Collected Evidence

Ann Murray’s grandfather picked up a poisoned fish from the marsh reeds and dropped it into the plastic bag she held open for him. A handful of bodies spun there atop a grey sludge that smelled like the end of something. Mr. Murray poked under the surface with his walking stick. Ann watched him and tried to breathe without smelling, holding her ribs tightly. When she was younger they picnicked at the marsh but the marsh was green then. What do you think, she asked. He shook his head and closed his eyes and opened them. She closed the plastic zipper on the bag and they walked the way they had arrived. He put the bag in the freezer.

Mr. Murray wrote letters to the township, county, and state. He left voicemails for his elected officials. He mailed the bag of poisoned fish to the mayor. This was more effective than anything you could do online, he said to Ann. People are frightened by the physical contact. They take it seriously. It reminds them you’re real and have your own handwriting. She nodded and drew a heart on her hand with a ballpoint pen in his living room, where his small dog sat chewing at her back foot and the television flickered.

In the afternoon, she visited the marsh again. Water lay still under the bubbling surface. If she had anything to say, there was no one to say it to. She found a gold ring on the bank. On some other face of the water, she was looking at herself. Next day, Mr. Murray found two dead birds in the marsh and put them in the freezer.

Ann started to wear the ring. She wanted to ask questions of somebody. The words had to count, to pare down. She walked in the reeds and bent them around her fingers. Ann always needed to be doing something with her hands. The wind pushed the pond up near to her ankles. If there was a place to go, she would be there. There was the water, there were the reeds. No one showed up from the township or wrote in from the county or called them up from the state. The water was tighter and receded on itself.

The Murrays drove to ambush a town hall meeting with the dead birds in two ziploc bags. Ann’s grandfather trimmed his mustache and wore his jungle safari hat. In the car they listened to a cassette of positive intent affirmations. The defrosting birds slid around the bench seat between them at sharp turns. Ann pulled on the ends of her hair and wished it would grow longer. The water along the road was clear, though darker in the light. She had been reading about Chappaquiddick, drowning deaths, the pressure of a small air pocket underwater. We could just keep driving off the road. The thought made her skin itch.

At the end of the meeting, Mr. Murray stood up and asked the microphone why nothing was being done to investigate the poisoning of their land. He held up one dead bird. Its eyes were still open, its feathers trailing fingers of mud across the plastic. Look! he cried, shaking the bag. Ann sat behind him holding the second bag in the palm of her hand, looking at it, unable to stand up.

The town hall members asked the Murrays to leave. On the drive home, Mr. Murray tried to throw his bird out the window, but Ann told him to give it to her. He said they should have kept the fish and brought them. In the evening, she walked to the marsh, the hot air above it, and poured the birds to the ground. She knew there would be more, likely. Ann turned the ring around on her finger. Mosquitoes made a wall against the sunset.

Sunlight stayed lavender over the trees, which did not yet show their sickness. The ballpoint pen had faded out on Ann’s hand and spiked into the creases of her skin. Her grandfather paced around the house and stood by the window. He talked about selling the property. Chemical disclosures, he told her, will reduce the value. What’s a Murray without a marsh?

New things showed up in the muck as the water dried, the space underneath disappearing. Part of a boat, a horseshoe, several broken bottles, a fireplace poker, and a plastic bowl with a rabbit on the inside. See, Ann’s grandfather said, don’t you understand why we never let you swim out here? He had many questions. Back then, she thought, I wouldn’t have been able to touch the bottom.

Cracked eggshell on the riverbank, blue and white. A little air pocket opened. These movements  would be okay, Ann thought. We’d be alright. She lost the ring and found it again on the path. Nothing she left behind was really lost. Her skin absorbed the ink. It was dark underwater, no matter what.

Elizabeth Walztoni’s work appears or is forthcoming in New World Writing, The Hunger, The Schuylkill Valley Journal, The Meadowlark Review, and elsewhere. She received a Nature in Words Fellowship from Pierce Cedar Creek Institute to complete her first short story collection and is the Short Fiction Editor at Five South. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.

Published June 15 2022