Maggie Nerz Iribarne

Listen to Maggie read her story

Content Warning

physical abuse, suicide

Hilary entered the sparse room, her new home. At the window, fog hovered above the lake. A sailboat lingered from the faded summer, bobbing at water’s edge. A steady white light glowed above the surface, moving with insistent ripples, piercing murky air. Hilary assumed it was some kind of optical illusion, a reflection. She focused on the utter silence muzzling the replaying mind sound of gunshot, body drop. Her hands still shook. She imagined her own form transforming, shimmering, levitating, rising from the mess of remembered old blood, hovering above the scratched wooden floors of the cold room. She turned from the window, tossed her backpack on the bed. This and the clothes on her back, her only possessions.

***

The library’s ancient corpse had been found preserved in a soggy peat bog in Ireland. They kept him in a glass case in a darkened display room, where he lay on his side, as though sleeping, a burlap hat calcified to his head. He wore no other clothes. His feet were bare.

Mrs. Allen, the library’s director, looked down at him, her face glowing in the soft display lights.

“He’d been murdered three different ways,” she said. “Arrow in the back, blow to the head, strangled. Can you imagine?”

Hilary pulled at her thin sweater’s sleeves. Gun shot. Body thud.

“Why is he naked?” she half-whispered.

Mrs. Allen shrugged, “Something about acid.”

Hilary tucked thin stray hairs behind her ear, followed the droning Mrs. Allen (the collection, the patrons, the hours, the duties).

The frozen face of the bog man remained with her the rest of the day, sat heavy in her mind -his clamped mouth on the verge of smiling or frowning or laughing. Light shone through the library’s large windows, but the bog man’s case remained in shadow. The sun could not warm, heal him. He must be preserved, Mrs. Allen said. Properly. Hilary worried about his over exposure, how anyone who wanted to could examine his curled naked body. Heading home, she still could not shake him, envisioning him squatting beside a tree, lurking at her heels, an arrow sticking from his back.

***

Despite the chill of early autumn, the townspeople were still swimming. A boy and girl took turns diving off the dock. Hilary touched the button of her thrift store blouse, making sure it was closed, doing its work: hiding her scarred body. She kicked off loafers, removed dark knee-high panty hose. She winced, wading into the cold water, soaking her skirt hem. She tilted her face into the fading central New York light.
Todd’s slack, heavy body. He would’ve sunk like a stone.
Something tickled her ankle – one weed, then more encircling, clutching at her feet. She rushed out of the water to the grass.

“Milfoil weed,” a white-bearded man with a toothpick hanging from his mouth said. “They got a problem with milfoil here. Big problem. Invasive. You can’t stop it. Never,” the man said, turning away, tossing his toothpick to the ground.

***

Old Annie, a millionaire and one of the main donors of the library, wore plastic bags over her threadbare sneakers, fastening them to her calves with rubber bands. Her hair fell to her shoulders in wispy white strands, her skin clear and flawless, her aqua eyes darting, laughing, ridiculing. She had the soft mouth of the toothless. She checked out books by the dozen.

“I don’t think she even reads them,” Mrs. Allen sniped.

“Terrible,” Hilary agreed just to agree.

One day in the basement stacks, Hilary pulled out a book from the shelf. A blue eye blinked through the narrow tunnel from the other side.

“I know you. I know exactly who you are,” she hissed.

“What? Who? Who am I?” Hilary said, heart in throat.

Annie giggled, vanished.

***

Hilary noticed the townspeople all looked the same, walking in orderly lines down the charming main drag. They poked into old fashioned stores selling bakery items, pharmacy, produce, gifts. They dressed neatly, with serious faces erupting into smiles when recognizing the familiar. They went about their business, tying their dogs by the neck to poles lodged into sidewalk cement. The dogs barked, sometimes howled. They were the only other lonely ones. Hilary hurried through the town, kept her eyes down. She preferred to remain a stranger.

***

The snow continued into spring. Hilary, wearing a thin lost-and-found coat, leaned into the wind, walking to the bar, Gavigans. There was a payphone there, an old timey kind in a booth. She let the bar door swing behind her as she walked straight to the back, feeling the eyes of the bartender and few customers following. She dropped the coins into the slot, dialed the number. The answer came after just two rings.

“Addy?” Hilary whispered, “It’s me, Jess.”

“Wrong  number,” her stepsister said, hanging up with force.

Hilary walked out of the bar, back through the snow to the hardened lake.

The bobbing light still pulsed, blurred by snow but persistent-at the horizon.

***

A long weekend to begin the summer. Hilary discovered a surprise of lilacs placed on her desk.

The last one to leave the library, she carried the vase in one hand, hesitated at the bog man’s door.

She made her way to the lake, stripped down, shivering in late afternoon sunlight.

Her navy tank suit hung, revealing thick red stripes slashed across her chest and back, the hard, unmovable wounds. The wounds that bore all memory.

She planned it this way. The dive into icy water. The shock of it forcing a gasp, rousing her from silence. The soft light beckoning her forward. The invasive milfoil weed dragging at her legs.

This piece was first published by Flash Fest Literary Review

Maggie Nerz Iribarne is a 55 year old woman, lives in Syracuse, NY, writes about witches, priests/nuns, the very very old, struggling teachers, neighborhood ghosts, and whatever else strikes her fancy. She keeps a portfolio of her published work at https://www.maggienerziribarne.com.