Hold Her Down

Image by Jolene Armstrong

Camilla’s secret is that she can split in half. Watch: she’s perched on the bench, picking at the moss-colored paint and tapping its metal underbelly. The second she sees the puff of Elliot’s white hair floating in the distance, she’s above herself. That half goes to the library, thumbs through battered back issues of National Geographic dumped haphazardly in the Reference section, where no one would suspect a specter, and the rest of her does what it needs to.

Elliot is fine. Well, he’s not the type of guy you have to be all there for. Camilla walks at a slightly slower pace than he does, somewhat behind him, and lets her eyes follow his pointer finger. There is the white fence that his grandson — good looking, bartending at Al’s on the lake, you know the type of guy, don’t you — painted last summer. There is the red Acura he’s trying to sell, that he’s apparently fixed up. The car has only one tire, and it looks more like Play-Doh than rubber. Camilla doesn’t remember ever seeing it any other way. Oh, and see the lake? Well, my mother’s cousin’s friend drowned in it. They found the hair, but not the body, and we got the Ghost Hunters out here for it — they really came. Camilla nods at this, her mouth slightly open, and when he asks if she’s good she gives him a jagged grin.

They’re heading down the street like listless teens looking for their town to magically be different on a Friday night. Camilla’s body gravitates toward the library, toward acceptable loneliness and quiet, but Elliot’s gravitates toward her, and he’s a force. She follows him in the other direction, toward the lake, where he’s got another thing to show her.

They met, of course, at the consignment shop, the one in the parking lot where the man at the register looked at once deeply morose and deeply at peace with himself. She was searching for a small CorningWare casserole dish. Elliot was trying to pawn one off to the guy at the register. She bought it because it was right there, and she wanted to talk to a person, and they talked, and when you don’t talk much, you’re susceptible. At least, she read that in a digest. Or maybe heard it on Dr. Oz, which she started to look forward to watching, which was maybe what prompted her decision to go out and shop in the first place. The first time Camilla put the dish in the oven, it shattered into a million tiny sparkling pieces like the Pretty Litter she kept getting ads for. She thought he couldn’t have known. That it was a fluke.

Does it matter that it wasn’t? That he hardly tries to hide it?

The entrance to the beach is sort of hard to find, and the lake itself is encased in thick hedges, which Elliot says is silly, because it’s right there. Hiding the entrance doesn’t make it any harder to get to it. To prove his point, they bypass the arbitrarily placed white wooden steps and gate to find a thin spot in the hedge. No key? he asks, and Camilla shakes her head. Membership is pricey. But it’s in our town, we have a right, he says. Elliot bends branches until they almost snap, forces himself through, and holds them back for Camilla, who doesn’t feel herself pass through even though she knows she does. In the lot, a twenty-year-old guard rolls his eyes, asking god why old people do things they know they shouldn’t. But he doesn’t stop them.

On the other side, Elliot glows. You know you can do that? Just walk right in? Guy’s not gonna say a thing to us, and everyone in the world knows that, but still, she finds it in her to look surprised, even nervous, and a grin crawls across his face, because this is what he does. He gives, and then he takes. This is the way the world works — exchange, exchange, exchange.

Camilla’s body doesn’t mind. Talking to Elliot spreads little spores of good feelings across her skin. She takes in the humid twilight, imagines it’s a kind of lotion. Her slow saunter is a meditation, the ache in her hips an oil, the thing that keeps her moving. She isn’t thinking at all — not here. In the library, she is reading about meerkats, and she is thinking that they look at the thing in front of them for too long. That kind of consideration is tiring.  And what does it get you?

Have you thought about it? he asks her, and she lets out a little hum in response, genuinely unsure of what he could be talking about.

 You mind picking something up from someone for me?

She cocks her head, interested. But she doesn’t say yes.

Okay. Okay, great. He can meet you, like, I don’t know — he delivers pizza sometimes, so he can do that.  Order some knots or something, something that comes in a brown bag, and then you can take the knots out, maybe leave me one, right?  And just don’t touch what’s for me. It’ll be in a little mint box or something. You won’t be able to miss it. Just take the knots. Don’t worry about anything else.

Camilla hums again.

It’s great to have a friend like you, he says. Great that we’ve met. I’ve got no one here, you know. I mean, my grandsons are down the street —

Elliot says a lot of things she’s heard from him before, and the moral of the story is he feels very alone, but as he’s saying it his phone pings, just like it does every ten minutes. She does what he says a lot. Has given him money here and there for his cat’s vet bills, pretended to be his former boss for a reference, and even made some scammy complaints on Amazon, hoping for a refund on the litter she’d ordered him so she could give him some cash if he needed it. When she does these things, she’s split in two, and she’s usually thinking of the anglerfish and incredibly old bodies that bubble up through bogs in England. Of nature’s inclinations, of the need to see and be seen in life and in death and how the specifics get kind of creepy, so she doesn’t dwell on any one thing, she just flips through.

All it is, for her, is the presence. Another person to engage with.

That’s why she doesn’t say yes right away.

Instead, she walks to where the lake foams up on the beach, smells the rotten fish, the stale beer. Dusk is seeping all around them and on the water, boats are dotted with red and green and yellow lights. They move slow. Without a wake, without a wave. That’s what she feels like when she’s split in two — like she can move and be moved without a trace, a memory.

Elliot must sense it, too. Her transience is a kind of natural advantage. She can middle man for him. She can help him with his nonsense scheme, and she won’t bother with questions. It’s not like she’ll be asked anything — no one will worry about her. No one will need her. She doesn’t even worry about herself.

Cammy? No one but him calls her that, but that could be because there just aren’t many people who call her anything at all. Parents long dead, no grandkids. Her friends have all left this town. You’re gonna do it, right?

She slips out of her sandals, dips a calloused toe into the water, feels the shock of it. It’s like she’s thrown her whole self in. A flicker of a thought: she could do just that. Fall, cause a scene. Withhold this yes from Elliot a little longer. She never did it before. Didn’t think it wise to be choosey with what she would and wouldn’t do for someone, not when she had no one. An iciness travels up her spine, and she has the strange sensation of her grip strengthening, even though she’s not holding anything. She almost likes it. He kicks through the sand toward her.

Jesus, Cam. Are you really gonna be like this? You know if you don’t help me, I’m screwed. We’re screwed. 

She turns, still keeping her toe in the water. Elliot does not have eyebrows, though he has a full head of hair. His forehead scrunches in a way that tells Camilla he’s distressed. She likes that.

Bullshit. When he says it, he spits. Fucking bullshit.

She stays quiet, steps more firmly in the water, watches pink bleed across the horizon.

You’re gonna do this?

His hands are on her shoulders, gentle though, like the moment before a massage. She can feel the beginning of a clench, how the rigidity flows through him like cement. And she can feel herself losing her balance.

Camilla floats back from the library with a pleasantly detached sense of how the world works. She floats above her body, watches herself in front of Elliot, watches his hands on her, watches her stare at the raft floating a couple yards out from the sand. She waits for the clink of the chain, waits for it to pull the raft down when a wave rises beneath it. It’s the assurance that’s always amazed her — it’s what keeps the dock from floating away. The chain. The ninety-pound anchor. Everyone needs something to hold them down.

That’s when his phone pings. He pulls a hand off her to pull it out and her body leans toward him. Off-balance. She rests her forehead against his plush bicep to steady herself, but at that angle, she can’t seem to move. He closes the message. Tries to shake her off. They’re too close. The closest they’ve ever been to each other. She cranes her neck up at him. And he grows a bit pink in the face, but not as much as he should, considering not only that, but the fact that he’s still got a hand gripped to her shoulder. That she’s at an angle. That even this is enough water for someone to drown in. But the chain clinks. The raft pulls away only to be pulled down. The moment’s over.

So, Eliot says, weighing his words carefully. Will you —

She says yes, feels a tingle at her scalp where she slips inside herself to speak. Of course. Of course, she will.

About the author

Emily Behnke is a graduate of The New School's MFA in Creative Writing Program. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and is found/forthcoming in Bear Creek Gazette, Tiny Molecules, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel.

About the Artist

Jolene Armstrong is an associate professor of literature at Athabasca University. Her art ("Artist/Machine") has appeared in Macromicrocosm, and in 2022, she has art ("Cosmic Sunflower") appearing in an upcoming issue of Wild Roof Journal, with a translation of a Hjalmar Söderberg short story, "The Blue Anchor" coming up in the Hunger Mountain Review. Later in the new year, her short story "Jólakötturinn or The Yule Cat" will be published in the The Society for Misfit Stories. In her spare time, she assembles in images and words the shimmering, sometimes terrifying, ephemeral beauty that marks our collective existence on this blue planet.  She lives and works in amiskwaciy-wâskahikan treaty 6 territory (Edmonton). www.jolenearmstrong.ca