Sofia Drummond-Moore
EXHUME
The bog body lies on the light table like an oil spill made flesh.
Curled on his side, knees drawn up, Avril can see the outlines of his once-bones under skin like leather. She can also see the creases in his forehead, a remnant of worry. She can see the folds of his eyelids, sweetly closed, the downturn of his lips. Copper hair still tangled at the back of his neck.
His hand, bare, gently curled as if in sleep, still with fingernails, still with the lines of his palms, lies so close to hers. Inches and her white conservators gloves between them.
Three weeks she’s been in Copenhagen, three weeks fled from her mother’s house in Boston. Fled from her college, the claustrophobia, her mother’s house, her mother’s house, her mother’s house.
This is what she’d come for. The museum internship, like a beacon.
She didn’t expect it to be like this. Back home in the boxy, stuffy libraries taking in everything she could—all the photos and essays, videos of the bogs, of the tools, of the bodies in cases. Classes and films and studying the formulas. None of that prepared her for this. For this moment standing beside the body.
Not now as—surrounded by the conservators, the historians, the other interns—she begins to inch her fingers forward until her gloved fingertip touches 2,300 year old hand.
She’d even watched as they lifted him from the bog.
Knee deep in peat she’d been desperate to hide her tears from the others.
It was glorious to watch him rise.
Rope still tied around his neck. Old blow still broken into the skull. Knife still stuck in his heart.
Triple killed.
It felt like a funeral, despite being the reverse. It felt like a tooth come loose. Her tears half glory, half mourning.
It had been enough for the others to just see him there on the table that day, cleaned and ready for study. They buzzed with it as they packed up quick and left. As they went to dinner, out for beer.
It’s hard for Avril to leave his side, to leave at all. But the museum lights are dimming and she’s forced to walk back to her student housing.
She passes through Gammeltorv Square, by Caritasbrønden, the fountain. The wind cold coming off the water. In her coat pocket she presses her thumb into the fingertip that had touched his. As if she could feel him there. She nearly can, the dank smell of him still hanging around her. If only she hadn’t had to wear the gloves. If only she could be closer.
Her mother calls and Avril makes the mistake of answering. Her mother berates her in a slippery tirade of guilt. She’s leaving her to worry an ocean away, which is so cruel. She didn’t want this for Avril in the first place. Don’t speak to anyone! Check to make sure no one is following her home. Lock her doors. Be careful, Avril, be careful. Is she covering up? A woman alone is prey. Avril says nothing and never needs to.
She avoids the others in the apartment and moves swiftly to her room. She catches sight of herself accidentally in the mirror bolted to the wall and winces. She takes off her scarf and drapes it over the glass. Habit. Her mother never wanted mirrors around, didn’t like them in the house. Vanity was not for the women in this family.
But Avril isn’t in her mother’s house. A fact difficult to remember. Slowly, she pulls the scarf away again.
All she sees is a girl caved-in. Someone collapsing in on herself, black hole or star, an Ouroboros of being. Hard to look at. Body unacceptable. Rather, unacceptable to have a body at all.
Avril’s about to turn away again when she catches something in the mirror—her reflection in the window behind her. A double image. Her body, her body again, as if she were drunk and blurred. While one outline looks like her, like her waist and her hips, the other body does not. Hidden behind her own, it’s taller, broader, stronger. Hair wild. She leans closer to the mirror, desperate to see the face and — click. The light changes, the image disappears. Someone’s turned a light off in the kitchen across from her window so only the building outside is visible now.
On the way to the basement conservation lab the next day Avril passes through the children’s exhibit. Warm light through the windows, it’s too early for anyone to be there. She lingers by a case of historical children’s toys.
Her mother calls. She silences her phone. Her mother calls again. Again. Avril turns her phone off, turns back to the exhibit.
A video feed catches her attention. A film of a toy, a thaumatrope it says, a small white disk with the image of a man standing with his arms by his sides, seemingly sleeping peacefully. There’s twine on either side of the disk, twisted tight. Disembodied hands grasp the twine and PULL. The disk spins, melding the picture of the man with the picture on the other side. An archway and a rope. The man, now hanging by the neck. The thaumatrope spins and the image seems to float, ominous, whole.
Avril hurries on.
They don’t work close to the body that day but Avril feels she’s always circling it. Circling him.
She spends hours looking at the fibers of his noose under a microscope.
She manages to be the second to last student there. It’s only her, the lead conservator and a Danish girl, Elinor. Elinor flashes a smile at Avril when she catches her looking at the bog body. Avril goes red, turns away.
She cleans off her station slowly and when she looks up, they’re both gone. Avril’s heart starts beating fast. She gathers her things, heads for the door, checks over her shoulder. She passes close, so close to the table.
Her hand skims, reaches, and there—her bare fingers touch his.
It feels at once so like and unlike skin.
It feels alive, in the way an electric shock is alive.
It feels dead, like bone, like petrified wood, so far past dead as to become something other.
Avril flies out of there, barely registering the cold as it hits her, smile wide, wind drying her teeth.
Until Elinor says, “Hi.” She stands by the back door. She was waiting for her. Avril only gives her a nod but Elinor falls into step with her.
Elinor asks her questions, smiles, nods at her one-word answers like they tell her volumes. Avril keeps her hand curled in her pocket, her own flesh a lucky talisman (her skin pressed to his! Like her palm was touched at the front row of the boy band concert, ooh baby I’m never washing this hand).
Avril almost doesn’t notice they’ve arrived at her apartment, thinks Elinor will leave her now but she doesn’t, she comes right in. Kate and I are going out, Elinor says. Come with us.
Avril sees her phone. Fifteen missed calls from Mom. She says okay.
Hours later, streets and train cars, dinner and wine and wine and one too many shots of something sweet and thick, Avril stumbles through the red velvet dark of the club towards the bathroom.
It’s giant, the floor marble, light dim. And there are so many mirrors.
At the sink Avril looks up.
A wide mirror in front of her, a wide mirror behind.
Infinite Avrils in each direction.
She sways and a hundred of her selves sway too.
Except one.
One figure, turned away, taller than the rest. Blond, broad shoulders, scraggily hair. Avril leans closer to see better. The figure LEANS out of line. He wears a drab dirty tunic.
Avril turns quickly, no one behind her.
But in the mirror reflection he is facing her now.
Avril leans close, closer, closer, her own reflection getting in the way.
She touches her cheek, her cheek, smooth as it is, and he touches his. Bearded, grimed.
“Peter. I’ll call you Peter,” she says.
He has a necklace of rope. He smiles. Avril can’t look away, even as the door opens, even as Elinor enters and steps in front of her and smiles and takes her chin in her hand. Now every Avril in the mirror dances with Elinor. Peter too, a hand on his chin too. Elinor carefully smooths the red lipstick over Avril’s lips. And so on Peter’s too. Elinor steps aside and Avril, bright red, smiles at Peter, bright red.
“We look pretty,” says Avril.
“We look pretty,” says Peter.
Elinor nods in agreement, smiles, fond, fingers skating down Avril’s arms. Elinor pulls her back out to the dance floor.
In between the flashes of lights, of the bodies, in between Elinor close and too close and not close enough, Avril swears his hands are over her hands, his shoulder turns with her shoulder.
Elinor and Kate walk with her home.
Avril cannot help but check for Peter. In the other swaying bodies on the dim side streets. In the flashes of window reflections.
When Elinor continues on to her place and Kate’s door closes, Avril leaves again, not done. Down the street, she heads towards the lights and sounds. She buys a bottle of Malibu from the 7/11 and takes a swig on the street. She doesn’t look at her hands and marvels at how they don’t feel like her own. Like her walk is bigger and longer. Peat and rot in her nose. She flies past a group of boys at the fountain with their skateboards and a speaker and they nod to her, salute. Avril grins.
She moves down half-empty streets like she’s done it all her life.
Outside a student bar Avril meets two men, German, boxers, tree trunk legs in jeans and shares the bottle, half a dozen fist bumps, loses track. Avril leads the way down the center of the street, arms wheeling. She walks between them, as tall as them, legs striding long, giving them shit.
They pass through Ørstedsparken, to the bridge in the center of the lake.
Avril climbs up on the metal railing and the world calms to a glow.
Down below her reflection in the water, an obsidian mirror, is a man in a noose, legs dangling. She has to meet him. She think of the thaumatrope, of two sides becoming whole. Avril strips off her coat, her shirt, her shoes.
She jumps. Only in the air does she realize the water could be any depth…
But she hits and it’s black, cold and it’s endless. By the time she surfaces the two men have jumped too. The bank is barely a bank at all, a flat lot of mud and muck and Avril crawls up it fists and knees. Fists and knees. Flops back, laughing, gasping, good.
It is only in the moments when they walk back to the bridge to gather their things and dress again, when the men stare and sway at her chest that Avril remembers she is supposed to be Avril, woman, after all.
When she sleeps it’s to the whisper of fire, soft and insidious. Forms in the dark. Fast, quiet speech. Cold water out in the distance, like an abyss. Bare chest gleaming, knees strong as they kneel.
She doesn’t remember waking.
Peter’s bog body glows with electric green grids of light. With the students in white coats and the lights dim, Peter whispers to Avril how a knife in your heart feels after you’re already dead. Avril feels her chest like this, eyes blurry with the scan, not hearing anything the others are saying, not writing, not understanding the words. Peter tells her the shape of life, the light flashes through his eye sockets and Avril stands blind.
“Vær ikke bange,” Peter says. (Don’t be afraid).
Elinor asks her what she means. Avril looks up to see the students are leaving. Elinor is watching her like she’s waiting for something. The conservators are closing Peter away from the air again.
Avril leaves and this time smiles as Elinor follows.
Elinor takes her to Christiania and buys her an edible, a brownie, from a woman in a camo tent. The streets are mud from the rain and someone’s playing music. Elinor asks her how she knows Danish as they walk the canal.
Avril never answers because she’s watching the figures in the water. They curl and unfurl, sticks driven around their bodies, little shelters sheltering them from nothing. Sacrifices, she knows.
“Dette er min frygt, ikke din,” Peter says. (This is my fear, not yours).
Avril feels her bones in their sockets, feels them try to bend and miss each other as she walks, she’s too tall and unsteady and Elinor holds her arms in hers until it’s dark and raining again and Avril wants to kiss her and there’s no reason not to and Elinor kisses back and there are three arms on her back and she tastes like moss and chocolate.
Avril dreams her body is divided by a glass wall. Avril dreams her body is so heavy the wood floors of her bedroom bend, splinter and turn to pulp underneath her. She walks on a beach and there are others with her. They are wading through the water, through the bog and night comes down on them, warm unlike other nights and hushed and good in her lungs and she hopes the peat will breathe into her this way too. She’s never been happier.
Avril becomes the oracle of the bog body department. Avril knows every fiber of the noose, where each plant came from, the way to twist it. Avril knows the knife and its edges and her age and her last meal and Peter whispers “Shhhh…stol på mig” (trust me) and Avril tells her mother to stop calling. Peter hangs up on her mother when she screams.
Avril looks at her body on the light table.
The hard of her bones on the hard of the surface. Skin spilling around her.
The air rings out harsh against her, smells of blood and that thing past rot.
She needs off the table. The concrete of this building weighs hard on her organs, on her head.
Avril sits on the floor of the bathroom stall, toilet filled with loam, dirt grit in her teeth. Elinor is at the door and wondering. Avril says nothing because her lungs are with Peter.
“I knew you wanted to be alone with him. I saw you,” Elinor is saying.”
Avril says nothing, but loves her for this.
Elinor slips the lab key card under the doorway.
Avril rides the subway with a bog body in her duffle. Avril looks at herself in the flashing light of the train car window as they speed under the river, speed away from the city and she looks at Peter. Avril/Peter smiles, red lips, hair soft. Face cradled in how many hands.
It is funny, having the bag on her shoulder, arms around it, holding tight, keeping safe. Carrying his old vessel like this, like her most sacred gym clothes. Concrete turns to cobble roads, turns to dirt lanes turns to brush as she hikes. Brackish water seeps into her tennis shoes. Peter walked this way once. With torches and a promise, chest a ready wound, three swears for his goddess. Hands pressed his and the fear is there yes, but time became different as soon as he made his first steps with them through the peat. He is already a girl in blue hiking down a highway. He is already reflected, infinite, eternal.
Avril/Peter sink into the gloam, into the bog, reeds and rock and hedge around them. Mud seeps into every bit of them. The night is kind and rich with it. There will be someone rising come morning.
Sofia Drummond-Moore (she/her) is a writer born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to park ranger parents and grew up in National Parks around the U.S. She graduated from Knox College with a B.A. in Creative Writing and has an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute. Her work can be found in X-R-A-Y Lit, Waxwing, Pithead Chapel, and Door = Jar.
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