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skin.
    We stood on the bridge and looked down into the water. Even
in summer’s sunshine, the water below lay dark and churning.
    “I used to come here alone,” he said. “I held my hands over
the water until I didn’t know where I began and the water ended.”
    When I stared down at the murk, I knew Charlie didn’t take
me here to swim. I crossed my arms over my chest and felt my Momma’s two sizes
too big bikini underneath my clothes.
    “I used to think it didn’t have a bottom,” he said, and then
nodded off in the middle of the sentence, his head dipping against his chin.
    Nobody would think of swimming in that murky blackness. Nobody except someone who’d been there before.
    Sleep deprivation could cause dizziness, hallucinations,
aching, paranoia, stunted growth, self-flagellation with a cat-o-nine tails,
and sleep chasing a demon across your girlfriend’s yard. Maybe it could cause
you to kiss her by the side of the river, like you’ll never kiss her again,
pushing grit and sand into her mouth with your tongue. Maybe you’d stand up,
knees shaking, point to the highest tree and say, “Think I can jump from all
the way up there?”
    I watched Charlie climb the tree above the river until it
arched like an arthritic spine, until he couldn’t climb any higher without
breaking branches. I should have told him to stop, but I guess I wanted to know
if he’d actually do it. If he’d really jump.
    I sat down on the edge of the bridge where the concrete
scraped against the bottom of my legs.
    “Think I can touch the bottom?” he asked.
    He could’ve been a pale animal snarled in the branches.
Maybe another year of sleepwalking and he’d forget human speech and speak only
in hisses. He grasped a thick branch in one hand and leaned out over the water.
    He held his hand out, light swelling between his fingers.
    She snuck up behind me and whispered in my ear.
    “Ke-ke-ke-ke-ke.”
    “Charlie!” I called out.
    He jumped from the tree. For a moment he seemed to hang
suspended in midair. He outstretched his hands like wings and his fingers
scraped the underside of the sun. His wounds were no longer wounds, but sparks
of light, gold and glittering. The light suffused him in magic that replaced
his pale, flabby skin and insomniac eyes with a heavenly glow, a falling star,
chariot fire, a single shining image of a god before he plunged downwards.
    He disappeared into the turbid water.
    I rushed to the edge of the bridge, calling his name though
I knew he couldn’t hear me.
    Though I knew he wouldn’t resurface.
    He wanted to jump. He’d wanted to jump since his parents set
fire to Little B, long before he made his first cat-o-nine tails or took his
first walk across burning coals. Every moment led up to this; his moment to
wear the sun like a crown.
    I couldn’t feel my fingers, my throat. My head throbbed. I
opened my mouth but I couldn’t breathe.
    The demon behind me held the folds of her white dress out
like wings. She tossed her head back, thick black hair, her mouth open in a rictus.
    “Ke-ke-ke-ke.”
    I stood before her, vulnerable and shivering.
    “You can still jump in and save him,” she said.
    But I saw the dark waters below. Heavy, so
heavy, the thick blackness enough to crush me. The river whispered,
“Hush, hush, suffocating is so easy.” I held my hand over the water. I couldn’t
tell where my hand ended and the river began.
    The demon lifted up the bottom of her dress, her pale thighs
so white I thought her bones must be on the outside. She revealed her jutting
hips, her small black panties, her skinny, scratched
ribcage.
    She discarded her dress on the bridge and jumped into the
river.
    Sometimes I imagine the two of them, Charlie and the demon,
sinking downward through miles and miles of water. His hair in her hands like a
leash, his head between her palms, his scars kissed by blind
fish .
    They never found his body.

 
Chapter Eight
    AT
SCHOOL THE BOYS called me black widow and baby