*I started this – meant to be a murder mystery – in 2010-ish. Maybe I’ll get back to it. Thanks for being here, and for reading!
1985
The girl – a young woman actually – had always imagined it might happen, but never really thought it would. She had a vivid imagination, ever since she was a child given to nightmares and later to intense bouts of dark inflected storytelling, some of which disturbed her teachers in the upper grades of the small rural school she attended. She’d often walked her dog across this section of the park, through the woods, wishing and dreaming she were back on the farm of her childhood, a property her mother had sold several years before, after her father’s death, but she knew she was not. She was not, and never again would be, at home; she was in the city, in Central Park, and if she stopped for a moment, letting the crunching sound of her footsteps in the brush fade away, the vibrating yelp of horns, the unnatural hum of park drive traffic, and the distant wail of emergency vehicle sirens wafted within earshot even here, surrounded by trees, a place where the city completely disappeared from view.
She lived on 106th Street between Amsterdam and Manhattan Avenues, in a small apartment up five flights of steep, filthy stairs. The building had no super; the front door hadn’t locked in years, but her two bedroom apartment was so cheap she felt, and was, trapped there, renting the second bedroom out for the full amount she paid the landlord. This gave her a cushion for her various fits and starts in the world of business and the arts; she was, she admitted it freely, lost and floundering, trying to find herself by trying anything, everything, short of – well. Short of prostitution. A prostitute, blond and about her age, lived on the next block, and she felt at times the other short distances between them. She felt too much, thought too much; she liked to joke she was twenty-five going on fifty.
She rarely met anyone in the Park, which, at this end, was deemed too risky to visit by most park users, even those who, like the girl, lived nearby. This made her feel both safer and less safe all at once yet with her dog, a large German Shepard mutt who was a complete sweetheart despite its gaping canine grin, she knew no one would approach her, although, occasionally, a man would flash his penis at her from afar. This kind of spontaneous and unwelcome ‘sharing’ made her angry and amused her all at the same time; she wondered what the thrill was, what the motivation was, for this flashing or whatever it was called. It had happened to her in vintage movie houses, at bus stops on the Upper East Side, while riding in a cab simply gazing out the window, or sitting on a bus.
Was it, she wondered, her age, her red hair and freckle-faced wide-eyed innocence, her merely being female? Or perhaps these men saw and smelt the scent of an outsider, a girl born and raised in the country, and seeing this they were liberated, free to display themselves to her because, she jokingly pondered, she would not by a long shot know their mothers?
Yet when the imagined thing happened, it was not exactly as she had thought it would be, and she did not react immediately when her dog, Darcy, began worrying at something in the brush. ‘Darcy – get over here! Darcy!’, but she would not come. And so the young woman proceeded to pull the dog leash from her pocket, walking to the place where the mutt, named for Austen’s hero, of course, was snorting and snuffling like another creature entirely.
And there he was, not as she had imagined him, a man, a body, with a whole lot of dried blood and a stink like no other she had ever known. A body, dead. She had never imagined the smell, never imagined, really, what she would or might do next. After all, it wasn’t, ever, going to really happen, and now that it had, all she could think of was getting Darcy home: all those fucking stairs, how would she climb them with her heart in her mouth, her stomach cramping and the smell in her nose, that horrible smell.
And then? Then calling the police and never, ever, walking through these woods again. She felt, at that moment, as if she were done with her New York adventure, although, having lived there long enough, she imagined too, a few minutes later, while climbing those goddamned stairs, how this story would play out. She waited tables at Hanratty’s, on the west side, not far from her apartment. Maybe she wouldn’t tell anyone.
Maybe she wouldn’t call the police.