Salmo
By Jessica Kosti
She came to Salmo in the dislocation of summer. On one hand could count how many times, but even then she’s not exactly sure. So much has degraded over the years that what remains of the pond, those visits, is slight. She thinks of a pot barely holding a simmer, how if she were only to look away for a minute she would see how much everything has reduced—by a third, a sixth—so that what she has is a concentrate too redolent of the pot it was cooked in.
She tastes like metal.
This need to close in, to draw nearer to that place—it’s a compulsion, a perversion. Mornings, she’ll wake to a stain on the fitted sheet, yellowed from sweat, and the covers hanging over the foot of the bed, and know she’s tried to find it again, lain in the night half in and half out, not quite participating in her own sleeplessness, which is beside the point.
Going on in this way, trying to recover more while overworking what’s left. When all she wants is to assimilate the fragments.
To create sense, order, she attempts to reconstruct. She fills in the holes with what she’s known or seen, bridging the other versions of the truth, so that fidelity pales in the light of resemblances. She can’t relive the past, anyhow, not entirely, not with certainty.
Yet some moments were more willing than others to resurface. These she had noted at the time, dog-earing for later, when she could use something nice. When she did she could stay in that warmth forever. Anything to shut out the present: the stale pleasantries after signing on, the lull before the morning’s instructions, delivered as the latest though day to day they never changed, the hours spent eyeing the clock at the corner of her screen, as if she could hasten the numbers, until, big enough, she could log off, shut down the computer, and move to the couch, where she would stare up at the ceiling, the blades of the fan thick with dust, and wait out the sun.
Only then could she go back, the night a kind of shield. With the glow of the kitchen behind her she would make to look out the window but in seeing only black shift her gaze to the pane of glass itself, where her face would appear soft and ill-defined, almost childlike, were her cheeks and philtrum not hollowed in shadow. She would bore in until her scanning loosened and she no longer saw her reflection or the dark beyond it but instead those images that were ready-made, which she had developed over the winter preceding that summer, as she waited in the cold for the bus.
The sun always seeming brighter in winter, less ambiguous.
In the sharp air her breath would hang and for a few brief moments her mark on the world would be indelible. Those plumes like matted cotton, reaching out beyond her, the bounds of her being extended. On them she indulged her daydreams, inflating them until they ballooned outside of her, the latex stretching thinner and thinner.
By June she had a vision for the summer.
It’s this she unfolds in the night, each time burnishing it a little more. All that she had envisioned—herself, sinewy and radiant and crowned in Queen Anne’s lace—never materialized, and when the rest didn’t either she blamed herself, for imagining more than she was owed.
*
When school let out she took to sleeping late. On waking, she’d find the sun pouring in through blinds she never closed, could never remember to, the light exposing ever knob in the paint, scuff along the baseboard, handprint near the switch, and feel defeated, already set back for the day. She would get up, and after coffee and dry toast, lie down on the chaise longue by the window in the kitchen and look out, and the blue and the green and the orange of the marigolds would seem unnaturally saturated, almost garish in their vibrancy, as if chosen to mock her. She would continue to look, out of inertia or a need to wallow, to feel sorry for herself. Entire afternoons passed in this way, on floral-print cushions. At some point, she reasoned, he would call on her. She counted on this, fixed her days to it, and when he did the scene out the window would change. The colors of the sky and the lawn would cohere into something she could make sense of, and she would see herself out there, with him, happy.
She waited.
Before Liam there hadn’t been anyone. She found something unnerving about being around him, his body near hers, which was slow to adjust. She began to think of herself as someone who trailed behind the present, always slow to catch up or catch on. A person held back by incredulity, or something like it. Some amalgam of doubt and deficiency and repulsion that made it harder for her to accept his embraces, his attention, fleeting as it could be, or to reconcile the reality in her head with the one outside of it.
It was like watching cartoons as a kid. How for hours over a bowl of cereal she would let the animation seep in, each segment bringing her closer to the loud images radiating off the TV. When the programming ended she would get up off the floor, stumble down the hallway, and find that nothing looked real: the wood paneling suddenly glazed and sticky, the sunlight in the bathroom thin and gray—everything canted and disappointing.
Those first weeks with Liam she tried to get ahead of her disbelief. Took to repeating his name in her head like a mantra, over and over until it became a different name, a name followed like a question by um. Yet to think of him as hers, even when she didn’t quite buy it, was inflating. She had quickly found that being attached meant something to other people, that she was in a way vetted. Knew at the same time that she couldn’t get complacent, that forgetting herself was no longer an option. That with him she now had to be and that being was something constructed. She’d grown stiff under this scrutiny, as if her limbs were suddenly jammed.
Yet by some intuition she knew that to his likes and dislikes she had to condition herself. Given the exalted way Liam spoke of Salmo—in the language of those who are bound to a place, where the years have been counted and measured—she knew to pay extra care. So even before seeing the pond she’d cleared out room for it. For the memories she’d form and the ones he already had, which she would adopt as her own and thumb well after they were no longer together.
The day he finally showed it to her was hot, the air stilled and sluggish. She hadn’t known he wanted to ride out—would have thrown her bike in the trunk had she known—but he insisted, talking up the time they would have in the elevated way she was coming to know, goading her. He lent her his sister’s bike, which was small and purple, with the kind of frame that curves away from the rider in an embarrassment of space.
Down a country road behind town their wheels spat up gravel. She watched him riding ahead of her, noting the ease with which he mounted the hills, how he never rested on his seat. Something between awe and jealousy, this way she watched him. Earlier, she had lingered in front of her bedroom vanity, which her parents had bought when she was small as if to entertain the idea of her, one day, putting on a face. She had grown to oblige this, or some crude version of it. At the low wicker seat she applied a series of oils and creams and pencils. She set it all with powder, and as she pumped behind him she could feel the sweat collecting at her temples and above her upper lip and worried that it would undo her efforts. That to Liam, she would look as disheveled as she knew she could look, as she looked in the morning or late at night, the hours at which she avoided looking in mirrors.
When they arrived at the pond her shorts clung damply to her thighs, which were fleshy and newly tanned. Something deflated in her, seeing them from above spilling out of the cotton fabric. She stepped off, tugged at her denim hem, and glanced at Liam. If he noticed a change in her mood he didn’t say anything, not right away. He fished a lock from out of his backpack and threaded it through the frames of their bikes, which they had stacked against a weathered sign. He stood back and pointed. It’s you and me, he said. Yeah, she muttered. Then, thinking better on it, she smiled.
Two men, not much older than her, stood at the end of a dock, the rods in their hands casually gripped as if the weight of them had ceased to register. She took them as locals, with their baseball hats and dungarees and ruddy skin. Liam called out if they had caught anything and they nodded in his direction. Couple smallmouth, one of them said, gesturing to the bucket at his feet. After they turned around she continued to look. They seemed to her the type to notice when a woman entered a room—the provincial type—and she waited to see if they exchanged something that could be about her. But they stared at the water without talking, and the blare of trucks and cars going by were louder for their silence.
Weeks had passed without rain and the grass skirting the pond was sparse and dry. She followed Liam to a hump in the bank where the drop-off was steep and began to remove her clothes, crossing her arms over her shirt and lifting it up in one motion as she had seen boys do, as he did. The hair on his chest not unlike the grass. A coarse tuft at his sternum, which gently caved in, and another fringing his navel. He kicked their piles together and motioned to the water. It’s going to be cold, he said. She gathered her hair in a bun and slid off the edge.
*
She goes to bed sober and wakes in the night to the spins. Opens her eyes to a projection unloosed from her head on the ceiling. What she sees is busy, palsied, like air over pavement on a hot day. She can’t resolve it, not completely, not so long as it won’t unstill.
She knows it’s him, though. This blur of color without texture, flat but wavering and tinted in blue. It’s him she sees and yet most of the frame is taken up by sky, providing direction, which way is up. She swims toward him.
What had concerned Liam wasn’t the depth of the water but the pondweed. Farmers in the area had cautiously taken to spreading more manure than their crops needed, so that with each late-spring downpour the excess leached into the pond. A skin would form along the rim like a bulging cyan iris, hiding the muddy copse below, which seemed to grow longer and denser with each year.
Liam had grown up on stories of near drowns. In church parking lots and grocery-store lines they were passed around like casseroles at a potluck, starchy apocrypha he dispensed late into the night, with the aim, she suspected, of bringing her closer, to have her feel for his spongy wounds. But she had no stake in them, these stories that for her were without imprint.
When she stripped down and dove anyway, she could almost see his mind running from above. Those seconds passing while he treaded water, interminable at first then suddenly giving way, like pulling a thread and making a hole. She was certain the fear would paralyze him. How in imagining the worst—her, tangled, with a single weed wrapped around an ankle—time would become material, some jellylike substance, pink and shiny and wholly unserious. His lips would curl into an ugly rictus, and shaking his head he would think no, not me, while in his stomach a pang would confirm this inevitability, some fated thing that he’d long expected, a tragedy to consecrate his life. Still, he would let it play out, and the slim window in which he could act but wouldn’t would close. Only then would he finally be confronted by the true nature of who he was and who he wasn’t: impotent, heroic.
After, there would be a lull. The sounds of the pond would hum into his ear, the jarring sweetness of the twittering birds and the din of the crickets normally tuned out, and he would be alone. The eroticism would come later. In bed, he would see her as the siren of an old black-and-white movie, doomed to the tendrils. Her long hair swaying in the murky swell, perfectly mirroring the slime-glossed strands rising up from the bottom. In her struggle to escape he would see her as he did when they fucked: eyes screwed up, limbs writhing, mouth open.
When she surfaced he called her stupid, his word for reckless. She studied him, the exaggerated pull of his downturned mouth and the eyebrows gone haggard—this artless way he had of telegraphing his disapproval—and laughed.
*
From almost anywhere the playground is out of the way. An inconvenience that doesn’t factor much, as it’s less a decision than an impulse. Driving, something will come over her and overcome she will go down a series of side streets, following some internal but nebulous map. Industrial tracts will cede to rural will cede to residential and back again on loop until finally the road will empty out into a neighborhood whose name she’ll recognize though on sight will not. The houses razed and rebuilt or else converted into duplexes and apartments with multiple units.
Passing the playground she tallies the changes. The remodel she chalks up to new safety standards: the chains on the swings now encased in plastic, the rubber mulch, the merry-go-round or lack thereof. In its place a vinyl turtle has been erected, in a nod she assumes to the town’s rebranding as a nature destination. Its shell pockmarked for climbing, a toothy grin etched onto its face.
These days, the playground is the closest she comes to embodiment. Will let herself, since returning to the pond is still out of the question. Yet she never leaves the safety of containment, the dome of this steel enclosure.
They’d gone to the playground only the once. Something had kept her, and she was late in meeting him. By then it was dark, and under dim sodium light she struggled to find him. When she did, it was from a distance. The tip of his cigarette what gave him away, the flare bright enough for her to trace his outline—his nose, his brow, the brim of his cap—the rest cast in shadow thrown by the slide. He sat beneath it, his heels ground in wood chips, a six-pack beside. She crossed the wet lawn.
What they talked about she can’t remember, or if they talked much at all. What she does is the way he drank. How he pinched the neck between his thumb and middle finger, the others splayed out, allowing her to admire their length and slenderness, the way they gently tapered, and the mole on his pinky like a stud on a tuxedo shirt. With each swig he tipped the bottle back until it was nearly vertical, his head going with it, so that his long neck was exposed over his collar. She was disoriented, watching him. She had the urge to bite down, draw blood, and lap up this elegance that for him was offhand, so natural, as if she could absorb some of it.
Be, like him, a sandhill crane.
Between them they had a few, and as her body softened she began to wonder what he made of the scratches overhead. If, like inkblots, she could decipher something about him by the patterns he saw in the plastic. How desperate she once was to know what he saw.
How often she still speculates.
*
She gazes over her screen, past the kitchen table and through the parted curtains. In the waning light the trees have taken on a fey quality, the way the winter sun fringes their naked limbs. How alive they seem, haloed, as if daring to self-immolate.
She stares out the window at the scene’s unnatural candor, which pulls her in yet fails to resonate.
Of the two of them it was Liam who was usually late. Their plan that night was to join his friends at the pond. He would pick her up. But by the time he did she’d been waiting for close to an hour. An hour spent brushing out her hair and reapplying lipstick, only to blot it with a tissue, not wanting to look too done, like she cared so much. An hour spent without committing to a book or anything that could distract her, no music, just her own reflection in the vanity, which she tried to bend to look unbothered, a vision of nonchalance.
She had learned to hide her disappointment behind a mask of bland congeniality. At the ready to assume whatever emotion he was packing, which she would simply reflect back to him. It was to her own benefit, being a specular woman. More suited to control the conditions of their evenings, the tone and temperature and volume, which she kept placid like a waiting room. In such peace he would have no reason to sulk, to play the role of chastened man, opposite whom the work of cheering-up would suddenly fall to her.
Only later would she allow the quiet to creep in, having wised to the significance of its impact. It took it out of her, though, this tax of withholding. Of staying her hand from squeezing his shoulder or parting with a kiss on the cheek. All for the sake of corralling his attention. For when she did—when she had it at last—he would fill her out, so that she was bigger, warmer, yet somehow addled.
That night they came in several cars, none of them their own. She could see from the headlights the others on the dock. They were sitting in a circle, and as she walked toward them she sensed something ironic in their formation, a joke from which she’d been shut out. Of Liam’s friends she knew only one, a girl named Des, who she beelined toward, though in first-year civics they’d barely spoken. Liam sat down across from them, with some guys a grade ahead.
They were talking about crosswalks. She assumed that a certain album had come up, given that some of the guys had the peeling shoes and ripped jeans of members of a band. Naming it brought easy cachet, so long as they were still in dodge. She leaned back, resting her weight on her forearms. Someone named Ethan or Ian asked how much crossing guards make in a year. Liam laughed. Not a dime, he said. Those schoolmarms already get pensions.
She was thankful, then, for sitting in such a way that her gaze was cut on the bias, and by default went unmet. She never planned to set herself apart, though it often worked to her advantage. Any impulse she had to glance his way, check in, and make sure that for him she held water—was playing nice—was curbed by this stance. The periphery safer anyway, less conspicuous.
Someone had brought a pipe, and through the milky smoke and her own bent knees she could barely make him out. The straps of the mask were tight around her ears, and it no longer made any difference whether he was by her side, palming her knee. Not when, to the group, they must have seemed like two people with nothing to prove. No pretenses. No need to parade affection. When it was her turn she took two polite hits from the pink glass, coughed, and handed it back to Des, breaking what had been a clockwise streak.
Being high brought her closer to the water. She swiveled toward it, peering on hands and knees between the dock’s aluminum siding and wooden slats. Liam was far away just then, and the moonlight that much nearer. On the surface was its double, and she had only to reach in and touch it, to set it off into lambent fits like refractions at the bottom of a pool.
They all turned when she stood. With her back toward them her expression was a thing of conjecture, something to be guessed at, loose change tossed into a pile. She might have hammed it up had they been able to see, transforming her blank stare into something blazing and wondrous that would only make them want to see more.
She closes her laptop. She would have to jump, standing like that.
In her head she plays out the scenario. How on hitting the bottom she would grab her knees and tuck her feet, suppressing the urge to kick off, to sit for a while, fetal-positioned, among the fishes and the scum, in the sanctum of Salmo, where it would be so cold, and her clothes would billow out around her so that she made for some terrible naiad, until she obliged her lungs and bobbed to the surface, where she would gulp air as discreetly as possible, and after peeling strands of hair from her face she would seek out his eyes on the dock but find them already on hers, well-trained, and together they would volley intensities on wavelengths at pitches they alone could understand, and he would smile at her a crooked thing, as if they were the only two people in the world.
*
It was hotter that night, the sky bright with stars. They descended on the water, choosing a wedge of land most like a peninsula, which in daylight was shaded by a large weeping willow. There was harmony in this—the wide lawn overhung by the tall tree. Yet she wonders if this, too, was a fabrication.
Salmo, she learned, had once been a quarry. She should’ve been able to see this—that its spatial makeup and proximity to town inscribed the pond with artifice—having grown up in the country, where such things were known. Liam explained it to her. How fifteen vertical feet of rock and sand had been displaced for the extraction of limestone. Limestone that was crushed and funneled into various projects, other worksites, so that all across the region were the vestiges of a former sea. To lie aboveground for just a brief while, until enough wind and rain ground it back into the earth. Like so many other discarded sites the quarry was filled and stocked and designated a park, as if the mining company had always intended it that way. A generous gift to the town, this repository for run-off, this waterhole squeezed by highway and freight tracks. She began to undress.
His friends had packed trunks and towels, knowing of the intention to swim. She had only her underwear, which she had at least picked out with extra care, as she did on the days she could count on being with him. It was her only matching pair, a bra and thong in a color the retailer described as Ceylon sapphire. She had purchased the set for New Year’s, and each time she wore it a little more luster was lost, as if the underwhelming turn of that night had seeped into the fabric, imprinted on it, so that pulling on and hooking the band was like fastening herself to those memories, especially those preceding them, which reeked of anticipation. She had to remind herself to expect less.
The pond was warm from hours of sun. She was the first to step in, not waiting on the others for a consensus. Aware, too, that her attire gave her away as someone who had been left in the dark. Only with Liam had she begun to shed her modesty, revealing her arms in sleeveless tops and thighs in skirts cut above the knee. Around the others, though, she reverted to old habits. Her hands she wrapped around her waist so that her fingers stretched as far as possible, into rigid butterflies. She walked as if hitched to a cart, not looking left or right, her eyes narrowed instead to the few feet in front of her, peeking now and then at herself, to see her body as the others might. The navel like a trench that she pulled toward her spine. The protruding ribcage that rivaled her breasts in size. The thighs that softly appeased. The stomach a shelf that no amount of sucking could reduce.
Nowadays it’s all knobs and hard angles. A victory, even if her hair has thinned.
She runs a bath, and as the tub fills she appraises herself in the mirror. Legs, cunt, shoulders, all intact, as expected. The almond shapes the wildcard, a pair she’s careful not to read, assuming the brown nuts have gone rancid. She steps in without first testing the temperature and yells out without moving. Lowers herself in anyway, her cheeks going red.
The further she waded the colder the water became. The skin on her arms pilling as if from too many wears, the hairs standing on end. She could hear the others behind her, on the beach. Bits of dialogue she couldn’t make out and immediately dismissed, lest the paranoia set in.
With a soapy washcloth she lathers her body, dragging it down her limbs as she considers whether she was to blame. She was the one, after all, who had tied her hair into a loose braid. This, which he had no choice but to tug, and hard. Helpless not to, her sweet Liam. She fell backwards, and for a moment under water filth convened with filth.
She spun around without bothering to stand up. He had been ready to laugh, she was certain of this. His lips were askew, one corner higher than the other. It trembled as he pulled it down the y-axis, as he tried to recover before she noticed. Then, on failing, went hangdog. Words were sputtering under his breath, which she made out as okay you okay you okay you okay. His hands, then, plunged into the water, grabbing hold of her shoulders. He nearly shoved her back in.
She made for shore, and the sound of the water was deep and primal, belching with every step. She heard nothing, though. Only her baying heart, her lungs charged with in-ing and out-ing. She kept going, grass submitting to pavement. Soon she was across the road and in the corn, where the breeze just then slipped through, rustling the leaves like brushes on a drum.
When she was a child, the fields had described a terminus, walling off subdivisions, vast oceans from beyond the ditch. Driving by, they were her constants. That she couldn’t depend on them to always be there, insulating her from town, had never occurred to her. Yet there was always something ominous about them, swaying under the least provocation. Once, newspaper in hand, her mother had relayed a story about some children a few counties over, the details whetting her voice: the phase of the moon and make of the tractor, the ratio of boys to girls and how many reached the hospital. Only later did she wonder if any of it was true. If farmers ever run tractors at night.
From the corn the sky was somehow blacker, the moon snuffed out. Rows deep, her movements began to slow, intent draining out. How alone she was then, so nakedly on the margin. Not unlike now. She toes the hot water tap, warming the bath. Pops her knees to sink lower, so that her back is flush with the porcelain. Between pecks of sudsy water her lips just barely kiss air.
How was it that she didn’t hear him coming? She knows the answer, this answer that she can’t accept. Instead she dissimulates: that again she was facing away. That once more she fell backwards. The stalks cracked under her weight, puncturing her skin. She bled—she was bleeding—though there was little light to verify this. She could only feel the smearing wet, which she rubbed between her fingers, inhaling the ferric and feral stench. She caught wind of his screaming—he had been, for how long?—words she couldn’t render into sense. His eyes just then so big and piercing, black occluding blue. He was shirtless, still damp. She turned toward him. Traced her fingers along his chest as she was wont to do, some impulse she had on seeing flesh that wasn’t hers, that all the same belonged to her. This overwhelming need to touch, pinch, tug, and lastly claw, the release complete and total, the impression finally wrought.
She thinks to touch herself but doesn’t, and on her tongue is the bitter taste of lavender. She can no longer put off the end, drain the tub, prepare for bed, though it’s well past time. She only wants to delay, to linger in the safety of the bathwater. At present she’s submerged in the promise of change, or at least the possibility of it. She’s finding it mutable, and in these residues and counterfactuals she can finally rest. Drift off to her imaginings as her fingertips wrinkle: Liam at her side, shushed and smiling, and her, fingering the cut on his cheek, her fingers still tacky with the mess on her backside, their blood mixing together, his and hers, then daubing the two back into her wound, their bond preserved by this other fluid, then hand-in-hand leaving the corn, the pond, to begin anew.
*
More and more the countryside was annexed by suburban sprawl, yet for a while the fields around the pond held out. Until, some years ago, long past that summer, they were finally rubbed out. What corn remained was reaped and processed and shipped, and somewhere the last of it molders in a feed bin.
In some ways, though, she has never left those fields. After the land was cleared it was auctioned, bid on, sold, and now, from the third floor, she can scan out over the sterile tract, at the parking lots and pruned hedges, at the snow piling on garbage cans. She’s no stranger to living alone yet here it feels different, more companionable. Her hand-wringing is getting better. Still, at times, she goes about as if on the edge of a knife. Waiting for the day in which she no longer anticipates him coming.
For now, she stays put.
Jessica Kosti is a former science journalist and editor who grew up in Wisconsin and Saskatchewan. She has been writing fiction since 2023 after moving to Pittsburgh, PA, where she now works at both an independent art house theater and a beer hall.