Excluding the Dead Girl from the Scene
Arlene Ang
We enter the trail of water and find ourselves in the bathroom. The toilet seat has been left up: a plastic gravestone waiting for a mouth to vomit. We record the time we turn off the faucet. The yellow wallpaper catches the unexplained absence of birds beautifully. Under the sink, a weighing scale calibrated at zero. We draw the curtains. There’s a paper bag on the windowsill containing brown hair—previously lost, then found. Outside, a skeletal elm looks in through the glass. We see through it and count the people walking around without umbrellas. Taped on the medicine cabinet, an exercise log with the words “abdominals” and “running” circled like eyes. As we take notes, we lean into the pen: our weight is carried up to three pages down. This is how we came to notice the pear at the foot of the tub stuck with a carcass of knife inside it.
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