‘Ophelia’ by Adam Trodd
Rivers are often described like snakes. How they move. The look and feel of them. Sinuous. Metallic. Flowing. A silken muscular band that probes and exploits weakness, that moves incrementally, incessantly towards prey. Like snakes, rivers too can swallow.
I am now a Liffey spirit I suppose. Weed in my hair. My skin pale, except where the plastic ties at my wrists and ankles have brought forth blood in red bangles. My eyes are open. Sea-blue like a stickleback’s. The water presses on their turgidity with the intimacy of a lover. With the advent of time and the decay it brings, the pressure will seek equalisation and my skull will become home to slickly sliding eels and lead-grey mullet will kiss me with their puce leather lips.
Where is my shroud? My troop of mourners, their faces contorted in grief? Horses with plumes of feathers erupting from their foreheads like shining black fire will not bear me to my grave. Those who love me will not scatter soil in scant handfuls on the varnished veneer of my coffin. I have been eaten by a snake and I will be digested in its liquid belly until the rest of me is washed to sea in emetic remnants.
There are rumours of course. My life is being pieced together, for the benefit of the public, in media jigsaw pieces. Never mind that they saw the edges off the bits that won’t fit and hammer them into place with grubby fists.
The wrong crowd. Couch to couch. Estranged from her father, though not fucking enough in my opinion. Mother dead. Yes. As a teen. A pulverising wrench to the soul from which there is no coming back. Walked alone through wasteland between estates. Attempted to take her own … her own … funny how it’s described as my own now that they have become its curator. Suspects interviewed. Former boyfriend assisting with enquiries. Appealing for information.
They do that. Hiding in plain sight. It’s been done before.
A boy throws a stone at my bloated belly. It rebounds; making the noise a spacehopper makes and plops into the river. We are two parts of an equation nearing solution. He squints in the sun, poised for another throw, then drops his missile and hares towards home. Later, the Gardaí will tell him that he found a mermaid.
I am happy to have entered his life as a myth.
From issue #3: autumn/winter 2016
About the Author
Adam Trodd’s fiction and poetry have appeared in The Flash Flood Journal, The Irish Times, The Incubator, KYSO Flash, Crannóg, The Molotov Cocktail, The Launchpad and The Caterpillar. He was shortlisted for the 2015 Bath Flash Fiction Award and has a piece in the 2016 National Flash-Fiction Day anthology. Follow him at @A_Trodd.
