Fiction By Becca Yenser

 Mike Maguire Flickr CC



Shallow Water

A woman was murdered last night on the Bosque, or at least that’s what I heard. I walk down here all the time. There are little birds that fly low in the maze of hollow reeds but these you can’t really see unless you stop and stare for a minute. They are the size of hummingbirds, but brown and dull. If you walk north at a steady pace you will reach the first of two duck ponds, where black ducks with white bills dive and pop up, dive and pop up. American Coots. That’s really what they’re called. The trail doesn’t go all the way around the pond. You can start, but you’ll end up in sinking mud with December mosquitos zombieing after your arms. The trails down here wind and intersect the larger ones, like the human cardiovascular system. I take the veins, where I am alone. Under the troll bridge is the homeless guy, Juan, who pushes a shopping cart of black garbage bags. He fluffs them up for me when I pass and turns to stare at my ass. Ten steps past this you hear the squall of geese from the Bio Park pond. The artificial blue water jam-packed with crashing remote-control boats and ducks fattened with Wonder bread fed by chubby toddler hands. I live here now, since the funeral home fired me on account of my nose piercing. Albuquerque is just a small town disguised as a city. I wake up under its soft shell robin egg sky and get ready for the sun. It’s out to get you, but it’s true I burn easy.

To get to the picnic tables I have to walk by the tree where a man was nailed by his hands. There are two black holes the width of pencils about two feet above my head. The bark is stripped there so the inner white bark gleams. I guess Santa Fe is nicer. My friend Abby lives up there and repairs turquoise jewelry in the storefront windows as tourists watch. A modern day zoo of labor.  Anyway, a girl was killed and I think I might know her. I pull my hat down and pull my hands back up into the sleeves of my jean jacket. A woman with a German Shepherd jogs past me and gives me a tight nod. I don’t smell good. At the second duck pond I see the maintenance boat out by Goose Island. They keep warming nests in the winter. A highrise for fowl. The Coots sing their scowls. The thick rasps make my ears burn.

When I get to the place where I heard they threw her in, I stop. The city has built a cedar platform here, for the vista. The water is muddy brown, eddying in the middle. A father with a nice camera is taking pictures of his sons. Striped sweaters, baby cheeks. They all look, then look away. No one has called the police yet. I can almost see her pale body from here, her hand rising with homemade rings on her fingers. It’s Janey, I am sure of it. She strung her lovers too close together. She ran out of meds last winter and began seeing ghosts in the woods. She talked to trees. We used to sleep in the fort in the woods, holding hands while we laid on our backs and looked through the cracks to find the moon. Juan is suddenly in front of me, barely visible behind his cart of garbage bags. The black plastic is stretched thin, and I can finally see what’s inside: packing peanuts. Bag upon bag of packing peanuts. I guess that would be nice, to sleep high up in a nest of air and foam. To rise above the mud, for a minute at least.




Manzanita, 1985

I had this god-aunt named Judy. She told me to marry for money, never for love. I was eight. She promised to show me actual tunnels in trees; when they turned out to be corridors under trees, I cried. She cursed.She smoked a lot and had olive skin that creped like origami.  She put the string of a kit in my hands and yelled Run!  Her voice a knife you had to check over and over again for sharpness.

When you are a child, you ride in the back of the car with the dogs. You get kissed on the mouth by adults. You wear yellow and blue and red at the same time: terry cloth, short-shorts, straps tangled.
You put your ear up to a tree to listen. She told me once, before my piano lesson, that this was all a dream. We were in a car; she was smoking. It sent me into a hysterics and so she bought me ice cream.

I couldn’t see the world right after that. My parents lost their faces. Someone got poisoned to death on Murder She Wrote. I couldn’t stop checking my fingernails to make sure they weren’t blue. In Kansas, in the winter of my 39th year, the world is encased in glass. My dead dog visits me in dreams, and man-made earthquakes shake me awake. My own cells have begun to turn and divide against me. Judy, maybe you were right.

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Becca Yenser is the author of TOO HIGH AND TOO BLUE IN NEW MEXICO (Dancing Girl Press, 2018). She teaches at Wichita State University, where she is fiction editor for Mikrokosmos Literary Journal. Her writing appears in Voicemail Poems, Pom Pom Lit, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, The Nervous Breakdown, CHEAP POP, Paper Darts, Metazen, 1001 Editors, Fanzine, Eclectica Magazine, decomP, HOOT, Entropy, Filter Literary Journal, and Toasted Cheese. She likes paying attention.