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Amanda Rizkalla
A Body of Water
There was a puddle—silver, like a splash of mercury—on the sidewalk. I could see the glint of it from my bedroom window. It was July. Raining.
“Look,” I said to my husband when he came home from work that night. I pointed out the window. “Maybe we’ll have a swimming pool after all.” The puddle, this morning the size of a dinner plate, now stretched to the size of a dinner table.
“Maybe,” he said, placing a button-down shirt into his suitcase.
I was nice that night. I stuffed a chicken with wild rice. I basted its skin every fifteen minutes and served it to him on clean dishes and watched him eat the entire thing, fork and knife. He would leave the next day for a work trip and not return for a month, a whole month. We slept in the same bed that night, his leg over my knee.
In the morning, when he reached over to kiss my cheek, I let him. I waved goodbye, watching the taxi drive off—yellow, like in the movies. Outside the puddle had widened to the size of a pond.
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That afternoon, the pond froze over, though it was the middle of summer. I checked the thermometer nailed into my living room wall. It was ninety-three degrees.
By evening, the pond had sculpted a snowman on top of itself, with indents for eyes and nose and mouth. An interim husband for me, I thought then. An interim father for the baby, which was about as big as a blueberry. But the snowman melted by morning, a sloppy puddle of want.
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On the third day, trout appeared in the pond, zipping through the water like sleek chrome missiles. The pond spat one out for me. I knew it wanted me to eat the trout because, twice now, I had thrown the fish back into the pond only for it to be spat right back out on the grass, its mouth open, gasping.
“No, thank you,” I said firmly, hands on my hips. I scooted the fish back into the pond with the tip of my shoe. Then the smell of something—bread. I looked around me. The pond had softened the brown rocks by its edge into rolls. They were warm. Plushy. I plucked three and ate them, right there, beside the pond, then fed the crumbs to the trout, who splashed happily in the water.
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It rained for eleven days.
The rain was thick, heavy like a wet drape. I could not see more than two or three inches ahead of me when I stepped outside. The shops closed. The weatherman stopped showing up. On the weather channel: static. I kept it on anyway.
When the food ran out, I ate out of our pantry—cans of creamed corn that expired seven years ago, jars of peaches that had dissolved into their own juice. I thought, briefly, about running outside to grab an armful of rolls from the pond, but the second I opened the door, my only umbrella was snatched away by the wind.
When the cramping started on the sixth day of rain, I could not tell what was causing it, the old food or the baby. I could not get out of bed. I drank old pickle juice through a straw and felt worse. It was sour-sweet. Five days later, the rain turned into drizzle, drizzle turned into dry, and through my bedroom window, I could see that the pond was now a lake, stretching out like a moat around the house. There was a grass walkway in the middle where the lake had parted itself.
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The day I lost the baby, the lake turned blood-red. It gurgled, splashing, spilling itself over unto the grass until I tossed ibuprofen inside it. I skipped the pills like stones over the red water. The cramps settled. The water cleared.
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I got used to the lake. I had taken to knitting by it, sunbathing on the walkway. The lake turned the grass around me into different seasons—scorched dry, lime green, frostbitten. I set up a canvas and painted the lake with watercolors. It painted me, too, in a way, reflecting me back ten years younger, smiling.
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The day the shops re-opened, I drove to the grocery store, then to the greenhouse. There, I purchased flowers with odd names—bladderpods, cape sundew, meadowfoam—and after I planted them by the pond, I ordered bees online. They arrived a few days later in a small brown parcel the size of a wallet. I held it up to my ear. It buzzed. When I released the bees, they settled around the flowers like yellow sprinkles on cake.
This made the lake happy, I could tell. It curved itself into a half moon, like a grin. It was laughing, simmering at the bees.
#
I think the lake wanted me to swim in it. Sometimes it lifted its tide up, up, around my ankles and tried to pull me in. I always backed away. Always dried off my feet. I had never learned how to swim.
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The day a postcard arrived from my husband, the mailman knocked on my door and handed it to me himself. He apologized for the delay. “It’s been crazy out there,” he said, adjusting his hat.
"I can imagine.”
I flipped it over. “Missing you both,” it said in blue cursive. I brought the postcard into the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, then opened the junk drawer. I rummaged through it until I found an envelope. I got a paper from the printer tray, a pen from my desk. I did not know what to say. Nothing sounded right. A pile of crumpled paper lay by my feet like dead white flowers. I hunched over the coffee table in the living room, writing then crumpling. It was around seven in the evening when I realized I had not gone outside that day. The lake splashed itself against the front door until I opened it, and when I did, it rushed inside.
The water came up to my calves. The trout swam in through the front door, doing laps around the legs of my furniture, nudging me with their foreheads. “Stop it,” I said, but the water only rose higher, up to my thighs. The water was a pale yellow-green, like it had soured, turned acidic. I climbed up on my kitchen counter, steadying myself on the granite. “You’re scaring me,” I said. “Please.”
Then it receded.
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In the letter to my husband, all I could do was tell the truth.
I wrote: “Miss you too! I planted flowers.”
When I walked out of the house to drop the letter off at the post office, the lake lapped itself up to my toes like it was sorry. In its little laps and splashes, I could almost hear it whimpering.
#
After that, the lake started to seem confused, like it had gotten lost in itself, in its own depths. At night, it reflected the morning sky, and in the morning, it turned neon pink. Once, when I dipped my finger into it, my fingertip came back smooth, too smooth. I wiped it on my pants, then washed it off in the bathroom sink. It had taken my fingerprint.
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Then the bees turned up dead, belly-up. Their little wings flared out in the water. I scooped them out using a slotted spoon. I put them in a jar by my bed.
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Slowly, the lake began to dry up, which made the trout anxious—they swam in circles in their small space, a space that only got smaller. I made a list about saving them. I could buy an aquarium, fish food, speckled rocks. A pack of plastic plants. But there were now over fifty trout in the lake, maybe even over a hundred, and it would be cruel to pick and choose which ones to save.
I peered out the window. I wanted to touch the lake, to console it somehow. Its surface looked normal, a pale blue with cotton clouds. I went outside and touched it.
“Ouch!” I yelled and drew my finger back, feeling it, the scald. I do not know if I was more surprised or angry that it had burned me. “Fine,” I said, then ran back into the house. I closed all the windows so I would not be tempted to look at it. I ignored it for three days.
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In the morning, I opened the blinds to see the last of the lake panting, evaporating. I did not know what to do, so I filled a glass pitcher with water from the kitchen sink and poured it into the lake but all it did was sizzle, the steam rising. I tried again with saltwater—it could have been a saltwater lake—but this only made it evaporate faster. I used every liquid I had in the house: the leftover pickle juice, the peach brine. When it began to rain a few minutes later, I almost cried—the rain would fix it. But the lake seemed to repel the water, the raindrops ricocheting off, into the grass.
What could I do but lay by the lake. I fell asleep beside it, staring at it, what was left—a cup’s worth of water turning maroon, then diluting into pink, then slowly running clear. I pressed my palm to the grass. In the morning when I woke up, it was gone. All of it, gone. I sat up, beside it, beside the trout, their many silver bodies, which had not yet begun to smell. I brought my knees close to my chest and cried.
When my husband returned, he sat next to me on the grass. He looked down, toward my stomach, which should have been bigger by now. He wrapped an arm around my shoulders, then looked off in silence—silence he thought we were sharing. “What happened?” he asked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
And I could tell by looking at him, at the way his face wore his sorrow, that he thought he could understand mine.
Amanda Rizkalla is a writer living in Chicago, IL. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in Boston Review, No Tokens Journal, The Fabulist and elsewhere. She is a recent Steinbeck Fellow and Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellow. Website: amandarizkalla.com.
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