Gloria Pearlman
Bottom Feeder: Specimens in Silhouette I didn’t mean to drown her. It was only that she withered so quickly before my eyes. I was saving the morphine for a rainy day, but summer monsoons kept holding back. She always cried so readily in smooth strokes of night swims; I couldn’t choose another way. She had always been laid bare in the water, floating defenseless—the only time she let me see her. When the monsoons came, they came hailing. Water rushed the streets, picking up tumbleweeds and cigarette butts, carrying them down the gutter. When the storm drains clogged and the rain kept coming, it flooded roads, overtook medians; there was no way to drive home. Before the storm broke, a needle pierced my skin a few hundred times, depositing ink with each quick stab of my paper-thin inner wrist, marking my body with evidence. Summer heats the pool to a lukewarm even night cannot cool. Step into the pool and there is hardly a difference on her skin, which has ceased to sweat in the dry night. The air might as well be another water to move through, thick as it is with the heat still rising from the baked ground. She sits on the edge, watching the blue light of the pool bathe her legs, palely swaying through still water. Her skin goes dry, chlorine crisps the ends of her hair, and only the brightest stars emerge from a crowded purple-cast sky. I never would have drowned in those drainage tunnels, the ones that carry away the sins of our concrete, our city that rests in a bowl against the rain shadow mountains. I can smell the rain coming, the way it mixes with the wind. I can see the color of it, that purple dark approaching. While the flood channels wait to be filled, I wait for their filling to carry me away. A moment of taking stock of the body I carry: it is shaped like me and looks like her. I lift her up. She is smaller than she was, and weightless—wrists and fingers not quite yet emaciated, just a thinness in the extremities to tell me I’ve already lost a portion. I carry her to the backyard, and it is night, but the pool glows bright as it would 47
