Tomorrow and Tomorrow

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Her body’s down in Nine Mile Run, half buried in river mud. Time-stamped late April, the rains must have exposed her. Or maybe the rain-swollen river rose around her, the current rinsing away the foot or so of silt that had covered her. Time-stamped 6:44 p.m.—shafts of sunlight slant through the woods, dappling the mud in the clearings. The water’s a mossy green where the sunlight hits, but outside the direct sunlight the water’s a sooty brown, almost black. I think of the earth here, the history of this place, how accustomed it is to burning—the hillsides running steep to the riverbed were once slag heaps for the mills, rolling landslides of molten ash—but by the time I knew this place, everything was reclaimed and greened. It was a city park.

When the time stamp’s reached 7:31 p.m. it’s grown too dark to see so I adjust the light filters. The woods and the body brighten with the sickly pallor of digitized light. I can see her feet now, white like white mushrooms grown bulbous in the soil. Bookmark the body. I leave her, finding my way back through the woods along the jogging path in the utter dark.

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