Not All Swamps Have Monsters by Mialise Carney

I can’t imagine what she must’ve looked like when they found her, at least not really. I think movies give me a false image because I hope she looked peaceful, just like she was sleeping. I imagine her hair looked like it did when we had sleepovers—dark curls rustling over her peach pillowcase, she never could stay still even when we turned the lights off. But I doubt she looked that peaceful. I bet when they scraped her from the bottom of Olsen’s swamp, she looked like a bloated piece of roadkill. She’d been there at least three months since she ran out the back of Sam’s kitchen, the soles of her bare feet kicking up wet pebbles and mud. 

I wonder if they only guessed it was her but couldn’t tell for sure. Maybe all her skin had burst and the bugs in her stomach crawled out, nibbling her away before swimming off onto a better adventure. She was the only girl that went missing this summer, so it would have been easy to pretend it was her even if they weren’t sure. I don’t know who searched the swamp so I can’t ask anyone if it really was her, or what she looked like even if I wanted to. 

I might be wrong to think she decayed. Last year in class we read about bog bodies and how they get mummified—all leathery and brown, lips puckering, teeth showing like the dentures swimming in my grandma’s bedside drawer. Maybe seeing her all leathery and brown is what made the open casket seem wrong to everyone but me.

I’d rather not think about her perfect brown skin, tickled by goosebumps and stray freckles, or her innie belly button, or her painted blue fingernails ripped and rotted and chewed by algae and sprawling leeches. I’d rather think about summertime and skinning our knees on fallen trees, and that winter we made snow mounds in her flat, flat backyard. We spent hours sliding down on old pizza boxes, warmed up grease leaving stains on the butts of our too-short snow pants.

But it isn’t wintertime anymore, and Cal isn’t alive anymore, and I can’t help but feel the weight of her waterlogged body on top of me every time I try to sleep.

Cal and I used to go over to Olsen’s farm sometimes after school in the fall. It was one of those small farms tucked back against a highway. When my stepbrother Jet drove us by real fast, little bits of cows and rusting silos teased out from in between the dried pines. I always rode with Jet, even though I didn’t like to. He’s six years older than me, and we met when he and his mom moved in with me and my dad. I was seven, and Jet was just stretching his long, boney toes over the line of thirteen, his doughy boy body tumbling into sharp elbows and a creaking voice box that used to slam shut on him just like the front door.

All Jet talked about that first year was how he always wanted a girl like me to play with. He sat beside the cardboard box dollhouse I’d built and watched me play, his fingers running over mismatched socks playing as rugs for Barbie’s stilted feet. Jet told me to say their voices louder when I got embarrassed, first pulling his sweaty fingers through Kelly’s matted straw hair before he’d sit behind me and play with mine.

I didn’t mind that much at first since nobody ever touched my hair, and it seemed like a thing a real brother would do. But one cold afternoon when I was dressing Stacie up for her horse ride, he leaned in close to my neck and sniffed real deep, like he was trying to suction me up inside him.

I didn’t like when he played with my hair or my dolls after that. Two weeks later, we got into a big fight. He stamped on my dollhouse, crushing through the messily painted cardboard and jamming a sharp plastic bedpost up into the arch of his foot. I stopped playing dolls right around then, instead comforted by the click-clicking of my new bike’s chain as I bounced into dips in the dirt path behind my house. There are still little brown flecks of blood on my carpet like I could never get him out no matter how hard I scrubbed.

I was more scared of Olsen and his farm than I was of Jet. I was scared of the big chipping green farm equipment and how it loomed over rows and rows and rows of corn. The fall before Cal ran, we stood in front of the corn. It was crisp and swaying, and I kept imagining getting lost inside it. The edge of her short, pleated skirt bumped my hand, a harsh breeze teasing the oncoming November.

Cal liked to play between the corn, to hide inside it. She said she liked how she could disappear so completely while also taking up so much room—the stalks had to bend to fit her. She begged me to follow, to show me the glory, to feel the burn of the sharp blades of corn against my arms and my legs.

“You’ll love it, I promise,” she said, her uneven lips curling up at the corners like she couldn’t imagine being afraid of something as innocent as nature. Her eyes searched the field, the sky, like she wanted to eat the whole landscape up, to become part of it.

I said no, shaking my head so my hair whipped hard against my face. I didn’t know how to explain why the corn scared me—it was too tall and too close, and I got the feeling I would go in and never be able to get back out.

But Cal didn’t care that I was scared. She just grabbed my wrist, her sweaty fingers pinching my skin as she gently pulled me towards the rows. She parted the corn with the back of her hand, beckoning me to the smell of sweat, and earth, and warm wet soil promising to envelop us until after dusk. I shuffled, crouching down low behind her, my heart thumping, mimicking the rustle of the corn. When she stood up, careening onto the tiptoes of her bare feet, all we could see around us was corn for acres.

When Jet drove me to school some days, pressed up against the window, I’d watch the corn sway in the rain and the November frosts like it was waving hello, like it remembered.

I try not to think about the corn anymore or the smell of it. My skin itches when I think about it and I get hives—small red bumps, burning all down my arms where the corn used to graze me, like a blister after a burn just waiting until I thought I was safe to show.

Sometimes I think about Cal’s eyes covered in leeches, their squirming bodies sucking, squelching until she’s got just two empty sockets. I can only hope her caterpillar eyebrows survived even if her eyes didn’t. At her funeral, I imagined her eyebrows standing up, swaying like seaweed in the current. It made me laugh hard on the cool, glossy pew at her parent’s church. Jet sat beside me, his leg pressed against mine, and when I laughed, high pitched into the stone echo, he didn’t even look at me. He leaned forward, elbows on his spread knees, his face going a deeper shade of peach crawling up his neck in splotches.

It’s funnier now more than it was at the church, when I had to bite down on my knuckle so hard it bruised down the back of my hand. Really, it doesn’t make sense to think of her eyebrows floating around like that, like they’ve got a life of their own because I don’t think swamps have seaweed or really any currents.

It was raining the night Cal ran. Big fat drops, the kind that puddle in trees for a while and then slam down on your head all at once, rattling against your skull like pebbles. Cal and I shivered in our dresses, leaning up against the side of my dad’s house. Our dresses were poofy too big hand-me-down party dresses—mine was salmon and tulle, hers was a black New Year’s Eve dress from her older cousin Bea. It crinkled when she moved and had little fake aluminum triangles all around the skirt. When stray headlights from a car hit, she looked like a shivering disco ball.

By the time Jet came back, we were forty-five minutes late for Sam’s surprise party, and he barely had any gas left. Still, we got into the passenger seat—me up against the gear stick, my kneecap familiarly lodged into the sharp edge of the console. Cal squeezed next to me, pressed up against the door so hard that her elbow bruised going over potholes.

We were still six months too young to drive so Jet drove us most places. He had a car and a lot of time to kill, and he never seemed to mind it all too much. Even though I liked the rides, sometimes I couldn’t help but think he only offered because it could keep us there with him.

Ever since I’d been friends with Cal, he always seemed to want to make her squirm. He used to tell Cal she was the sister he never got, his eyes twinkling at me over her shoulder. She hated him, but couldn’t say it to his face, shrinking away when she came over to our house. I’d watch his hand twitch, his eyes staring into the back of her head when she was near like all he was thinking about was how much he wanted to hold her like he always tried to hold me.

Once, in the truck when he was teasing Cal, I bent his finger so far back he yelped and kicked us out on the highway. Cal and I had to walk down the breakdown strip full of glass and burnt up tires all the way to her house in the dark. Since then, I sit next to him and I pretend not to mind when he puts his arm around my shoulder and calls me his girl.

They found that disco ball dress before they ever found Cal. It was in the middle of Olsen’s cornfield, just lying there up against the stalks. They’d been combing the area when Olsen said he saw a dress, all perfect and silent like it was waiting to be found. They let me see it at the station, to make sure it really was Cal’s dress. I was glad that they didn’t just check the pictures because I wanted to see the dress, even if Cal wasn’t in it.

Lying there on the plastic table, it looked like it still held her shape. The tight corsety part was crisp and rounded, like she’d just unzipped it and slipped out. I looked underneath the table to check if she was playing one of those real mean pranks she played sometimes, hiding somewhere, waiting to jump up and scream. To tell me it had all been a late April fool, and I’d been the fool all along.

The police took me out then, and I tried to wriggle free, just so I could touch it. I wanted to see if it was still wet from the rain, or if there were any stray headlight beams caught in the aluminum shapes. But they wouldn’t let me. They just shut the door tight and stood in front of the tiny criss cross window and told my dad to take me home. I still feel bad that Bea never got her dress back.

It was our new friend Sam’s Surprise Sweet Sixteen, but we missed the surprise part. I’d never been to a party like Sam’s before. She had lots of friends, got invited to senior parties, and lived in a big house with laidback parents. We’d only gotten invited because Cal sat next to Sam in first period and gave her answers to the homework she forgot about. Cal and I were excited to see one of her parties, to get invited to something we both never did.

Jet was supposed to drop us off when we got there, but as we peeled our legs off the clammy leather seat, he opened the driver’s side and jumped out. My stomach curdled like old milk, and I wished I’d braved walking instead. Cal didn’t say anything, her head bent against the rain as he followed us, heavy music leaking through holes in Sam’s front screen door.

Nobody seemed to notice we were late. But Sam stared hard when she saw Jet, her blue eyes widening, her head tilting just a bit in a question, glancing from me to him.

She turned to Cal. “Why’d you bring him here?” she said. 

Cal’s face twitched, her forehead scrunching into wrinkles, her mouth curling. “I didn’t bring him,” she said. She looked at me and her eyes flickered, uncertain. “He’s not my brother.”

My skin felt warm and tingly, hot goosebumps running up to my shoulders. I waited for Sam to tell me to make him leave. But she didn’t, and I blew out my breath slow and quiet as she turned inward to Cal, shoulders glancing together, leading her out toward the glittering living room. I didn’t follow right away; I turned to watch Jet stamp his muddy boots across the clean tile floor, his tall form leering, shuffling, searching.

The Monday after Cal was still gone, I sat in a small cold chair in a small cold room. They had tried to make it seem cozy, with plastic toys cluttering the floor and painted flowers creeping up the walls. But I knew it wasn’t a nice room because the air felt thin, and the corkboard behind my head had posters for rape counseling hotlines stuck into it. I leaned forward over and over, the pushpins kept sticking in my hair, little flaws in the plastic grabbing, pinching, pulling, biting into the back of my head.

I itched at the hives under the sleeves of my sweater. Cal and I had spent most of the party together. Halfway through dancing, we stopped to unbuckle our sandals, kicking them off at the bottom of Sam’s staircase. We ate tortilla chips crumbling in off-brand cheese, and I danced with Cal, sparkling under the strung-up Christmas lights. I turned to talk to someone else, to shout over the noise and when I turned back to Cal, I didn’t see her. I thought she went to dance with someone else or maybe get another soda, so I didn’t say anything until I got bored and went to the kitchen. I heard someone yell, and the screen door slammed. I looked out the window over the sink.

I saw Cal run out into the rain, her bare feet kicking up mud like she was going to jump into the high grass, belly flop into a puddle. I laughed because I thought she was trying to make me laugh, but then it was dark and I almost couldn’t see her anymore.

I opened the screen door and ran out after her. I ran and ran, my bare feet cutting against rocks and dirt and oyster shells strewn across the flat, flat meadow behind Sam’s house. The long weeds and plants brushed against my bare legs and pulled at the edges of my skirt.

In the middle of the field, I stopped because I couldn’t see anything in front of me, and I could only barely see the light flickering from Sam’s house way, way back behind me, and high voices were screaming at me to come back. I didn’t know how I got there or what I was even thinking, acting so crazy, to just run out of there like that at Sam’s party. I’d never live it down.

I felt almost like I’d sleepwalked, and even the stones bouncing around in my lungs didn’t feel real. I was scared of what might be out there, in the meadow, in the field, in the swamp way far up ahead past the corn. And my feet were cold and cut and squishy in the mud and I was scared that everyone at the party would be laughing at me. I couldn’t see Cal anyway, and I was a faster runner than her. Maybe I’d been wrong, and I’d only imagined she’d run out because how could I not have caught up?

I turned around and ran back, faster and faster and faster like something was chasing me, and the more I ran the more I thought I was going to get caught.

The officer nodded, pulling a chewed blue pen out from between her teeth. I showed her the cuts on my feet, slipping my foot out of my sneaker, peeling back my sock. She asked if there was anything else I wanted to tell her, anything that might help them find Cal. I said no.

I’m glad they found Cal even if it took three months. They said what happened was an accident. She spooked like a deer, they said, running disorientated all around through the night, eventually falling and drowning, cold and alone in Olsen’s swamp. It was cold, they said, unseasonably cold. Maybe she’d gotten hypothermia. That would explain why she stripped because she got so cold her brain made her think her blood was boiling.

It said that on the news. Accidental And Tragic. But I don’t think that is true. I don’t think it’s that easy or prepackaged, a convenient end for Cal. I don’t think running through the night, taking off her party dress in a field, and going to Olsen’s swamp is an accident. And I don’t think it’s fair of them to think Cal would ever be that empty.

Now when I sleep, I don’t dream, but sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m awake but I’m not in my bedroom in the basement of my dad’s split-level house. Instead, I’m back at the party, and I’m really there. I can feel the itchy hot tulle of my dress creeping up my thighs, catching in the tight band of my underwear. I can hear the sound of the bad, tinny Bluetooth speakers bang-bang-banging against my ears, my fingers clasping a sweaty plastic cup full of Capri Sun. Sam’s bright eyes are shining around the room, her arms swaying above her head, her plastic party tiara glinting against the twinkling Christmas lights.

I’m in the process of inching towards Sam to apologize for bringing Jet when I look over my shoulder and see Cal turn the corner around the hall, her hand trailing the eggshell-colored wall, bumping gently over the edge. I see Jet follow her, his saunter just quick enough for the music to ring flat in my ears and for me to know I should follow.

The party happens again each time, and it’s just as loud and hot as before. I know it’s not a dream because I want to change it, but I can’t. Each time I follow Cal, and each time I don’t move when I watch Jet stand over her, his hands so close to touching her shoulders. She doesn’t see him yet. She’s looking out over the large open field outside, lit only by a yellow light simpering across the yard.

I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I imagine she’s thinking about the coolness of the air, how it’ll feel running over her warm shoulders when we leave together in a few hours. The feeling of climbing back into Jet’s rusting truck, our mouths full of nervous laughter. I bet she’s thinking about riding home with all the windows down, sticking her head so far out the window she’ll have to dip back inside when we get too close to trees so she doesn’t get hurt.

His hands come down slowly on top of her bare shoulders, hard, pushing down like he’s trying to squash her. She jumps, her knee pops out, bumping into the cabinet, a hollow echo I can’t hear but I swear I feel it—the quick bruising, the ripple of fear crawling up my spine. I want to yell at him to stop, but each time I wait like I want to see what will happen. Like maybe I don’t want to be the one in charge of him this time.

She turns around, her caterpillar-seaweed eyebrows scrunching together. Her lips move but I can’t hear what she says. Her chin recedes into her neck as she leans back away from him, her back pressing into the sharp counter.

I stand at the edge of the kitchen, my thumbnail digging into the paint. I know it’s not a dream because if it were, I would peel Jet off her. I’d beat his creepy little worm hands into a pulp and drag him out to the swamp and drown him myself. And I know it’s not a dream because I do the same thing every time—I stay, my bare feet sticking to the glossy faux-wood floor. I pick them up slowly one at a time like I’m marching to a silent, sticky tune.

Jet leans forward, his broad shoulders enveloping her underneath his lumberjack plaid, squeezing her in. I know the smell of him, the musky denseness of too much cologne, car grease, and weed. He holds her, pressing like he wants to break her arms and shatter her bones. Each time I let him.

She pulls her face over the crook of his shoulder, her eyes peeking up, her nose twisting. Her eyes search, different now from how they did in the cornfield when they were searching for air, and warmth, and for me to trust her. She’s searching for someone to pull her from his grasp, pull her back to bare feet and dancing on the hardwood living room and spilling Capri Sun on a dented coffee table spattered with magazines. Instead, she finds me. Watching, staring, allowing. This time I don’t protect her, because I don’t want to have to be Jet’s girl anymore.

I peel my mouth open, barely sputter a weak warning but I think she has already given up on me. She already knows I’m not coming. She wiggles her chin up to his shoulder, her Maybelline red lips smeared from the crushing bite down hard.

Jet yelps and pushes her back hard against the counter, and I can feel the own snap of my neck as her head pops back against the wooden cabinet. She doesn’t wait for anything, doesn’t yell across at me, doesn’t punch, or scream, or cry. She just slides away from him and runs out the screen door, like she already knew where she needed to go.

I start to run after her, but Jet grabs my wrist hard with his clammy, calloused fingers before I can get out the screen door. He yells in my face, but I don’t know what he’s saying, a string of spit snapping in between his front teeth. His other hand searches for blood underneath his collar from where she bit, but it turns up nothing.

When I finally break away, my skin twisted with the tightness of his hand, it’s too late but I don’t know that yet. Instead, I’m in the meadow, and pieces of wet dandelion stalks and long grass brush up against the back of my knees and my feet are slipping on the uneven ground. My lungs shrivel against the cold, and I’m terrified of the dark and what might be out there, or what might not be. But I somehow feel more alive than ever, because I think Cal is waiting for me to find her. I still don’t know that she’s already so far out of reach.

They say she stripped because she was confused and maybe hypothermic and disorientated, mistaking her cold for warmth. But I don’t think that’s true. I imagine her running through the field, her lungs banging against her ribcage, trying to escape the arms around her but the corset on her dress kept her body all tight up against itself. When she unzipped it and stripped it away, she could finally breathe without feeling like someone didn’t want her to. And then she was running through the corn, the remnants of the hard rain splattering down on her shoulders and stomach and head. Even though she didn’t know at the end of the corn was the swamp she’d die in, she could feel nothing but the corn, so sweet and soft, pulling at her, begging her to stay.

I was thinking about Cal being dead too much, so I decided to walk down to Olsen’s farm by myself. I want to see the corn. It’s the end of August now, the perfect time for corn, the time when it’s just about Jet’s height but still young enough not to scare me. Before it towers too high and starts to decay, to crumple in on itself. The soft yellow hairy bits of it are spurting out, pressing out like it’s trying to bloom, trying to escape from the flesh that encases it. I want to see the corn now before it gets old and whispers things I can’t understand without Cal here to cup her hand around my ear and explain in her way that made it not seem so awful.

I go to Olsen’s farm, and as I pick my way over the dirt path that leads from the back of my woods to the front of his, I can smell the swamp. It smells sweet, but in the sharp kind of way that reminds me of pear trees in spring or dead mice, stuffed up in the walls of my bedroom before my dad peeled them out, carrying away their intricate tunnels, gutted.

I stand where Cal and I stood last fall, and I want to see it. I want to see the bog Cal had been lying in for so long. But I don’t go. I know Olsen and some of the other farmers blocked it off anyway. Besides, Cal won’t be there. I know she’s in the corn, in the sturdy stalks ants crawl up and down. And even though I am scared of the corn and how it prickles and traces my skin like unwanted fingers, I reach out with both hands, part it, and step inside. 

Jet and I don’t go on rides anymore, even though I think he got what he wanted—me all to himself. I never got to be friends with Sam because she thinks I killed Cal and she’s failing geometry without her. All I want to do is tell Cal about it. I want to tell Cal how weird it is for her to be dead, and for Jet to not want to eat me alive, and for Sam to be failing geometry. I want to tell her how pretty she looked that night dancing. How we could have been like that again, in the cornfield, in her living room, on her birthday, with the lights off, if she wanted.

I crawl on my hands and knees until I am heaving up dust and warm air, and my skin is burning with hives, and I feel like bugs are crawling all over me. The heat bugs are screaming louder than I’ve ever heard them before like I’m trespassing and I’m not worthy. I stand to see how far I’ve come, but I can’t see over the corn, to see if I’m in the middle. It’s all around me, rustling, buzzing, and I feel like if I spun around with my eyes closed I’d never find my way out. Only then do I stop, kneel to the earth, and speak to Cal.

Mialise Carney (@mialisec) is a writer and editor from the Boston area. Her short stories have appeared in Menacing Hedge and Atlas and Alice, among others. See more of her work at mialisecarney.com.