Story: Drownings (part two)

Drownings

(part two)

The bank along the riverwalk was reinforced with cemetery detritus, gravestones slabbed together. Thrusting from sludge you saw a brass orb or the planes of an obelisk, the very tip of a wing. It had been decided the dead must go, unentitled to occupy the city’s treed spaces. Picnic shelters, stands for sports, fields for sports, belonged. The ancient and forgotten did not. They were cremated. Descendants were invited to please do file your complaint.

Faia and McAlley stood, unspeaking, but separately searching names.

“That looks like Ferrer,” she said. A discharge pipe emptied below and traced its flow on the water’s surface.

If you came so far, you descended stairs over the old canal, bedded in its tunnel. Your fingers tapped a metal rail, one of two. The walls were glazed block, perspiring, the air growing colder, your progress almost blind at the unlit center. You debouched to dredged marshland, an artificial slope with plantings, a plaque and map to tell you their scheme. Approach the plaque opposite, and learn…that an entire district lay drowned under your feet.

Said fascinating for snorkelers, who made an informal museum of the tunnel’s grates. The canal sucked and sighed; they had thought, the builders of this amenity, that you would want to see the water. The snorkelers found clay pipes and oyster-shell buttons, metal fittings for wooden shafts, chamber pots and drinking cups. Ceramic shards, groupings that curated themselves as the floods rose and fell. Modern things, too, phones and aerosol cans, whole bicycles, purses.

McAlley stooped.

Faia, murmuring, “Horrible down here. A morgue,” moved past, not noticing her boots splash his trouser legs. He had spotted a laminated card, wondered at this, that the diver hadn’t tried returning it. A workplace ID: small photo, medallion logo, name, employee number no doubt, illegible in weak light.

He ambled to the better…

“McAlley!’ She caught his lapel. “Isn’t that one?”

Dead blond grasses arched here and dropped their heads. A large amount of trash had collected…a metal post, bent by a scrapper’s effort to dislodge it, must have a chain as well.

“I imagine,” he said to Faia, “they’ve got it weighted in concrete, a mooring post.”

“You don’t think I’m talking about the post!”

“Thinking aloud. Ignore me. I’ll have a look.”

2

Drownings

Drownings (part three)

(2021, Stephanie Foster)