When he was done, he threw the phone down and pulled off his coat. The marbling hand jerked again and suddenly he felt the cold on his skin and his heart beating and could hear Biscuit’s bark loud and clear and then the phone was at his ear and his voice added to the clamor. The dog turned and whined at his owner, but still the man couldn’t stop staring, fingers gripping the phone tucked deep in the pocket of his thick coat. I am the early-morning dog-walker who finds a body.īiscuit ran in small darts up and down the dirty snow at the water’s edge, furious, eager, disturbed by this change to their daily routine.
I am a cliché, was his next coherent thought.
It was five forty-five in the morning and there was a dead girl in the river. He could hear his chest wheezing loud, although Biscuit’s frantic barking, the alarm that had brought him from the path to the bank, seemed to be coming from somewhere far away. She was snagged on twigs as if the bent branches, bare of leaves and broken by winter, had grasped to save her, to keep her afloat. Her pale face, blue lips slightly parted, was turned up to the inky sky. She was wearing white, bright against the dark river, almost an accent to the fresh snow that lay heavy on the ground. Her hair could be blond or brown, it was hard to tell, soaked wet in the gloom. The thin twigs are scalpels on my dying blue skin this is a terrible mistake and what time is it and … If I can just reach the branches I might be able to pull myself to the bank, if I can just stop myself from going under-and what time is it, what time is it-and oh I can’t feel my hands. My lungs are raw and ice-scalded as I try to take shallow breaths, desperately keeping my chin above the water, but nothing is working, not my lungs, my limbs, or my brain. My white joggers and sweatshirt are so heavy in the freezing river. It’s so cold, it’s so cold I can’t breathe and I panic hard in the water that is like shards of glass, and for the first time I think I might be in serious trouble.
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