Bog Bodies

content warning:

mentions and descriptions of physical abuse, assault, implied grooming, attempted murder, murder.

***

Do not speak of the bodies in the bog.

Do not whisper their names,

do not mention their lives.

Do not hear the bodies in the bog,

not their broken breath,

nor their withered lungs.

Do not feel for the bodies in the bog,

not their yellowed teeth,

nor their rotted tongue.

Do not seek the bodies in the bog,

they already seek you.

The night is any icy lover pressing damp kisses into her arms, and she rubs them to dispel the goosebumps which soon follow. A mosquito lands bravely on her bicep, and she swings her hand at it. The sound cracks through the air like a whip. She freezes. Shoots a nervous look over her shoulder, watches the overlapping black silhouettes in cautious silence, listens for footsteps interrupting the stagnant night. Her nose is wrinkling in response to the mildew and rotted fish hanging damply in the air, hands twitching when she feels the bugs return their swarm around her face. She remains still until she is certain there is no one else but her and the insects in the muggy woods.

Anyone who is even just passing by would know she isn’t meant to be out here, her only armor against forty degree weather being her black T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants which have been thinned by far too many horrors and far too few washes. From the thick curtain of hair hanging limp over her features peers a bloodless visage and too-wide eyes spotted with the red of burst vessels. She looks like a vengeful spirit, which is only compounded by the dark contusion swelling violet across her cheek and the red splattered against her forehead.

Bridget imagines she would feel braver if she really were one. She’s just a woman though, with a name her mom once told her meant brave, feeling as stupid, hurt, and less brave than she ever has. She has no one to call, her mom having passed from cancer when she was a teenager left unmoored and with a father she hardly knew and quickly found she didn’t want to. She had fumbled for another life, and had found Nate.

Handsome, well-to-do, intelligent Nate. What a dream, beautiful as it’d been brief.

What brings Bridget to the bog this night is less the promise of a haunting, and more the promise of escape and at least one semi-peaceful hour of sleep. And if that sleep became a more permanent thing then, well. She can’t exactly be picky anymore, now can she? She’d already been chased from no less than three park benches and two alleys before resorting to this. The bog is the one place nobody in Dole Creek goes to, and with how rare a commodity privacy is in such a small community, it makes her think there are some sort of wild animals or deadly killer that lives among the bog like a Babayka. Bridget’s only just moved here two years ago to live with Nate so she has no context herself, and when she’d asked him directly about it, he’d just said, “Only the dumb, blind, or desperate have ever gone past the treeline.”

At this moment, she felt like all three, stumbling blindly in the thicket growing so closely together that it forces their roots out of the earth and into jutting obstacles, branches swaying overhead to obscure her in flickering, intersecting shadow. Her heart is a racing jackrabbit in her chest that feels just as large, pushing her lungs into obscurity and her brain into panic.

Then, all at once, the trees end. There is no thinning, no slow dispersing of the woods, just a sudden separation from the bog and the trees, like an invisible barrier had long ago been erected here to prevent any further growth.

Bridget’s mouth pops open, and she forgets herself. Her eyes are wide, this time in wonder rather than fear. Before her is a flat plain which stretches into the horizon, and then stretches even further. Long silvery-green grass tangles across the valley, interspersed with ling heather, cotton and tormentil splashing purple, white and yellow across the otherwise monochrome landscape. The bog itself is clearer than she’s ever imagined something called a bog could be. It reflects tiny stars in the pitch depths that aren’t being interrupted by tall swaying columns of cattail. She is so caught up in awe, all thoughts of potential predators and serial killers leave her, and for the first time all day, her heart slows to something close to a normal rate. She sits - collapses, really, intending to watch the twinkling stars in the water, but the tension leaving her leaves her a stringless puppet, and sleep catches her fall backwards.

Bridget is in Art HIST 101 and stands, paralyzed, watching the other students finding seats and chatting as though they’re well acquainted with each other and the ritual of the classroom. They probably are; they have probably gone to public school, have learned all the little social cues that signals it’s okay to come within a five mile radius of one another, all while she had to try her best not to leave her room until her father demanded to check the workbooks he’d given her. They look like giants, staring at her with repressed smirks and pitying eyes. She thinks about going home, telling her father that he’s right, that she can’t do it and there’s no way she’ll ever be able to.

That’s when she sees him. She doesn’t know why. Maybe his blonde hair is what stands out, the way it’s wire straight until it curls ringlets around his neck, styled in a mullet. Maybe its the way is moss eyes are trained unblinkingly on her, and when she meets them, he doesn’t flinch or shy away, just stares a few seconds more before offering the sweetest dimpled smile she’s ever seen, one that sets off fireworks of light in his eyes and warmth in her stomach that spreads up to her head, and when he silently points at the seat next to him, she can’t think of a single reason why she should say no.

They become close friends fast. She, a freshman who’s taken her GED and entrance exam a year early. He, a junior who’s returning from a two year gap. It isn’t weird - they’re just friends, at first. When he finally, shyly, asks her to be his girlfriend, it’s a semester before he graduates and she feels confident with her grades, her friends, the dinky apartment she shares with a classmate in the same major. She hesitates - of course she does. She cares about him, doesn’t want to ruin a good friendship over something as fickle as love. But when he looks at her with hope sending sparks to his eyes, she feels that love grip her heart tender, and she says yes.

He’s begging her to marry him six months and a week after they begin dating, telling her he’s never known the true meaning of a twin flame before her, his gaze holding a fire so bright she doubts she can match it. But she feels the same way, and she becomes misty at the prospect of growing old with someone so kind, so patient, with such evergreen eyes and love, and she says yes.

He’s asking her to consider transferring to another college, mid senior year, maybe to something remote, to move home with him so he can spend time with his mother, who’s dying. His garnet stare shimmers with tears and dreams, and he holds her hands close to his hammering heart so she knows how serious he is. Even with her stomach fluttering with captive butterflies, she says yes.

He asks her to take care of his mother after they sign a lease on one of his great-uncles homes. She’s not much of a caretaker - but Nate’s mom is sweet faced and wrinkled and smells like her mom used to, so she says yes.

He asks her why she has to go back to work a day after the funeral, when they’re both sitting at the kitchen table allowing their faces to become inundated with the steam curling out of their matching mugs. His sour apple greens simmer with repressed heat and tragedy, so different from the kind of shine she’s used to. They fight for the first time that day, voices rising to a cacophonous crescendo, and in the heights of it, he snatches a cup from the table and launches it at her. It shatters at her feet and sends shards flying and hot water splashing onto her ankles and calves, and he’s already yelling frantic apologies when it catches up to her what’s just happened. He asks her to forgive him, and even though she knows she should say no, that she needs a divorce and that she never wants to see him again, she stares into his mournful face and catalogues the familiar gemstone eyes twinkling with the stars she can count her love on, and she tells herself that his mom has just passed, that he’s emotional, that he has never done something like this before and likely never will again, and says yes instead.

He demands to know where she is, and why she’s been out for so long. The strawberry fields of his eyes have been overtaken by a wildfire of bitter jealousy that runs rampant and spreads to the burning grip he has on her wrists. There is no answer she can give, and so she doesn’t try.

He’s on top of her in the kitchen, knee pinning her back to the linoleum floor, cheek stinging from where he struck her down, hands vice-like around her neck, and she isn’t really noticing the color of his eyes in this moment, just the way she can see the whites all around them but not a single light inside. She knows then that the question being asked is, “Will you die for me?”

This time, she doesn’t say yes. She grabs what she can. She swings with as much force as her deprived body will allow. She feels something wet splatter across her face, and the weight gives just enough to push and turn to her stomach while she heaves saving breaths, and scrambles to her feet to rush out the door.

Bridget jolts up, then rolls over heaves from the nausea, Nate’s unfamiliar expression slowly fading from awareness being traded for the memory of where she is. Her face is hot and wet and she realizes from the now-familiar way her heart is hammering and fingers are shaking that she has been crying in her sleep. She spits strings of saliva into the grass, staring vaguely at nothing. What is she going to do? She finds herself feeling the same way she had all those years ago as a naive homeschooled seventeen year old attending her first college class. Only, she barks a laugh, this time, she really does think the man she hasn’t called “father” in years is right. She can’t do it. She droops forward, feeling more defeated and exhausted than ever, eyes fluttering shut.

Something brushes against her.

Bridget screams, leaping to her feet and searching frantically for the snake it must have been. The grass sways in the wind who has chosen a new dance partner in the cotton pirouetting elegant spirals across the scenery fairly glowing under the thin crescent of the moon, the single tree on the other side of the bog. She notices for the first time that there are no bugs, and the thought isn’t comforting.. It feels warmer, if damper, than the woods had, which to her feels wrong, although she can’t say she’s an expert on environmental science. But… a place like this would normally be a tourist spot. Right? Why did everyone avoid it so much? Why didn’t Nate ever speak about it even when pressed?

Dancing flowers, playful cattails, the single jagged, branchless tree on the right side of the bog, the horizon that stretches into limitless darkness, the giant stones with water lapping greedily at their dry surface. She breathes, presses her hand to her chest and feels it racing so fast and hard she’s worried it will stop working. She should go back. She should apologize. She should beg for forgiveness and…

Snarled weeds bobbing in the wind, purple petals mingling with the green, undulating water creating honeycomb wrinkles in its surface, that tree in front of the bog, the endless horizon, on and on it ripples into obscurity.

She looks back at the single tree intruding on the plain. It is right in front of her. It is not a tree at all.

Its eyes are perfect. They don’t blink, pearl sclera seemingly untouched by anything but baby pink tear ducts, and glittering irises swirling green-yellow-brown. Peeling flesh flaps in the soft breeze, along with it carrying the over-sweet pungency of decay and soaked locks of hair. Pockets of flesh which have finally burst open from the weight of water oozes viscous black liquid down death-paled skin. Its veins are still mapped out, peering through pock holes and gashes, pulsing with life that should be impossible.

Bridget runs. In her mind, she runs, and she leaves the bog and returns home. In reality, her body is a manacle weighing her to the spot, watching in horror as it watches her.

“Will you help me?” It burbles through algae-eaten lips, and it sounds like razors scraping flesh.

She should say no. But her shuddering jaw won’t utter a single syllable. She expects it to become angry at her reticence. It just waits without blinking instead.

This alone shocks her out of her abject horror. She stumbles backwards, landing on her ass, heart still racing and body feeling like it will soon fall apart. But the panic is ebbing, and without the terror coloring her vision, she can see the way those veins create delicate, multicolored patterns resembling the thin roots of a reed, the way that dripping hair is as pitch as the night and somehow just as starlit, tangled with long flat leaves that look like kelp, and twisting bog vines threading their delicate fingers through the strands and…

She’s revolted. And entranced. She wants to lean in close and take in every detail, she wants to hide beneath blankets she doesn’t have. She thinks about how Dole Creek ignores the bog and every mention of it, wonders why. Why ignore something so beautiful?

Bridget’s lips move before she fully knows what she’s going to say. Her words ring too loud in the clearing, and is impossible to hear over the rush blood in her ears. “Will you help me?”

It stares. Drip. Drip. Drip. For a moment, Bridget wonders if she’s offended it. Then the atmosphere thins, and that’s how she discovers that it had been so heavy.

“You will be ours,” it gurgles, an offer. “And us, yours.”

Bridget has had her lifetime of watching eyes. She watches the pulsing veins instead, the rippling water of the pond breathing in tandem, the now-delicate night air breathing life on her skin.

She smiles. When she answers yes, she is looking at her own beating heart.

***

The town does not really notice the disappearance of Nate’s wife. They didn’t even really notice her arrival, used to the strange women who regularly came through on the arms of their young men. They don’t notice when her arguments turn to screams, when her screams turn to silence, and even if they had, they wouldn’t dare speak of it. That’s not how things work in Dole Creek.

They do notice the disappearance of Nate. They notice when his house goes quiet and they notice when he isn’t striding around town like he owns it, when he doesn’t wander into Davies Roasts to work a bashful grin at the newly graduated high schooler at the counter, they had even noticed when that dripping figure that watches through the trees began to watch him all those months ago. They will notice when his father, the sheriff, quietly retires and his house becomes an abandoned playground to brave adolescence testing their invincibility. He will not move to grieve, of course. No one in the town will, despite all of their noticing.

You don’t feel for the bodies in the bog, after all. No matter who they are.