The Girl in The River

I watched her kill the first man without a sound.

One moment he was standing behind the bush, half-turned toward the camp, muttering to himself as he zipped his pants. The next, she was behind him–sudden, silent, unreal–with a sharpened stake in her hand. She drove it into his neck and pulled him down into the leaves before he could make more than a wet, choking gasp. She looked almost feral: hair stuck to her face, clothes dark with mud, eyes burning with something too raw to call anger. She didn't look at the body. She looked at me through the branches, as if she had known I would come back from the river at exactly that moment.

I froze, one hand still gripping a branch. I was half-hidden in the brush, close enough to hear him die, too far to stop it. What stunned me was not the way she looked at me or his death. I had seen men die before and always felt something human rise in response–fear, pity, horror. It was a terrible relief this time, like a knot loosening deep inside me.

My mouth went dry. I stumbled backward and shouted toward the camp.

"Help! Over here!"

Voices answered. Footsteps crashed through the woods. The other men came toward me one by one, drawn by my panic.

The first reached me breathless, pushing branches aside. "Who the fuck are you?"

Before I could answer, she appeared behind him and slammed a rock into the back of his skull. I reeled away, my boots sliding in mud.

The second man came slower, calling the others' names. He saw me standing there wild-eyed, saw the body at my feet, and his face changed. He opened his mouth to shout, but she was already on him.

A flash through the trees. A crack. Blood sprayed across the leaves. He folded forward like a marionette with its strings cut.

I started screaming for real, unable to stop, every shout dragging the next man closer.

The third burst from the brush with terror already on his face. He looked from me to the bodies and tried to turn.

Too late. She rushed him from the side, and the next moment, he was dead too. Now it's my turn.... I charged at her. We fought harder than the others, clawing at her, stumbling, cursing, but she stayed on me like a curse that had finally found its owner. We crashed into the shallows, rolling through black water and stone.

I hit her hard enough that we both lost our footing. We slammed together, fists, knees, teeth, fury. Cold water swallowed us. I grabbed her hair. She raked her nails across my face. I drove my shoulder into her ribs. She struck back with a strength that felt inhuman.

When I came up choking, she was already several steps deeper in the river, moving away from me.

Not swimming.

Walking.

She turned once, just enough for me to see her face, then continued into the dark water as if she were leading me somewhere.

I followed. What else could I do? I called it magic at first, some spell cursed from her ruined beauty. But it was no magic. It was something older, something buried deeper than reason. It was hunger. I wanted to go to her as the moth goes to flame, as the river yields itself to the sea, as the blood rushes to the wound, helpless and willing. It was the truth I craved, the reason to this madness. As I went to her, the water climbed past my knees, my waist, my chest. Every instinct screamed that if I followed her much farther, I would drown.

I turned back once, and I saw her on the shore. I stopped. She was there too–standing on the bank among the trees, dripping and still, watching me. I spun back around. She was in front of me, slightly deeper. My pulse exploded in my throat. The river, the shore, the trees–she was everywhere, one girl multiplied by terror and shadow.

"No," I whispered.

I looked back to the version of her I'd been following. In the deeper current, she was holding someone underwater. At first, I thought it was one of the men. Then I saw the body thrashing, the hands clawing weakly at her wrists. I recognized him, and horror surged through me, cold. The drowning person was me.

I lunged toward them. I kicked at her side. I hit her shoulder. I grabbed at her arm, trying to tear her off the man beneath the water. My foot connected with flesh. She staggered. The body below the surface rolled, and the face beneath her hands changed. It was not mine anymore. It was hers. I stared, choking, unable to breathe.

She looked at me and smiled–not kindly, not cruelly, but with the terrible patience of someone waiting for me to understand.

And suddenly I was crying, not from grief, not from fear, from the knowledge pressing at the edges of me, from the sense my mind had spent every second trying to keep me from feeling it. I wanted her gone before the truth could take shape inside me, so I shoved her down.

My hands found her throat. I forced her under. Water exploded around us. My bruised arms trembled with effort as I pushed her deeper, harder, as if killing her would end the nightmare.

Then I began to feel the drowning in my own lungs: pressure in my chest, fire in my throat, panic ripping through my body. I gasped and swallowed river water. Still I kept pressing. This time, not out of rage but refusal.

Beneath my hands, her face blurred.

Her mouth moved under the water.

I leaned closer and heard her voice, clear as if she were speaking inside my skull.

The river seemed to tilt. The trees bent. The sky tore open into flashes. And suddenly, memory came back. Not all at once. In shards.

The cabin. My love inside it. My childhood love. I left with the fishing rod that morning while she laughed and told me not to stay out too long.

Then the clearing when I returned. The clearing. The four men from the camp. Her on the ground. Their hands on her. One of them raping her while the others stood around. Enough to break something in me forever.

There was no girl.

I jerked backward, sobbing.

"No… no…"

The river did not care. Memory kept coming: The stake entering flesh. The rock cracking bone. The chase through the reeds. The last man gasping on the ground. My own hands. My own rage. My own body while my mind stood aside and invented her.

Beneath my hands, the face in the water shifted again.

Her face.

Then mine.

Then only mine.

I started crying so hard I could barely see. My chest heaved. My nose and mouth filled with river water and tears. I should have let go. I should have pulled back, crawled to shore, lived with what I had done and what I had lost. Instead I pushed harder. My hands tightened on my own throat as if I could force the truth all the way through me, drown it into silence, punish myself with the same violence I had given them.

I remembered every killing now: the first shock of impact, the sounds they made. My hatred burned so bright it felt holy. With every memory, I pressed down harder, wanting the river to take the murderer and leave only silt.

My vision darkened. The current dragged at my legs. The last thing I felt was my own body giving up under my hands. Then even the crying stopped.

By morning, the river had gone still again. Four dead men lay in the forest. I lay at the bottom of the riverbed beside the stones, eyes open to the dark, as if I had followed someone there.