The Night They Found Her Body and Her Mother Told Reporters the Will of God Abides

by Eileen Tomarchio

They warned her it was a lake of fire, the neighbor’s above-ground pool, the blue of it a trickery, but still she goes in, forgetting what comes of her not listening, and she finds no consumption here, only a cool against her throbbing cheek and ear and skull on one side, and the air woozy with a smell like a hundred shower curtains, like the sciences she wants to be taught, nothing like the stink of rushed river baptisms, of muck and spit under a crumbling bridge, so she goes under and trails her hands along the puckered vinyl, imagining it a bumpy globe, or an ocean cave wall, or some worn etchings in a language older than Jesus times, but they battle in her throat, church dinner potato chips and chlorine, a scream stopped up just behind them, though in the silence of not-screaming she can marvel at how the pool makes her feel more weightless than rivers do, how it unplugs her ears of all the speaking tongues, how it softens the throb, but she has to surface for breath, no choice, a truth harder than God’s, and as she does so she grabs a leaking octopus inflatable and thrusts it underwater in the way her father plunges a sinner’s head clean, again and again, then lets it go, watches it bob away, dead-limbed, past saving, like her father said of her after the bible’s thwack sent her across the church kitchen for the sin of making a face, her eyeballs rolled back, her mouth opened wide, full of chips and growls, the enemy indwelling, he took it for, and now there are sparks and a spinning, spinning that draws her to the pool’s edge so she’s running, running because she can’t tell if she’s chasing the spinning or it’s chasing her, running till a whirlpool strains the bolted ribs, till she parts her own sea, till she’s sucked heavy to the bottom where the spinning doesn’t stop, where she looks heavenward to be lifted up as true believers are, unless this is her great tribulation, and that’s why the bleary moon looks like an alien eye and the bobbing octopus a hungry serpent and the runnels of lawn underfoot feel like a far-off planet, a sinless one where Jesus never walked, but no, oh no, this is the enemy again, her father would say, and the throbbing, and the blood, and her mouth wide open, and the scream that comes out, finally, transfigured as bubbles, so many, a legion of little fish, lives brief and blameless, and maybe this is her own gift of tongues, she thinks, unknowable even to God, and oh, what power, a kingdom awaiting just there, where the spinning and all trickery end, no more enemy, only herself indwelling, her own grace, lifting her up above all lakes and rivers and pools and fathers, above everything, God’s everything, where she is clean, where she is saved, where she is born again.

Eileen Frankel Tomarchio works as a librarian-ette in a small NJ town. Her writing appears in Passages North, Atticus Review, The Bureau Dispatch, Chestnut Review, The Forge, Okay Donkey, Pithead Chapel, jmww, and elsewhere. Her work is featured in the Best Small Fictions 2023 anthology. She holds an MFA from NYU Film. Find her on Twitter (for now) @eileentomarchio and IG @gondaline26.