by Ann Marie Potter

She’d come upon the trio as they were stoning the duck to death. They’d trapped it against the bank and were winding up like caricatures of major league baseball players, laughing uproariously when the duck cried out in pain, hooting with mirth every time they caused blood to seep from a jagged hole into once white feathers. Izabella Bruno should have backed quietly into the shadows and called 911, but she’d been utterly incensed. She had a reputation in academic circles as a gifted rhetorician, but rage had brought out the South Philly in her: “You little fuck-heads, what the hell is the matter with you?” Her tirade became even more vitriolic when she recognized two of the boys as her own students.

Kaiden McMillan was a good looking, charismatic kid who’d tried to run her classroom like Geno Luizi had run the pool table in her father’s Wharton Street tavern. Out of deference for Kaiden’s budding popularity in the freshman class, the other students had felt compelled to snicker at his under-the-breath snide remarks as she lectured. She’d squashed Kaiden gently but firmly, attacking his behavior rather than his personhood. Certainly she’d remembered that little nacre baby of wisdom from one of the mildewed pedagogy books stored in her garage. Now, sinking to the bottom of a pond with Kaiden McMillan’s belt around her ankles, she wished she’d popped him like the oozing little pustule he was.

Miscreant number two was Derrick Layton. He spent so much time traveling in Kaiden’s shadow that he’d be a foul smelling mist before long. The third boy was pudgy and oily, no doubt a Greek house pal of Kaiden and Derrick. Early in the semester, the boys had come to class for a full week wearing dandruff coated sports jackets and misshapen ties, a sure sign that they were pledging one of the fraternities. When Kaiden had stood over her and removed his belt, she’d seen the Greek symbols glinting in the sunlight.

When the fat kid realized what was about to happen, he started to cry. Then he ran up the path, his orange basketball shoes slipping in the mud and goose shit. Derrick seemed to be having second thoughts, too. His voice had taken on a childish whine. “We don’t have to do that, Kaid. We should just leave her.”

“So she can tell on us? We’d get kicked out of school for sure, kicked out of Greek. My dad would kill me.”

 “But, Kaid, I don’t want to.”

“I don’t give a shit what you want!” Kaiden was coming apart, his whole body shaking with adrenaline and rage. He was the one who had turned on her, knocked her down, kicking and stomping her until she felt herself disarticulating like a dollar store Halloween prop. He ground her face into the mud as he jerked her arms behind her. She thought they would tear out of their sockets as he tied her hands with the laces from his sneakers.  In class, the boys had displayed their fraternity symbols like they were war medals, but their short romp with the Greeks would be their undoing. It was no surprise that a kid who couldn’t figure out how to use a semi-colon would send himself to death row through sheer carelessness. She could feel his pewter fraternity belt-buckle grinding against the bone in her ankle. Even small town cops couldn’t miss a clue like that. Kaiden would be his usual arrogant, snotty self, but the puling little asshole, Derrick, would cave at the first sight of a badge. Bella pictured the boys on their first trip to the prison shower and felt a deep sadness. Some things really are worse than death.

Then, the boys were gone and she was in the water. She tried to touch bottom, but the pond was too deep. She tried to float on her back, but her feet were too heavy. The boys had thrown the duck in a few feet from her and, every so often, it would gather its strength to shudder. One eye had been lost to a stone and the insects were getting interested in its empty socket. Bella flashed on a faculty email sent from the campus security office and realized that the white duck wasn’t the trio’s first victim. For weeks, campus police had been responding to calls about decapitated geese and ducks hanging from trees. Several squirrels and a stray tabby had been found skewered with rebar stolen from one of the university’s construction sites. The little psychopaths had had plenty of practice in the cruel arts.

Beside her, the duck had stopped moving and its bill started to slip below the water line. The smell of the filthy pond water reminded Bella of the Rozenhoedkaal canal and the sandwich she’d left on the counter of the Bruges café. She’d taken her first bite and gagged, her taste buds infected with a smell that reminded her of the stainless steel examination table at her veterinarian’s office. It was the same smell that kept her from leaning down to whisper goodbye to Augie Beagle when it was time to let him go—the smell of stomach cancer and Alpo vomit.  “Goodbye, Augie Beagle,” she whispered, as the duck’s head slipped into the algae and fish urine soup.

She’d been coming here for her evening walks ever since she moved south. Despite the redolence of the brown-green water, the place had an odd beauty. The pond was ringed with baldcypress, their roots protruding from the ground like the work knotted knees of elderly washerwomen.  Dragon and damsel flies created wispy shadows as they flitted above the water. In a month or so, baby turtles would be out, hovering at the edges of the pond, nibbling the garnish of new spring vegetation. Darting shadows in the darker depths signaled the bountiful presence of fish. The pond usually hosted a good sized flock of Canada geese and she’d even seen an egret last spring. Of course, if this were a fairy tale, the duck, turtles, and geese would rescue her. She’d ride the turtle’s back to a nice warm house in the woods. There would be peanut butter cookies and hot cocoa with little white marshmallows. The duck would count out the marshmallows as they dropped into the sweet brown liquid, just like her father had done when he made her cocoa in the tavern’s kitchen. Sometimes he got all the way to seven or eight before he turned over his big mitt to show her it was empty.

But the duck was gone. It had slipped below the surface of the water, down to where sunshine and people’s voices were forbidden. She pictured herself drifting gently to the bottom of the pond, barely stirring the gloop that covered the beer bottles and sleeping turtles. But wait, didn’t dead bodies float? Hadn’t she seen an upside-down man riding the top of the water a long time ago? Her memory was flagging, but here had been an upside-down man. She could see him clearly now.

Sister Mary Paul hadn’t been the sharpest cheddar in the dairy case and she was as blind as one of those star-nosed mole thingies. When she was in charge of last period study hall, the more adventurous members of St. Theresa’s senior class ended up prowling the underbelly neighborhoods of South Philly. Bella and her friends liked the paths along the Schuylkill River, a sure place to catch glimpses of men in little bicycle shorts or, even better, burly construction guys in tight jeans and wifebeaters. On this Friday afternoon, however, the girls found themselves staring at a man with anything but lust in their hearts. The boat wakes had pushed the body against the South Street bridge pilings in Devil’s Pocket. The guy’s jeans were tight, alright, but only because the body had swelled up like bread dough in a warm kitchen. He had reminded Bella of her nephew’s punch clown and she wondered if he would pop if the girls poked him. Under the dark hair on his arms, he was the color of a bar of Ivory soap. Because he was floating on his gas bloated stomach, the girls hadn’t been able to see his face, but the round bald spot in the center of his pate said he hadn’t been twenty and gorgeous in life. Bella had been glad she couldn’t see his face. The Schuylkill was good for all kinds of fishing, and she bet the perch, bass, and carp weren’t all that picky about eating eyeballs and lips. She had no trouble picturing eels swimming in his mouth and out his nose.

“We gotta tell the cops,” Bella had insisted.

“No way,”  Christy Sullivan had said, “The guy’s not going to get any deader, and I could lose my scholarship to St. Terry’s if I get caught cutting.”

“Do you think he’s a gangster?” Mira Demno asked in an excited whisper. That part of Philly in the eighties, it hadn’t been a stupid question. Mira’s excitement suddenly turned to fear. “What if they’re still around, the bad guys. We should get out of here!”

Energized by an adolescent sense of high drama, the girls ran all the way to Bainbridge Street. Before she turned up Taney to go home, Christy tried to play tough. “Nobody says nothing to nobody!” she warned in a hiss, making Bella wonder if they’d been attending the same honors English classes for the last three years.

But Bella couldn’t stop thinking about the man in the river. She had wondered if his kids were sitting on the fire-escape waiting for him to come home. In the end, she stopped at a pay phone around the corner from her dad’s bar and made an anonymous call to the 17^th precinct. For days afterward, she pictured the man’s pale, hairy flesh bobbing in the wake of the riverboats. She wondered if he exploded when the cops took him out of the water, or if the fish had made it into his trousers and nibbled away his privates.

Everybody talked about sex-struck teenaged boys but, when it came to obsessing on the minutia of the procreative act, nobody had it over the Catholic girls of Saint Terry’s. Patsy Monroe’s older sister Eleanor had had a million boyfriends, one of whom got drunk and fell asleep nude on the family couch. After a few moments of intense observation of the specimen, Patsy had made good use of her father’s Polaroid. Eleanor and what’s-his-name’s relationship had had the shelf-life of warm milk, but the pictures had made the rounds for years. They helped Bella to not react with catechistic fear and disgust when she encountered the real thing for the first time in college. But they didn’t help with the boredom and self-disgust of allowing herself to be used by an older man who believed that her orifices had been installed for his pleasure. What did help with that was the wine he gave her to make her less of a moving target. She couldn’t remember his name either, but she had no trouble with monikers like Cabernet Sauvignon, Nebbiolo, and Sangiovese.

A flash of movement caught her eye. A young man in a black jogging suit and red sneakers was less than ten feet away, heading for Carter Avenue. Bella gathered every ounce of strength she still possessed to cry out and to rock her body back and forth to splash in the pond water. He walked by her leisurely, his eyes studying the landscape of his phone, his ears stuffed with expensive buds. Izabella Bruno started to cry. Then, she started to pray.

Bella had been named after her paternal aunt Izabella. A cloistered nun in a convent in Narberth, Izabella’s order made communion wafers and distributed them to churches throughout the Philadelphia Diocese. Knowing the little crackers were made out of unleavened flour and water, instead of fat globules and corpuscles, kept seven year old Bella from vomiting all over her organza and lace at first communion. However, when she was old enough to drink from the chalice at the Mass, she’d gagged at the thought of a blood and backwash cocktail and sealed her lips. Now she was going to die without ever having completed the sacred communion ritual. She’d never drunk the Blood of Jesus.

Truth be told, the whole God thing had kind of shell-shocked her. When she was really little, she’d stared at the crucifix on her parent’s wall for hours, waiting for the man to move, waiting for the blood drops on his foot to fall onto the bedspread. Later, she’d had to pretend that the incense had gotten in her eyes when she started crying during the stations. When they got to number eleven she counted the tiles on the floor to keep from looking at the man on the cross.

Father Turley had preached the same Holy Week homily every year. Bella wondered how the words “Passion” and “Good Friday” could be applied to the gruesome death of a man that had seemed so nice. The priest always looked sad when he talked about the suffering of Jesus, but that didn’t stop him from going on and on about torn tendons and ripped flesh.

During the rest of the year, Bella volunteered at the church gift shop to help her recover from Father Turley’s nightmarish narration of the crucifixion—to drink in the silver, gold, and crystal beauty of Jesus’s face before it was contorted in agony. She collected scapulars like baseball cards and wore them in a clump to stockpile forgiveness for her grown up years because she knew she’d never be able to drink the blood from the cup without heaving. When she was older, she memorized every detail of the bloodiest martyrdoms because she had to understand how a horrible death could be beautiful in the eyes of God. Now, feeling her own torn tendons and ripped flesh throb, she wondered if she would be considered a martyr. A martyr for a duck.

Her faith had crashed and burned when Pope Benedict XVI shamed Aids victims in Africa for wearing condoms when they slept with their wives. She’d counted the tiles on the floor to keep from looking at the doctor when she asked for her own birth control. She’d studied the shiny semen on the sheets, wondering how its right to swim unhindered became the obsession of the largest religious organization in the world. She’d thrown away her contraceptives when she’d thrown away men and told her parents that she was a nun on the inside. It was a language they understood and besides, they already had eleven grandchildren to shop for at Christmas.

She did miss St. Theresa’s, though. She pictured the glass and the stone and the Virgin Mother who’d traveled on a donkey, married a carpenter, buried a son, and then got shipped to Philly to watch over people who drove Toyotas and bought their furniture wholesale on Christopher Columbus Avenue. Bella had always loved Mary, who had smiled at her when she walked by on her way to choir practice and whose head seemed to turn when she heard the organ playing in the loft.Bella imagined that she could hear the music now. She turned her head and would have crossed herself if she didn’t have shoe laces tying her hands like the string her mother used to weave into the turkey on holidays.

The sun began to strobe and for a minute, Bella wondered if she were having a seizure. Then she heard splashing behind her and the water began undulating. Someone was coming to rescue her! Hope died, however, as Bella spotted a dozen big black and white birds congregating in one end of the pond. A flock of Canadas had come in for a landing, their v-shaped formation intermittently blotting out the sun. Making little waves.

That’s exactly what Bella had done with her life, made little waves, barely perceptible to the people whose lives intersected her own. Her students would discuss her death for a few minutes before returning their attention to their phones.  Her colleagues would hold a memorial for her and the English Department secretary would box up the stuff from her desk and store it in a utility closet. Somebody younger and smarter would get her job and her desk and the chair that squeaked like a spastic mouse.  Her folks were gone, but her sibs would hear the word “murder” and come south on a rampage. Not because she was especially close to her sister and two brothers, but because three little “punk bastards” had violated the Bruno family honor, had taken “one of their own.”

She thought about her last trip to Philly and all the changes in the neighborhood that had made her feel like a stranger. The yuppies had moved in and the families had moved out. There were college students cooking Ramen in the kitchen where her mother had made magic. Her father’s bar had been replaced with a bistro that sold twelve dollar cups of soup and pseudo Italian sandwiches made by people who had never tasted real prosciutto or Grana Padano.  Her father’s booming laugh had been replaced by the chatter of mockingbirds and squirrels at the Woodlands cemetery.

Bella wondered who would find her. Maybe the kid with the earbuds would come back on the way to his dorm. Poor boy, she mused weepily as her thoughts began racing toward mental oblivion. He’d probably wanted some solitude and she’d always craved her own solitude and maybe he was one of the sons of that man in the solitude book about Argentina that had indelible ash crosses on their foreheads and my how she’d loved it when the priest put ashes on her forehead, as if it had marked her as one of Jesus’s favorites.

She could see the priest now, feet stained crimson by the blood of Jesus, coming with his hands outstretched, his mouth forming words that she couldn’t hear. Bella finally understood what it meant to be a cradle to grave Catholic and to share the chalice with a billion other Catholics and to honor the blood of a man who had suffered for you even before you were born. She opened her mouth to drink and immediately felt the hands of God stretched out to bless her, to take her up to heaven.  

Ann Marie Potter recently graduated from a fiction PhD program at Oklahoma State University and is now enjoying a first year in the beautiful state of Wyoming. Potter’s work has been published in The Storyteller, The Meadow, Peauxdunque Review, and Literally Stories.