So far, the honeymoon had been okay, but she couldn’t rid her mouth of the taste of soap.
She had been brushing her teeth three times a day.
Only breathing deeply could cleanse her palate—but with the next taste of anything, it was as if she had been gnawing on a golden bar of Dial.
She would have never picked a fishing trip for their celebration—must be what Jehovah would have wanted.
Slicing the little bowrider through Lake Crescent, his skin gathered a few times on his cheeks when smiling at her. He had the hue of a trout. His skin was gray, or perhaps it was just his stubble in the sun.
Smoke from annual summer fires shrouded the sun, angry and red against the dirty gray sky.
Last night, in the tent, they had done it. Even when hard, he had been soft in comparison to the boys she had been with.
She had almost said something, but then remembered she wasn’t supposed to know how hard a cock was supposed to be.
Lake Crescent used to terrify her. Still does at night.
A waitress from Port Angeles had been dumped in its dark depths before floating to the surface in the summer of 1940.
Over three years, minerals from the deep frozen floor had turned her body into soap.
The lady of the lake.
Children claim to have seen her. They conjured her at girl scout camp by saying her name thirteen times—or so she was told on the playground. Her parents hadn’t allowed her to go to camp.
She hadn’t been allowed to say the pledge of allegiance either.
Boys at school would tease her for it, so she chased them on the playground.
Around ten, they started chasing her back.
At sixteen, she let boys catch her.
She was amazed how she could lather.
The best was on the bench seats while listening to the radio.
Christmas music felt the naughtiest.
She hid her passions well, until one Saturday morning, some orangey foundation, which she used to cover an enthusiastically bruised neck, rubbed onto the collar of her polo.
Her parents kept her home from school for a month.
They told the everyone she had walking pneumonia.
With a synthetic seafoam loofah, she scrubbed her neck so hard that it beat new bruises.
Washing her hair, she imagined reaching through the spongy layer of her scalp into her skull and washing her thoughts.
She pushed her fingertips deeper and scrubbed faster until a bit of blood ran through the suds of creamy strawberry scented smoothie.
“But how clean could she ever really be?” she feared. The same water raining in her shower left red calcitrant residue in the tub, that could only be erased by steel wool and Comet.
She dropped out of school. Got a job at a Safeway Starbucks.
On her short resume, cleaning the Kingdom Hall was her only relevant experience.
In the interview, the manager tried to joke, “I thought y’all weren’t allowed to drink coffee.”
She mutedly sighed and picked at imagined dirt in her cuticles.
“No. That’s the Mormons … I’m not Mormon.”
Vowing to cover weekends and evenings got her the job.
In the evening static of the supermarket, pastries hardened in their cold cases, and she practiced perfecting her white bubbly foam heart in paper cups.
That’s when he came up to the counter to order a hot chocolate.
She knew him—an elder of their congregation. His wife had died of esophageal cancer a year ago.
He kept her company while she cleaned and closed.
He asked for a plastic cup full of whipped cream.
With a sharp plastic spoon, he took a bite, and then offered her one—a heap of greasy cream.
She reached out for the spoon.
“No,” he said with a smarmy smile.
“Let me feed you.”
That night she brushed her teeth, flossed, and scraped her tongue—pulling up the tastebuds until they were a clean pink carpet, hoping she hadn’t said something wrong.
On the second night of their honeymoon, she cooked the trout he caught on a spit.
Lavender smoke rose from where its mouth had been skewered.
Why was she so thirsty? She pulled in her mouth for saliva, only to taste soap again.
She took a deep breath and headed down the hollow path to the lakefront.
The water came right up to the trees. The lake had washed away the earth between each heart root revealing a thick wooden lace.
Something bubbled at the shoreline, a puzzling freshwater foam.
Filmy froth reflected dark green and gold, rising up from murky duck weed.
She rushed into her waist and pushed her hands down past the membrane of surface tension. Lifting her hands to her face, a swirling pearly residue puddled in her palm.
The cold water entered and heavied her denim, enticing her out toward the lake floor.
Ten feet under, untouchable to the sun, a thick phantom tree trunk rose was slowly petrifying.
Before her, she saw the outline of white hands paddling deeper.
Deeper still, she followed the trunk down in the dark.
Her ears crackled in a rush of vertigo.
That’s when she saw her face.
White pinguid skin. So cold. So clean.
And her sockets were hollow. The eyes hadn’t saponified.
Then she heard a call, or was it the last bubble of breath rushing past emptied ears?
Any terror she felt was a gentle impetus to move.
With a strong kick, she buoyed to the surface.
She caught her breath while looking straight into the hazy red sun.
She imagined that she was soap, that she could disperse what clung to her, vanquish any cloying debris.
And she knew it wouldn’t be too far to swim to the far shore.
So, she kicked suds behind her, and blew water from her lips in cold white sparks.
Taylor Hebert is from an island in Washington State, and is based in Dublin, Ireland. She feels at home wherever there is rain.
Image: pixabay.com
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Heavy Feather Review 