And the thing that must be trapped in the back of her mind is haunting her too, the tarot card I can almost see hovering behind her eyes, the one with the skeletal rider and his red-eyed horse trampling over the dead.

7

We spend the next day emptying buckets of dirty water from the basement. The power comes back on around noon, by which time Elizabeth is already throwing out rancid food from the warm refrigerator and looking constantly on the verge of vomiting. It is evening before the basement is dry, or as dry as it will ever get, I suppose. The floors still smell of mildew and the faint ripe odors of the swamp, which no amount of lemon-scented cleaning solution can fully eradicate. Old wet magazines and holiday decorations and other debris that ended up floating in the water are added to the growing pile of garbage on the side of the house.

When I haul out another bag to the trash bins in the long shadows of twilight, the ground still wet and spongy from last night’s rain, I find a little boy sitting on the grass, surrounded by a half circle of dead frogs as if performing an esoteric ritual.

“Ribbit. Ribbit,” he says. “You’re dead. You can’t see. Can’t talk. Only I can see and talk. Ribbit. Ribbit.”

He pokes them with a stick. They flop wetly, baring white bellies and limp, sticky limbs. Then he stands, a boy of seven or eight with a blank, shadowed face, and steps on the frogs, leaning his weight into it. They crunch under his shoes.

His childish notion of death disturbs me in its superficiality, as if death were merely a lack of vision and vocalization, with mental processes remaining intact so that one becomes imprisoned in one’s cage of flesh. How terrible, I think; how much more terrible than actual death must be, when those mental processes cease. Perhaps he simply cannot fathom that cessation, not while the world is his.

“Julian?” I say, then feel foolish. He cannot hear me. But I cannot help myself. “You wouldn’t hurt your auntie, would you?”

The boy faces the swamp, and I am grateful his back is turned so that I cannot see the indistinct blur where a face should be, that unsettled vision of inhumanity, a face that is not a face.

Without turning, he says, “You’re supposed to be dead.”

He could be speaking to the frogs, I think as I drop the trash bag and hurry back into the house. He could be speaking to the ghosts in his head or the voices of the swamp or whatever else exists in his mad world.

Or, a voice suggests in the back of my head, he could be speaking to me. Like Clementine.

For a time, I am distracted by the classes I teach as an adjunct at the local college and the armload of essays I have to grade, but it is all I can do to stop myself from venturing back into the swamp. I have gone over the story again and again in my little notebook, searching for answers, and I have had to grapple, too, with the inadequacy of my reiteration, knowing all the while that I haven’t gotten their voices quite right, that there may be some blanks I’ve filled in myself, some things I may have gotten wrong. Well, we do our best with what we have. I suppose a certain number of imperfections are to be expected in any story.