Invisible String
By Christina Miller Larsen
The women planted themselves in the earth like weeds. “Volunteers” we’d call them if they held worth, like valued plants that had gone to seed and found new land to regenerate. Instead we called them by what was left of them: Bodies. Remains. Corpses. Bones. They were conscripts, not volunteers. Carcasses, not women. Women, not people.
Born in ‘78, I was a little kid in the 1980’s when they began to spread, mounded in the shade of pine trees, laid out in riverbeds. I lived along the Green River and, as with kids who normalize the familiar into near-invisibility, I had never noticed it much before except to comment that it wasn’t that green whenever we drove along its banks or splashed around at Flaming Geyser State Park. I thought it was neat that there was a soda called Green River and liked to compare its vivid Crayola green to the dull water that lazed its way through my town. “Now THIS is green!” I’d proclaim in my best TV commercial voice as I chugged the shatteringly sweet drink before releasing the bottle with a theatrical “Aaaaahhh.”
For me, there wasn’t a Green River until there was a Green River Killer. It wasn’t until he got his name that it even occurred to me to pay attention to the river. It just was. Then he came, and the place materialized, fertile with terrifying potential. Haunted by the hunted. Peopled by the dead. He had cultivated his beds on the river’s banks, and what he planted laid roots and grew in my imagination.
At first the children were unaware, the adults wary. We kids didn’t recall the immediately previous scourge of local murders or its famously long-haired victims, but our parents had been those victims’ peers. The adults easily recalled the wasteful horror of perfectly good girls plucked from well-lit corridors or sunny summer beaches and gone forever. Some even recalled the two deaths up north at the hands of a Californian killer and speculated that maybe our evergreen shelters were too alluring to girl-hunters, that our year-round mild weather enabled perennial reaping. In the shade, perhaps, it is always girl season. But when the adults realized that what had been sown were merely the bodies of whores, no one’s darling buds, no risk to them or theirs, their lips began to loosen.
As our parents eased into the knowledge that this monster would never rise from under our own beds, that these grotesque Naiads had always been and would always be outside their own locked doors, we began to hear the stories. Newscasts were left unmuted when we wandered in the room, whispered conversation at 3 p.m. pickup rose to regular volume, and euphemisms for horror fell away as the adults relaxed into their own safety.
There was a killer, a murderer, so we learned the word “murder.” Someone was killing women—women?—not like our moms. So then girls—girls?—not like us or our sisters. Someone was killing, though, and corpses—real ones, not like Halloween—were floating, snagging, rotting, polluting the river that ran behind our houses and school. We learned the word “remains” and what it meant. We learned about “bodies,” not like our bodies that we used to ride our streamer-handled bikes and climb monkey bars. The foul kind, devoid of a soul, ripe with smells and infestation, like so many permeable drums of toxic waste filthying our river. Not bodies, but bodies. The flesh was bad, and it further muddied the water that was never green.
Recess became strange, and its games even stranger. We shared what poorly filtered information we had with each other at first recess, and by second recess we had distilled it into dramatic play. There was a daily pattern to the digestion and reproduction of the news: First recess, talk; Second recess, draft; Third recess, refine. That’s when what had been cops and robbers, Duke boys vs. Boss Hogg and Cletus, became chase games named for the river’s killer. Boys vs. girls, obviously, except for the all-boy police force who, frankly, never prevented a single chase. As a girl, all I could do was run and hide.
But I didn’t hide alone. The game sickly recalled Sardines, and we girls, like the dead fish for which the original variation of hide-and-seek was named, stuck tightly together. We’d huddle, close in thrilled terror, behind play structures, or wedged into the enormous, half-sunken tractor tires we had formerly climbed on, or at the far corner of the field. In the field we had no cover except for the soft protection of one another’s limbs and bodies. We were our own small human shields. Our fragile hands clasped one another’s backs, and our thin arms wound around the blades of each other’s shoulders precisely where wings would have sprouted had we been angels. No one faced outward. All eyes squeezed shut. Collectively tensed into one protective body, we prayed that because we were many, only few would be sacrificed. Part of the terror and thrill of the gamble was that some girls would remain safe until the next round of play. But naturally, eventually all the girls died. While the boys ran and chased the “killer,” we were picked off until the recess bell rang and we all returned inside to pencil shavings, chalk dust, and the humid exhalation of children.
At school my last name, once so boring, now imparted a chill as the mean boys named me the Green River Miller. One letter away from his press moniker in a schoolyard a literal stone’s throw from the river’s banks, my throat lumped as I tried to ignore their taunts. When I ran and hid, I was excitedly scared, but there was distance between the player and the game. When I was named for him, I was terrified and disgusted in the way one is terrified when told a large insect is on one’s back. It made no sense, but my mind repeated “Get it off me! Get it off me!” whenever someone tried to touch me with that name. It was on me. It was in me. Being the hunted was horrible, but with some odds of survival and the chilling warmth of shared dread. We prey would shelter together, sisters in play-terror, protecting one another until we couldn’t. Being the hunter was a lonely stain.
Some time after I was tainted with the Green River name, I, too, began hunting. Not as he did, for prey, but as children do for Easter eggs or hidden pictures in damp copies of Highlights Magazine at the dentist’s office. I first started when my mother would drive me on a wooded road from our house to daycare in the morning. The trees were thick, a coniferous mass the murky green of a Grimm’s tale. Where the trees relented to reveal ground grew wild, reaching ferns that insistently concealed any breach. I would stare at this dense wall of competing greens in search of a glimpse of white, of beige, of brown bleached gray with decay. Of hair, of bone, of skin, of flesh. Of woman.
This compulsion to hunt spread rhizomatically in my fertile imagination. Every drive became fair game for seeking what lay hidden. Bodies were found near my grandmother’s house by the airport, and so drives there became tense with focused searching. The riverbanks, of course, were ripe with opportunity. It was all just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. It felt inevitable. I was neither scared of, nor particularly interested in, the details of what I might find. I just wondered, like when a tooth would fall out or when I’d get my period, when my turn was to find a corpse in the woods. Finding bodies then was a stumbling commonplace. Not quite as unordinary as a dandelion in one’s yard, but not so unusual in concept. Of course I was going to find a woman. Everyone was doing it.
And so I stared. At first, my strategy was to focus hard, squinting painfully at every frond, leaf, and needle as we sped past, searching for a difference in texture, in color, in shape. But that was exhausting and exacerbated my childhood motion sickness. My next strategy was to simply unfocus my eyes and sift through the images they sent to my brain for disruptions in pattern. I was ready at a moment’s notice to yell “STOP!” and alert my mom to the presence of a body in the woods, to mark the spot with my brightly-colored child’s coat while we sought out a payphone to call the police. I knew that I would have to talk to the police, and that would be scary. But I was ready to be brave. After all, finding women in the woods was a civic duty now, and no one likes a litter bug.
Horrifyingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the synapses formed in my young brain as I sought fingerbones and mandibles in the underbrush have held firm through the decades. The urge is evergreen. I still search. I can’t stop. Now, as my husband drives our family car piled heavy with suitcases, beach toys, and daughters to the coast, I stare into woods that flank us. I unfocus my eyes and scan for smooth where there should be leafy, for bleached white where there should be shadowed green. At this point I’m both practiced and a mother, and so I easily multitask. I may be chatting with my girls, or singing along to a song on the radio, but my eyes don’t leave the density of green. I look for the women. I could be handing snacks over my shoulder or glancing at a map to mitigate a child’s bathroom emergency, but that’s only a break in my real work. I look for the women. It has become essential to my being beyond mere habit and well into the realm of vocation. I look for the women. Every drive is a hunt. Every hike is a forage. I have no memory of being in the woods that is not also a memory of seeking bones.
The difference between a plant and a weed lies only in its value to humans. I may not have planted this urge to find what he poorly hid, but I have carefully tended it where it grew. When the river’s killer carelessly scattered women like so many blown dandelion puffs, he also sprouted my obsession with finding them and women like them. I never consented to this invasive colonization of my imagination, but I don’t wish it gone. I don’t resent the fixation. These girls’ names, hopefully chosen by hopeful parents as I chose my own girls’ names, are welcome in my memory. In the word cloud of my mind they are smaller than my daughters’ names, but deeper, and always adjacent. The lost girls haunt me, and I hunt them, in what has come to feel like a meaningful, private sympathy.
Justice is impossible for these women. No one can hope for that. There is no retribution that can touch the waste of their degradation. But their reclamation! What sacred hope of finding these lost sisters, these huddled girls, drives me! These gaudy exclamation points cheapen the hopeful expansion in my chest when I think of honoring their loss, our loss of them, by finding them among the trees. I’ll keep the baroque melodrama of those exclamations because these lost lilies most deserve gilding. I long for their recovery, their discovery, in my own bones. I have embodied a loss for these squandered women I could never have known but who are decidedly not strangers. Because which woman hasn’t wondered if, or when, she was going to die at the hands of a man? Which girl hasn’t survived a day or a moment only at the whimsical mercy of a man? Who among us hasn’t lived by luck, by chance, by happenstance? Who among us isn’t prey?
And now that I have borne my own girls and reproduced my own vulnerability in the small, precious bodies of my own children, I seek in a new way. All of the girls, lost and safe, are mine. All of the women became my daughters when my babies’ soft, pink girlflesh was ripped from my own. It doesn’t make sense chronologically. Many of the women whose bodies I grew up seeking are old enough to be my own mother. But that’s not how this sorority works. This kinship holds stronger than mere calendars or clocks, faster than flesh or blood. I search for lost women as I would want to be sought should my own luck run out. I search for them as I would want other sisters to search for my own treasured daughters. It is the price, chief among many dear costs, of membership in this family of the hunted. Like the girls on the recess field protecting each other from boys rehearsing predation, even through time we have one another’s backs.
When I think of the women in the woods, two songs compete for space in my brain. The first is Ledbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?,” which haunted my teenage years after I sprawled on the carpet in my mother’s house and watched Kurt Cobain howl it on MTV:
“My girl, my girl, don't lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don't ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through.”
The song is cold like damp soil pressing against flesh. It is the thickening throat before a hard cry. But it is a plunge of skin into earth worth leaning into and a sob worth choking free because, in my mind, it is always incongruously coupled with the spritely “Invisible String,” by my daughters’ favorite, Taylor Swift:
“And isn't it just so pretty to think
All along there was some
Invisible string
Tying you to me?”
It is this invisible string, this connection through risk and vulnerability, more than mere proximity or chronology, that drives my search. This bond is stronger than place or time. If these sisters are lost, then through this tether something of me, of my girls, of all girls, is lost, too. The separation between us, above ground and below, is more illusory than this invisible string. This is why I seek women in every stand of trees and girls in every shaded wood. I long to plunge my hand into the cold damp of the sunless forest floor and reach the bones at the other end of that string. I want to grab fast to that bond and bring her, them, us home.
Even miles and miles from the Green River, even years and years from his crimes, I know the woods—all woods—hold women like sick secrets. And I still seek them, huddled like girls at recess, waiting to be found.
An elementary school teacher who grew up on true crime, Christina Miller Larsen wholesomely molds the youth of America by day and writes dark and twisty essays by night. She lives with her family in the pines of the Pacific Northwest.