Chapter One: In The Stream You Least Expect, There Will Be Fish

WARNING: Language, Suicide, Crime

168 hours, twenty-seven minutes, and eighteen seconds ago, I realized just how fucked up the world is. Tragedy befell the small town of Marblehead that moment and a tsunami of wickedness struck the hearts of its citizens as we all contemplated the simple fact that one of us is a goddamn child murderer. The rug of this town is lumpy with all of the twisted shit swept underneath it over the years, but a corpse doesn't fit under a rug unless it's burned to ash.

An ashy red stains my vision with a tired dread for the morning sun sneaking through my curtains. I shook and stirred in bed last night like an insomniac cocktail, bathing in the rotting smell of her corpse as it dangled from that tree branch like bait on a hook. It is a scent that has infected my insides and I cannot seem to wash it away. My skin has broken at how vigorously I've scrubbed since this time last week, but it swims around in my lung, nests itself in my bones. Trauma has built a well-scented home in my core with no intention of finding a better place in someone else's sanity.

The aroma of crisping bacon seduces me out of bed with a simple whispered promise of satisfaction. My ragdoll body follows its instinct, leading me out of the door. Each creak of my descent haunts me, a ghost of my ever-growing anxiety. 7:30am on a Thursday morning and I am already back in this whirlpool of melting emotions trying to convince myself I even left. The humor in depression is that it is a glorified body snatcher, a friend in a dark capsule I've swallowed dry time after time.

My mother greets me with a less than welcoming glimmer in her eyes that runs a thick streak of ice through my foul blood. My running eggs bleed into my toast and the silence, the same overly familiar silence that has been peeling us like fickle fruit for the past year, takes its well-deserved seat at our table.

I've become accustomed to the stillness between my mother and I, almost fond of the way it skims in and out of the walls like wind through our house's bones. You would never know that she used to love like she invented the feeling, that she used to be my sunflower in any winter that life casts. Death blanketed us in its hawkish embrace, making igloos out of our once warmed hearts and we have worn ourselves to dust trying to change it. With that, we swept ourselves under Marblehead's carpet.

The silence has not aged her gracefully. I can see the heavy years in the wrinkles above her high cheekbones and the waning elasticity in her once flawless skin. She gazes aimlessly at the small stack of pancakes she had placed in between us. A slab of butter craters in the center of them, melting down their side in a type of raw emotion. I catch her in these moments more often than I had before, wondering what life even means anymore.

I take a couple of the pancakes, placing them dead center on my plate. She looks at me, but she doesn't see me anymore; how could she when I don't even see myself. Her look is one of disdain for a presence you can't shake even when you leave the room. My father's death haunts the air we breathe and creeps under our skin every time we get close to shutting the wound. We have gradually drifted from one another; both freezing alone in this constant emotional winter.

My father, like many men, was life's whore. He spent the last three hundred and sixty-five days of his life being bent over by the things he couldn't control anymore. Their marriage, taped together by amateurs, had finally shattered into unrecognizable shards of toxicity he would leave to fester on the grounds below. I watched them staple smiles on their faces for the world outside these walls and hated that the facade was socially acceptable. Their truth was simple, yet all they did was lie.

"Did you sleep okay last night? I heard you tossing a bit."

My mother's voice chirrs from her throat in a low roar as she breaks the silence and halts my thoughts.

"I haven't been able to sleep. All I do is think about her," I answer plainly.

She sighs with an exaggerated blink of her eyes as if my response was somehow unwarranted or even annoyingly childish. The way I have watched my mother let this murder run down the drain of her mind is baffling. She has put my feelings about it in a concrete box lined with needles as if letting my feelings breathe makes her less of whatever she considers herself to be these days.

"Teagan--"

"Don't start with that, mom. Someone hung her from that tree and waited for her to be found like some kind of trophy," I say.

"I know and of all the darkness in this world, I'm sorry it found her, but you can't start going off the rails again because of this. You haven't been to school in a week. You haven't done much of anything in a week."

"Off the rails? I'm traumatized. I think that warrants a few days to get my head straight," I reply angrily.

"And I understand that Teagan, but the best thing we can all do is move forward. That doesn't mean forgetting it happened and you don't seem to understand that."

"I just want to shut my eyes without seeing her. You weren't there. You didn't smell the rot of her corpse or see the bugs seething inside of her intestines making their new home. I just want some fucking peace!"

"This is not the way," she says forcefully.

"Then point me in the right direction. Hmm? Show me how I deal with this."

"You'll find yourself with your father soon enough if you keep this up. Call it coping, call it whatever you want, but realistically, you won't make it to your next birthday at this rate."

It is more than just the lack of sleep, it is the emotional cardio I am forced to endure anytime we lock eyes. We have been running around in these same circles for almost a year hoping a finish line will magically appear and we can cave in to the soreness, but we have had no such luck.

"I miss him too," she cries out.

"This isn't about him, this is about Bea!"

"Loss is loss, Teagan. I know it hurts, but please don't do this. All that's happened is that this death has piled on top of your father's and the pain--it is taking over."

Wet voice. Dry eyes. It's hard to believe she cares how early I dig my grave when she spent so much of her time scratching her poisons into my tombstone. Now she wants to understand, she wants to help me.

Everyone wants to be there for you at first; bestow their deepest condolences, caress your weeping heart, fuel your withering body. Emotional tourists. The obligation to mourn for you tends to fade for them within the first month of it all, but it doesn't fade for you, it'll never fade for you.

Emotional tourists. Marblehead is filled to the ends of its skin in them and they bubble to the surface like goosebumps whenever tragedy strikes. They often sniff out one's grief like hound dogs to say that they've contributed, that they cared for that individual when they needed it most. After the kind words, the pastries left on your doorstep, the long, repetitive Facebook posts about what plagues you and not them, they slither back into the dark nests they emerged from; unless, of course, grief sneaks up behind you and finishes what it started.

My mother was neither an emotional tourist or permanent resident like myself. She fell in between the cracks, sobbing softly into her bottles when the last drop slipped down her throat. My father's death swung an aluminum bat that she ducked effortlessly, but I took it straight and bled into my own grief. This isn't about him, it's about Bea.

When it was brand new, she was this grieving widow to the eyes and cameras that bulbed around town, but once the doors shut, her eyes became the Atacama Desert. This two-faced act of hers made me despise this spheric hellspawn more than I already had. But this isn't about my mother's backwards reaction to her husband's death, this is about Bea.

"You and I have coped in different ways Teagan, but just because I may have been callous towards you and dried my tears, that doesn't mean I don't feel his absence and that Bea's death means nothing to me," my mother says.

"Murder. Bea's murder," I correct.

"What you're doing isn't coping and perhaps you're too young to understand that drowning your pain isn't a cure. It's a bandaid. Frankly, I'm at my end with you and I feel that I've done everything I can to help you with no real progress, but a hell of a lot of regression. I am trying."

A faint grey strikes my mother's dark mane like a bolt of lightning in the pitch black sky. It gives her presence a voice and her character dances like a silhouette behind her hardened cowl.

"You take things so far--"

"And you drink," I shoot back at her.

"I enjoy alcohol. Is that a crime Teagan? God knows I've deserved a drink or two in my life, but you? This will put you in the ground before you know it. That is not honoring your father's memory, it's destroying it."

"What exactly do you want me to say because I'm a little speechless here. You're allowed to drink yourself into comas, but fucking crucify me for trying to feel something other than this pain!"

"Watch your damn mouth Teagan.That is two times too many. Now, I've done my best to try to understand you, to give you breathing room, and get you the help that you need with any and all of your problems, but maybe you just need to go away from here, away from the constant reminder of him so that this depression is not your only way," she suggests.

"All you've ever done is send me away. It must haunt you to see him every time you look at me knowing that as much as you prayed never to see him again, I'm still here."

My mother shakes her head as her teeth grind one another into dust.

"So this still isn't about your father? I will not do this with you today Teagan. If you want to swallow yourself into an early grave, don't let me stop you."

She gives me no time to respond, her heels click-clacking into the garage with haste. Once the door shuts, the tears are instant and they burn as they streak down my cheeks.

An alarm goes off on my phone, startling me and reminding me that I missed the bus. 8:13am. Class starts in thirty-five minutes, I missed the bus for the ninth time in a row, and my mother just left with no intention in arguing with me to go to any of my classes.

"Fuck," I mumble.

Rain beats against the windows, mother nature's tears streaming down the metal. Each droplet is its own desire, its own fear, falling from the sky as I watch with a certain despair that my one, and only, rain coat is sitting in some pile on my ex-boyfriend's floor gathering dust or sparking memories.

Standing on the front porch of the only home I have ever known, I watch the sky spill its tears onto the Earth in the most unnatural of months; August. August is home to all four seasons in Marblehead, typically one season a week. By the time I muster up the want to sip tea on my back porch, summer's scorch shoves me back inside of the ice box my mother makes me live in. Today welcomes spring showers and reminds of the soft fabric lining the inside of that one, and only, raincoat.

My father put his credit card down on the counter when the salesperson told him the jacket was sixty-two seventy five. It was a lightly used J. Crew raincoat; black in nature but striped with red like warrior marks. We went shopping on September 17th a few years back to escape the clutches of my mother's mood swings and had no intention of buying anything. Window shopping was a thing we both shared and one of the things we bonded over. I suppose my tendency to want what I cannot have comes from the way he lit up whenever we passed a tailor's shop. The suits in the window would scream his name, but it was more than the glass that kept them apart.

I tried on the rain jacket and he commented on how it made the grey in my eyes much fiercer than usual. Knowing my mother would be livid, he bought the jacket for me. Some days it'll rain. He said this and perhaps he meant it literally, but all I can ever think about is the metaphoric rain and how it won't fucking stop.

I still believe that these emotional tourists, those wildly chasing emotional souvenirs to validate their worth as human beings, are the most callous of us- they just hide it behind cheap smiles and over-cooked casseroles.

My therapist urges me to dream beyond Marblehead, to walk amongst the clouds with aspirations of better things for myself, but now his daughter is dead and my intentions to be better has nestled in my father's coffin.

I sometimes see my father's cheery face at the table peeking from beyond the Times. The smell of his horrid cologne still lingers the halls, but it fades more each time I get a whiff of it. Seam-by-seam, I find myself being torn to shreds by the little things about my father I hadn't missed before.

The road ahead of me stretches out on the flatness of the small town of Marblehead, where there only seems to be one road. A single desolate road.

This one road is dazzling with freedom, even when the sun doesn't shine upon it. Trees with leaves of all colors bend over the sidewalk and into the street. When the breeze is just apt, the trees shake their branches and nature rains upon the street no matter what time of year. Now, in this downpour, the trees sit there in a quiet shiver as their leaves cry with the sky.

My own mother cannot find the words to soothe the hurt, the actions to cease the pain; instead she hides behind forced gratitude, "cutesy" monnacers like "sweetie" and "honey," and the illusion that pain fades quicker when it is avoided altogether. But, it is there and it looms over every second of my life.

I know that she is secretly happy that he is gone, but I am still a reminder that he existed. So, when my face crosses her path, all that she felt towards him gravitates towards me and without even knowing, I am her new center of hatred. Is that how mothers feel towards their daughters? My mother shoves those feelings into the crevices of her being and pretends to hate life's misfortune instead, but it is the one truth she cannot hide from me.

My mother gave birth to a still born baby boy when I was thirteen years old. They had known he was without life in his lungs for weeks, but he was still to come into this world as I had.

I couldn't understand my mother's fury at the world then, but as I've grown older and let men use my body, I sympathize with her decay. My mother flowered in a time where women were expected to give birth to as many children as their husbands wanted and being a black woman with a white man, even those society given motives were questioned. Everything she had done once she took his name was in question.

She swore that she'd be more than a mother, more than a housewife, but those roots had dug so deep into her that when she miscarried, they were watered and sprouted to the surface. Her work became what the boy was to her. She nurtured it, tended to its every wound until her cubicle became a top floor office with a view and interns that shuddered when she breathed.

It is still not enough and underneath it all, she knew that and to an extent, I know that too. Growing up in Marblehead, I watched eyes flush at the sight of my parents and the product they made. As a woman, I am thought to have few functions in this world, but as a Black woman, I can't see past the smoke of my burning human rights. My mother and I have unattainable expectations laid in front of us with broken tools to accomplish them. Maybe this is why she has mourned the way she had; all these fucking expectations.

It has broken her down in ways that are non-existent to those who can simply choose not to acknowledge that our world is bleeding the blood of those who broke their backs to build it. She told me once that our country was and is still being built on the backs of Black individuals who just want to live in their skin without the fear of a rope around their necks or a bullet in their skulls. It doesn't matter if we kneel or stand high, this system was made to keep us scraping at the bottom of the barrel like diseased whores on the street that are still expected to suck any cock that finds itself within a foot of our mouths. Idiotic fucking expectations.

My father was no paladin. On the surface, the expectations given to him were much lower than even mine now. Every bar that was raised to him never reached his shins let alone tried to strangle him. The amount of thighs he slipped himself in between as his marriage crumbled was forgiven, yet it reflected bad on myself and my mother. We should have loved him harder. It should have been us that tied him down to this earth and kept him from wandering aimlessly from pussy to pussy.

This is at least what I heard people whisper at his wake. Dressed from head to soul in blackness that they could not let rest for the three to four hours they crowded our home to mourn a man they spoke ill of the same day as his burial. They spoke as if it was all news to my mother and I, but the dynamic in our home had shifted far before they managed to take his name on their lips.

My father took his last breath at 1:43pm August 23rd, 2015. Less than a week later, August 29th, I sat beside my mother as the pastor spoke of the corpse from behind a podium. That morning itself was beautiful and I remember the sunrise blinding me with its perfection as I realized that it was like looking into the eyes of God. Whether God is a man or a woman didn't matter; I knew for sure that they were a liar. Neither of my parents attended church regularly, but a single bible always sat itself above our fireplace just to remind us of something more powerful than ourselves.

Saturday, August 29th, 2015. Everyone in the town of Marblehead wore black to celebrate my father's life. They hardly knew him, but death was an excuse to gossip and tear wounds open further. I didn't care that morning as everything seemed to blur from moments into hours. My mother refused to let me speak at the funeral and I had not fought her hard on it. To speak of his life meant to acknowledge his death.

Shortly after the funeral, the townspeople crowded into our home to feed us their condolences over and over again. My mother had bought black curtains, black napkins, black plates, black everything and I wondered if she herself was an emotional tourist. She thrived off of their sympathy while I drowned in the noise. I was practically stapled to her hip throughout it all for she felt that our presence as mother and daughter needed to be stronger today than it ever had. To her, we had to be united in the falling of our patriarch, yet I felt weaker beside her than I managed to feel standing alone.

My mother squirted lotion in my hand every five or so minutes, explaining that our hands had to be soft as people took them and apologized for death doing its job. Me nodding and saying thank you was robotic until the condensed air suddenly became tighter.

Emerald Schlowski twisted a knife in me that I'm still struggling to pull out. It has been a long time since she has taken her grasp from the handle, but I still feel its jagged edge when I see her.

The night Ezekiel confessed to me, my head laid against his bare chest as my tears burned into his skin. His fingers swam through my hair and he held me to keep the pieces of me together. He said her name and even though he hated what he was saying, the timing, the situation, he couldn't hold back a smile saying her name. His love, my best friend.

Our breakup was soon before my father's funeral; thirty-two hours if I remember correctly. He walked around with a smile on his face, a smile in his heart while I swallowed pills to feel anything but grief. Emotional tourists have a tendency of doing this to the grieving; severing the personal ties just as the kettle is to blow. He was no different. I was much like Black Saturday and he had decided that he longer lived for the weekend.

They showed up to my father's funeral, dressed in the typical black with their hands intertwined in such a loving manner. Emerald's eyes were a bright red from obvious crying and Ezekiel's cheeks were ashy from wiping the tears from them. In this small town, news spreads like rapid fire, so it was no shock for people to see what they have already heard of a few hours before. The two of them approached me in my own home to give their condolences, but when they apologized for my pain, I knew what they really meant by it.

I leaned in towards both of them, my eyes still wet from crying moments earlier. In the kindest voice I could, I told them to get the fuck out of my house. Emerald was prepared to take the opportunity to run, but Ezekiel stood his ground firmly.

"We loved him," he said.

I scoffed at him. Sometimes being in love with the thought of someone is mistaken for what people define as loving the person. My father was a placeholder for Cole's hovering over his son's every move and for the father Emerald no longer had. They didn't love him as I did, they never could.

"You didn't love my father. Get the fuck out."

My mother nudged me angrily in the side for my language. Ezekiel's courage possessed Emerald and she stood to me with her fists balled at her sides.

"He was my father, too," she said through her teeth.

If I were to pinpoint the second I began this descent into an unhealthy mindset, that was it. I couldn't even control the fist that swung far behind me and collided with her left cheekbone. The entire house was swallowed by silence. My mother held me back from doing any more physical damage. Emerald stayed on the ground to play victim to the watching crowd. I didn't care what my actions made me look like to the rest of them.

"Then where were you!? When I was trying to save his life, you were rolling in the sheets with this fucking asshole. Everything my family has done for you and you throw it away for him!? All you had to do, all you had to do was be a friend and clearly that was hard for you. If you ever call him your father again, I'll bury you beside Barry."

My mother smacked me across the face to keep me from saying anymore.

Bernard "Barry" Schlowski shot himself on Emerald's tenth birthday. The moment she blew out the tenth candle was when he pulled the trigger. Her little eyes fell upon her father's brain matter that laid upon her comforter. He shot himself in her bedroom. In his note, he labeled it as symbolic, he labeled it as the purest love he could show. The pink walls in her room were now splattered in his blood. Fluid oozes from his stray eyeball that was crushed underneath her ballet shoes.

A closed casket funeral, where half the town packed into the town's excuse for a church, was held for him. Five dragging hours of people standing behind the podium to speak kindly of him when my father saw him as nothing but a prick.

I later learned that Barry and my mother were having an affair before death intervened. Thinking of my mother as a cruel mistress, I forgot that nobody could compete with fate. Mrs. Schlowski was in the process of divorcing him when Emerald's tenth birthday rolled around. His shit caught up to him in bullet form.

There was a bleeding sense of mercy in my father's veins that saved the parts of him that were humane and full of human error. He confessed to my young teenage self that he was a flawed man and behind the smog of his cigar smoke, I couldn't see what he saw because I was blind to his imperfections as a spawn of one of his downfalls.

Marblehead has a way of taking what's yours and twisting it until you begin to believe its poison. I thought, how could my father have been more poisonous? What else could go wrong in my life?

If he had been caught before his death, he would have been classified as a sexual predator. The girls he cheated on my mother with were minors--there is arguably nothing worse a grown man could do to a young woman despite what she thought she wanted. Sex digs deep underneath your skin, beyond the bone and the cartilage. It hooks onto you with its tantalizing teeth and often doesn't let go until it has sucked you dry.

With sex comes feelings that cannot be explained or replaced once they've settled so far into you that even finding them becomes an impossibility. My father, having had experience in encapsulating these feelings, was then immune to its effects, but those girls could not have possibly known what waited on the other side.

If my therapist had cancelled our session that day and spent that time with his daughter, she'd be alive. I could sleep without the smell of her dead flesh licking my nostrils. The stench has stuck on all of my clothing, permeating my skin.

If my father wasn't tainted by the sin of man, he'd be alive. I could smile without a guilt plaguing my every muscle. The joy would be real and not synthetically designed by my mother's iron fist.

Beatrice. What has this world done to you?