it. Other than this watcher across the water, Rachel and I have had the area more or less to ourselves.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asks me now, interrupting for the first time in several minutes our pleasant quiet. The goal we had set for the day was to avoid mulling on the infection. Rachel wanted for us to get outside in fine weather and ‘think good things,’ as alive to loveliness and light as if we were on a hike at Tunica. But the truth is that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the corpse across the water. Even when I try to focus on good things, my thoughts are brought ineluctably back to it; it alone is the final, dispiriting link in every chain of associations.

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