Reynold Mathers, 28, of Tankawa, Oklahoma, died suddenly on Monday, April 25th, 2016. Authorities believe Reynold drowned in the Chikaskia River late Monday night, five miles southeast of his home.

Reynold was born September 28th, 1987, in Boise City, OK, to Krystal McNaster, a schoolteacher, and Robert Mathers, a truck driver for Hunt Oil Company. He was their only child.

Reynold worked the past seven years for Northern Oklahoma College as a graphic designer & marketing associate. In 2005 he graduated from Boise City High School, where he worked on the literary journal and participated in debate club. He then went on to graduate from Kansas State University in 2009 with his bachelor's in marketing and visual communications.

Friends and neighbors describe him as sweet-hearted, quiet and thoughtful. He enjoyed reading and listening to music.

Reynold is survived by his mother Krytsal, Tulsa; maternal grandmother, Nancy McNaster, Boise City; and both his paternal grandfather and grandmother, Robert and Suzanne Mathers, Lawton.

He is preceded in death by his father, Robert.

Services will be held at 10 a.m., Saturday, April 30, at the McKnight Funeral Home Chapel of Memories. Michael Chepsky will officiate. Burial will be in the Boise City Cemetery and serving as pallbearers will be Louis Jacobs, Marcus Denovan, Wright Gatewood, Louis Michaels, Richard Marskovitz & Ryan Demme.

Family will receive friends from 6 to 7 p.m., Friday, at the funeral home.

Arrangements under the direction of McKnight Funeral Home, Boise City.

They began that day in the file room. A row of silent ivory-beige cabinets, little terracotta warriors, roasted under the white fluorescent lights. They made Ryan Sean Witt nervous, and he did not hear what Rachel was telling him. Organized by fiscal year? Alphabetical? What she was saying sounded important, but Ryan watched instead as her left hand tore open a cabinet and then how the fore and middle fingers of her right hand seemed to walk like legs to the back of the cabinet, pulling out laminated graphics. One after another. Northern Oklahoma College spelled out in a 'kissy' carmine serifed font. Photos of students laughing and laying in the grass. Last years recruitment campaign. The fundraising campaign the year before that. Some of it good. Most of it just okay. All seemingly done in-house, of course. 

More important stuff she was saying. More failed efforts to pay attention. Because, after all, there was the arch of her neck, Ryan noticed, and the way it dangled like a swan's up and over the cache of photos, graphic logos, brochures & flyers, as though looking at them were painful. As though she were straining her neck to see them from some removed vantage point. Some safe place high above.

'Well,' she said. 'I guess that about does it.' Her soft blue eyes were misty, and when she shut the drawer Ryan thought he saw her linger slowly over it. 'I'll leave you to it then.' She smiled and strode out the door. Ryan noticed that she took a photo with her.

He supposed they wanted him to get the feel for it. Icon templates. Branding strategies. Visual messaging. He was the new guy, expected to come in and take it up exactly where it'd been left off. A relay game with a predecessor whose face he'd never see and name he'd never know. Of course none of the hundreds of pages of material lining these cabinets was signed. Who, after all, would think to put their name to NOC's Kosher Menu. What would it even mean to take credit for such a thing--this innocuous piece of 5x11 cardstock--no matter how ingeniously laid out and sleekly designed?

The file room was like a crypt. A mausoleum. Nothing moved or changed. The faces staring back were blank and anonymous. Lord knows how many graphic artists had proceeded Ryan to this spot. All homogenized, anonymized. A few years serving due deference to the vague uninspired corporate logo. The vestal virgins of Northern Oklahoma College, constantly in attendance to some limp, dispossessed icon.

His wife--Tracy, an ER nurse at Blackwell--told him once about these caves in France where prehistoric folks hung out, did drugs and painted animals on the wall. They say the caves are over 15,000 years old or something. And that they were painted over the course of 5000 years. 5000 years and not a single signature or monogram. Generation after generation of anonymous people coming to those walls. It wasn't the painter who was eternal. Nor was it the painting. It was the wall. The hard rock that would outlast them all. The permanence of the canvas, for which the work was but an occasion.

Ryan was still new to this. A stranger in a strange land. By no means native to the world of color, structure, aesthetics and choice. 'Form' and 'content' were still a little tough for him to hold onto. Too airy. Too 'not there.' At thirty-eight, he had spent the better part of twenty years working with his daddy for Ryerson Metals right there in Little Rock. 

But Tracy thought it'd be a dead end before long, so she made him get an Associates Degree from the local community college. She said he should do something with computers. So he picked graphic design out of the course catalog without even asking an advisor what it was. Not that he regretted it or anything. Sure as shit the plant shut down after the crash, and suddenly clicking on a mouse and wearing a button up dress shirt didn't sound so bad after all. Sure, it didn't pay worth a damn, but Tracy made decent money, and it let him be at home with his two girls.

Still, if a fella some quarter after midnight in a tonk out west asked Ryan what his trade was, he wouldn't stop to think. 'Metal,’ he’s say. And leave it at that.

The lifestyle change admittedly made Ryan a little fidgety. He never quite knew what to do with his hands, which felt so empty all the time. Listless. Soft. He found himself doing all sorts of weird things. Making little paperclip men at his desk. Offering to help delivery guys carry in heavy boxes of office supplies. Taking apart the sink in the kitchenette to fix a clog. Anything that got him up. That made him feel concrete again.

Ryan hadn't been sleeping well ever since he and Tracy came to Tankawa. They were too far north now from the Ouachitas, and there was something about sleeping on the flat prairie that felt tight in his chest. That, and he swore he could smell the mud of the Salt Fork at night. Like earthworms and black mold, he'd say.

Back at his desk, Ryan notices a strange feeling emanating out from his office chair. It's been there all week really. More or less since he started. Ryan wouldn't know how to describe it. A sort of smog or density. In the air but also 'in' things. First and foremost, it’s in the silence of his swivel chair with its broken gas cylinder. And also in the pull in the carpet from where someone had rolled the chair's back wheel too many times. It's in the permanent coffee stain on the desk, but also in the strange carvings in the side wood paneling of his desk.

And everyone seems to feel it, too. Rachel, sitting to his left. And the old guy (whose name he hasn't learned yet and who rarely ever looks up from his copy editing). Both of them can feel it. He sees it in their eyes when he catches them staring. Right before they avert their gaze and pretend to be busy at something. It’s a kind of…intensity. A balled up fist in the air, squeezing so hard it’s jagged fingernails start to draw blood out from the calloused palm. This fist is in the air somehow. And they’re all making it.

The Director of Marketing (his name is Dan) strums over, but Ryan doesn’t notice at first. There’s an address of sorts, but it’s not Ryan’s name, and Ryan doesn’t quite catch what he says because almost as soon as it’s out of Dan’s mouth, he swallows it back up again. But Rachel hears him, and she stares sharply into the corner of the room for a second, as though it were moving. It takes a moment for everything to settle again. The fist gets tighter.

‘We need some pictures taken of the new track and field facility.’ There’s a sullen disappointment in his voice. Not directed toward Ryan (i.e. not targeted or explicit) but latent (i.e. folded back into the request itself). ‘Think you can handle that?’ ‘Yeah,’ Ryan says. ‘I think I got that.’ ‘Good. It’s just east of the quad. Can’t miss it. The facilities guy Chuck Tolliber will meet you there.’

Ryan grabs the digital camera, stashed (unbeknownst to him) in his own desk drawer and makes his way to the front door. All four members of the college marketing team are crammed into a little corner office in the campus’s main service center. One foot outside the door, and the fist starts to ease its grip. Further down the hall, past the two old ladies standing at the coffee pot, who lean in and whisper as he walks by. Releases a little more. Past the front secretary, chatting on her cellphone. Toward the stained glass of the entry hall (a little more) and out out out into the quad where the students are smiling and the sun is warm and everyone everywhere sits easily in an open palm. Ryan breathes for what he swears is the first time all day.

The camera’s a bit old. A 2007 Canon EOS 6D DSLR. Ryan used one of these in some of his visual communication classes. He’s playing with some of the buttons, trying to get a feel for it again, when he looks up and finds he’s at the track and field facility, basically an open air field with some concrete stadium seating, surrounded entirely with a seven foot chainlink fence. If it’s ‘new,’ it’s been ‘new’ for a while now. At side gate there’s an old guy with long, sinewy black hair and a hooked nose, smoking a rolled cigarette. He makes a hacking noise as watches Ryan approach. ‘Back again so soon, eh?’ It’s the kind of comment that lingers with Ryan, who’s left vaguely confused, but in some surreal way. Like he were in an episode of Twin Peaks. The confusion of something being displaced and uncanny, yet logically inconsequential. 

The guy opens the gate and Ryan steps onto the field. He notices scoreboard, which looks as though it just got a new coat of paint. And the press box has been recently resided. But there are cracks and water damage in the tartan track surrounding the field, and the field is in need of a mowing along the corners. It’s suddenly overcast outside. Maybe it had been, and Ryan hadn’t noticed. 

Ryan turns the camera on, but when he brings it up to shoot, he’s looking at the selfsame scoreboard, only it’s suddenly sunny. He stops. He’s looking at a picture still saved on the hard drive. He scrolls through hard drive. There are several photos of the scoreboard. And of the press box. The seats. Ground level pictures of the track. All of them dated just three months prior. Somebody was just out here.

There are other photos, too. Dozens and dozens. Shirtless track stars, sprinting, sweating in the warm sun. Clusters of college girls laughing, head on hands, leaning in to one another, strewn about the stadium seats. A couple facility guys in beige, rumpled uniform shirts and khaki shorts. One of them’s on a riding lawn mower, the other hunched over laughing. Ryan scrolls back. From the first photo to the last, the timestamps say whoever was out here was here for the better part of three hours. That’s dedication, thinks Ryan.

Rain drops started to fall. Slowly. Little pellets across the breadth of Ryan’s massive shoulders. Someone had been this way before, and suddenly Ryan didn’t quite know what he was doing there. He thought about the Ryerson factory back home, liquidated, empty and now entirely silent. He thought about his daddy, and his granddaddy who both worked there. He thought about the file room and the coffee stain and the snag in the carpeting. If you had asked him--in that moment--his own name, he wouldn’t have known. Or been able to summon it. Or even thought it mattered. Eventually the picture and the monogram blended together. Eventually the object assumes the signature, wraps it back into the fold. There is always that moment when the things we leave behind go back to being just things again.

I went down to the river,I set down on the bank.I tried to think but couldn't,So I jumped in and sank. 

- Langston Hughes

The autopsy of the body of Reynold Mathers is performed pursuant to Oklahoma Statute 406.11 by Aadhya Sengupta, MD, Associate Medical Examiner, District Seven at the Kay County Medical Examiner Facility, Newkirk, Oklahoma on April 28th, 2016 at 8:20am.

The diagnostic of drowning is described in the literature as one of the most difficult in the field of forensic medicine.

- Farrugia and Ludes

IDENTIFICATION: The body of Reynold Mathers is identified by a friend and neighbor, Elise Fitzpatrick. The identification is made to Deputy Marcus Dunne of the Kay County Sherrif's Office on April 27th, 2016 at 7:24pm at the Kay County Medical Examiner Facility.CLOTHING AND VALUABLES: At the time of the examination, the decedent is dressed in a gray button-up dress shirt, white cotton undershirt, blue boxer shorts & gold-toed black socks. The pocket of the dress shirt is torn, and holes are present in the heel and toe of the right sock. A yellow metal ring is on the 5th digit of the left hand. Received with the body are black footwear. The oral cavity contains two clear/transparent orthodontic alignments with the inscriptions 'Invisalign, 377171, L0N and 377171 U06N.'GENERAL STATEMENT: The body is that of a well-developed, well-nourished approximately 69 inch, 140 lb., adult, white male consistent with the reported age of 28.

Many years ago, my old teacher, Henry Littlejohn, used to describe how painless and easy a death by drowning was—'like falling about in beautiful green fields in early summer'— this flashed across my brain at the time, and I said to myself, 'Poor old devil, Littlejohn—scarcely so accurate that time.' The 'gulping' process became more frequent for about ten efforts, and hope was then extinguished.

- James Lowson, 'Sensations in Drowning' (1903)

The scalp is covered by up to 14 cm of brown hair. The irides are brown and the sclerae are white. The conjunctivae have no petechiae. The external nose has no trauma, and the nasal septum is intact. The teeth are natural and in adequate condition.

The torso has no congenital deformities, scars or tattoos. The external genitalia is that of an adult male. The anus is normal.

The body has a post-mortem abrasion over the forehead, over prominent points of the face including the right cheekbone and the chin, both right and left pectoralis major and the right trapezius. There are also lacerations on the backs of both hands and the fronts of the lower legs.

Skin maceration is visible, most profoundly on the fingertips, palms, backs of the hands, and the soles of the feet. The thick keratin of hands and feet is loose, and able to be pulled off in 'glove and stocking fashion'. Nails and hair are loosened. There is significant mud and silt on the body and underneath the nails of the hand and feet, consistent with the opinion of drowning although not conclusive.

The sphenoid sinuses contain approximately 5 ml of fluid.

When a person falls into water, he sinks partly due to the force of the fall, and partly to the specific gravity of the body. Shortly afterwards, he rises to the surface due to the natural buoyancy of the body. In sudden immersion into cold water, the victim may take a deep inhalation of water due to reflex stimulation of the skin. He may hold his breath for varying periods until the CO2 in his blood and tissues reaches sufficient levels to stimulate the respiratory center.

At that time, an inevitable inhalation of water may occur. When he cries for help and struggles, he is likely to inhale water, which produces coughing and drives out [a] large volume of  air out [the] lungs, and leads to disturbance of the rhythm of the breathing.

The victim may vomit and aspirate some gastric contents. His struggle increases and again he sinks. If this occurs during inspiration, he will inhale more water. The cerebral hypoxia will continue until it is irreversible and death occurs. With warm water, cerebral anoxia becomes irreversible between 3 to 10 minutes. Consciousness is usually lost within 3 minutes of submersion.

The struggle for life with rising and sinking of the body goes on for a variable period, depending on the vitality of the person, until he remains submerged. Convulsive movements then occur, followed by coma or suspended animation and death.

-Dr. Dinesh Rao's Forensic Pathology

In consideration of the circumstances surrounding the death, and after examination of the body, and toxicology analysis, it is my opinion that the death of Reynold Mathers, a 28 year old white male, is the result of drowning.The manner of death is accident.

I can’t listen to you. I can’t listen to your voice. It’s as though I’d drunk a bottle of anise and fallen asleep wrapped in a quilt of roses. It pulls me along – and I know I’m drowning – but I go on down. 

- Federico García Lorca

‘By morning  you’ll be gone. I’ll wait. But bring [unintelligible] next time. - R.M.’

It was in a hurried script, written with a fine-tip sharpie on the back of a playing card. The Jack of Spades. Clearly old, it had been deliberately kept out of site. Buried at the bottom of a small wooden box along with other sordid pieces of tchotchke, tickets to movies, childhood rosaries made of little plastic beads. Looking over the note and the contents of the box, Ellie could only giggle. A tiny piece of paraphernalia upon which the life now laying in the home hospital bed in the adjacent room invariably relied heavily upon. Were Ellie to bring the note to Mr. Louis Brandheist--now eighty-seven--what would he do? Would he recognize it immediately? Would he blush? Would he acknowledge who this mysterious woman was to him? Would he become angry? Would he cry even?

Sure she knew better, but nonetheless Elllie couldn't help but balk at. For although Ellie had not the words to express it, the note nonetheless represented everything that she found most contemptible in life. The anonymity. The placeless-ness. The out-of-sight-ness. All kept secrets. All indifferences. Items such as these were like currency from a foreign country. Holding it in her hand, she could feel how it might be valuable, but not in any open-air market she would visit. To her, it felt almost a threat. A challenge. An invocation even. Discreetly, Ellie slipped it into the back of her pink scrubs, and walked down the hall back toward Mr. Brandheist's room.

Ellie snooped through all the homes she visited. She figured if they were able to afford a private duty nurse like her, it meant they were rich. And Ellie assumed that rich people had no privacy. Or didn't care about privacy. Or at least not from people like her. It was like those shows on PBS. The ones with the house manors and all the servants running around. Nobody ever censured themselves in front of servants. Around people like her, she assumed, rich people would live openly and with immense privilege. Which is why she rifled through each of the seven chifforobes in the third floor bedrooms.

Mr. Louis Brandheist owned a trucking company in his younger days, but there was more than several pictures of a dashing young fellow in a big wheel (circa 2015 perhaps), so Ellie assumed he'd also driven at some point. A truck driver who opens his own trucking company. The story was at once inspirational and depressing, and she sighed as she listlessly circled the room, checking the dust on old picture frames in between monitoring Mr. Brandheist's air hunger.

Ellie had seen lots of people die before. She told people that the effects had worn off on her, but to be honest, she was never especially fazed by it. At the end of the day, death was a non-event to her. A party gone on too long. Having stood over the beds of innumerable dying patients, Ellie had noticed the way rooms slowly clear out right beforehand. Usually until there was only one or two left. And Ellie assumed life was overall much the same--a party with an ever-rotating guest list that went on until everyone else had left. She often spoke adoringly to friends of "other cultures" (none of which she could name) which venerated the process of dying. Which put the dying on pedestals or large monuments and made everyone in the village stand outside in the rain until the decedent was gone. She hoped people might sell tickets to hers. That she'd be put in a glass casket like Snow White and embalmed like Lenin.

Ellie hovered over the barely breathing body and gently tapped the sack of morphine dripping down the catheter into Mr. Brandheist's veins. Soon he'd be dead, she thought. What will he be taking with him? The utter specificity of a life. The singular occasion of a person's time and place. The profound lack of other eyes with which to see the world. And yet even as we walk through this life--an unparalleled thing crashing into an unrepeatable moment--we continue to wrap the mantle of a shared humanity closer around our freezing shoulders. What are we so afraid of? We'd sooner be unconscious and asleep together than conscious and awake alone. And at this moment, wherever he was, Mr. Louis Brandheist was finding this out. That he had come all that way in search of a commonality--a friend, a partner, a yogi--only to find that the only end any of us ever came to was the end of ourselves. And that when we withdrew, we withdrew the only thing that was ever of any value. Our sole piece of it. Even if we did not merge into celestial heaven, we eventually would all withdraw into singular obsolescence. And who at that point, Ellie wondered, twirling her hair, would be able to tell the difference?

Ellie thought back to her horrid father and the way she felt when he died. Half crazy and drunk and shivering along that river. He'd no one in his life who gave a shit about him by that point. Everyone else was dead or gone or had forgotten entirely about him. And deservedly so. Still, he'd had a hard one in his own right. So when his heart burst beneath his chest, Ellie took a moment to shut his eyes and send him off to the sleep he'd always craved. He lived now only in her. Our last repository isn't an urn or a shallow grave. It's in the subjective impressions of those we leave behind, and it's to them we have the most tenuous of holds. Who would be gone forever with Mr. Brandheist? Who would history and all the cosmos wipe clean from the slate with his passing? Each of us dies twice.

It would not take long for Mr. Brandheist. Ellie noticed the way his cool, gray-toned specter of a wife hovered noiselessly around the house, whispering on the phone and avoiding the windows, grimacing behind her sunglasses and cutting checks. There would be no love lost. But love was hardly necessary, for the dead live on as love and pain. We are rewarded in the afterlife not for our virtue but for our effect.

Ellie was going to be star. The only reason she was sticking it out in her shitty one bedroom condominium in Silver Lake was so that she could make it big. Not that she was actively trying anymore. She'd not been on an audition in nine months. But Ellie had stopped believing that effort and focus resulted in anything. Especially in this city. Here it was luck. All of it. And luck could find her anywhere, even checking under the blankets for bed sores on Mr. Brandheist's legs. Tucking the blanket back under the mattress, she stole a glimpse of her reflection in the metal rails along the bedside. She winked to herself and checked for lipstick on her teeth. The silver screen was all that would save her.

Within two days, Mr. Brandheist would be dead. What remains of the note from R.M.--which had been conspicuously left in Ellie's scrub pocket, run through the wash and destroyed--sits in a landfill in Glendale.

In the year 2169 an old man by the name of Michael Lundin--aged 84--will trip and fall indecorously down the staircase of his Dubuque home, and with him will pass out of time and space the last living memories of Eleanor Kampf, his grandmother and a hospice nurse who worked in the greater Los Angeles area most of her life and who had died alone of a stroke shortly after Michael turned four.

Krystal McNaster is twenty-one years old. Her face is tight. Her lips are perky. Her skirt is short. Krystal's assets are not unknown to her, but she nonetheless thinks of them as a common enough means of exchange. Her Aunt Liza sang country for a three-piece group down in Baton Rouge. She had a big chest voice, and she knew how to really "feel" a song. Aunt Liza used to say that men always give what they're asked for. And her pushup bra meant she could ask without ever having to open her mouth. And her mother, well, her mother never thought she need anything bad enough to ask for it.

But the point is, Krystal saw firsthand how looks opened doors. How looks paid the bills. How looks picked up dinner. For Krystal, a world with 'looks' was magical. Populated with invisible spirits by whose good graces she was universally adored. A little rouge her and a little lipstick there was the least she could do. Krystal put on eyeliner the way some people say 'thank you.'

Krystal lived with her parents for the first sixteen years of her life. It was...surreal. Her mother lived in conditions of third-world scarcity, right there in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A housewife. Both of them were first-general Polish immigrants. Her dad was a machinist, and toward Krystal he was a figurehead. A masthead. He who commandeered the rough seas and the ragged winds. He was Prospero to her Miranda, and they seemed to occupy a special place--the two of them--together. Her every interest was safe with him. Her every secret, an untouched bloom. They were very happy.

To her mother, Krstal's father exhibited a cool sort of patience, a seriousness and an observant distance. Krystal does not remember her father ever saying more than three words to her mother the entire sixteen years she lived there. Not that they would have been well-received. Krstyal's mother, despite being a middle class housewife in the middle of the hot plains, lived in conditions of economic scarcity found more readily in the third-world. Her clothes were rags, and her shoes a pair of broken, muddly flats held together on the bottom with a few pieces of duct tape. Her hair was raged and streaked with dead, gray tendrils sprouting from her dry scalp. Her teeth were rotting slowly. And she bit her nails nearly to the stub.

For the most part, her mother made the meals and cleaned the house and did the laundry. She didn't have hobbies or friends. She had a mother and a sister back in Poland, and every once in a while, Krystal would see the phone wire strung underneath the closest beneath the stairs. And pressing her ear to the door, she could hear her mother speaking Polish in a heated and hushed way.

Let it not be said that Krstyal and her mother didn't get along. They did. But her mother never said anything to her that might have led Krstyal believe that her mother possessed a personal interiority. Rather everything she said was a more or less record of her impressions. She could thus only speak of things which were within immediate reach, either chronologically or conceptually and even literally. Everything she said had the fevered rush of the penitent, a hurried confession of every fleeting moment. There was therefore no time to consider what had transpired a moment ago or what might be coming immediately down the road, two directions Krysal's mother never wished to look. So Krystal and her mother would sit cross-legged in bed and, like sisters, braid each other's hair and scratch each other backs. And Krystal would tell her mother all about her day. Her mother gave the best hugs, desperate, tenacious, like being shrink-wrapped.

Krystal never saw a single act of violence in her home. Nor did she ever hear a raised voice. Krystal never witnessed an argument or ear a single displaced tear. It was a beautiful life.

But naturally, as Krystal became a certain age and as she started to make other little girls as friends, she soon realized that her situation was different. Her home, strange. For to Krsytal, her friend's mothers seemed rude. They talked too much. And drank too much. And complained bitterly about their husbands sitting next to them. Even at a young age, it struck Krystal as somehow 'disorderly,' and dinner conversation at her friend's homes often made Krystal anxious and wanting to go home early. And when she'd get home, she'd run into the kitchen, wrap her arms around her mother and kiss her a thousand times over, saying all the ways in which her mother was the best mother and not at all like Jeannie William's mother, who talked too much and brayed after two glasses of wine and made Jeannie's father cry at dinner tonight. And while she was telling her mother all this, Krystal took note of her father, wrapping his fingers steadily on the kitchen table, sitting up straight in his chair, and smiling.

But the older we get, the wider the circle, and in middle school, Krystal began to notice how people treated her differently. And not just the kids, although they were, too. The girls in Krystal's class wouldn't stop smizing at her and had a tendency (without most of them even knowing it) of lifting their noses in Krystal's presence. The boys, for their part, kept their distance. Not for Krystal's lack of allure, which even she understood by comparison to be...well developed. But as though she weren't even there. As though she were on the other side of some wall. But even the adults looked at differently. The women teachers refused to make eye contact with her, and the male faculty, well...they were very much like the male student body.

One day, Jeannie Sterling, whom she had known for a decade, came out with it: So what's wrong with your mom, Krstal?

The question visibly shocked her and in some way took her elsewhere. Krstal would afterword compare those first few moments upon hearing Jeannie's question as though she were underwater, in that she could readily discern the surrounding shapes of her high school's football field--its scoreboard and press box and bleachers. But everything was distorted, bleeding one thing into another. A picture from a child's coloring book where the child has refused to color within the lines.

What do you mean, Krystal asked.

Nothing. Nothing, forget about it.

Krsystal didn't. Instead she spent the next few weeks dutifully observing her parents, an activity which in and of itself nearly wreaked total and utter havoc. For Krystal had never stopped to notice before now how much and how consistently she had always inserted herself into every available silence that arose between her parents. How uncritically she had accepted their attentions. No matter how facile her point or aimless her story. So one night Krystal didn't. And her father would ask for a roll from the basket, and her mother would pass the basket, and where there would afterwards be a ruckus of noise from Krystal, there was at those moments, only renewed silence. A heated silence. A silence which was not just the absence of talking, but almost an unraveling of something almost said. Those moments frightened her and seemed to frighten everyone at the table, who no sooner caught wind to its being there, would make some comment to Krystal, who was expected without hesitation to pick it up and run.

But why...? What at this table accounted for it? What had her mother done...?

When Krystal turned 16, she understood. She packed her bags that night and left. No note. No warning. No nothing. She walked herself to the highway and got in the first pickup that came close enough.

The years that immediately followed were unproductive to Krystal, which is how she described them now to adults and to officiates of varying kind when called upon. And what made them all for worse was that they had not been a precipitous decline into darkness. In fact, they had at first been what would always be over the whole course of Krystal's short and frustrated life, among the happiest years of her life. But also characteristic of said period, was Krystal's inability to know when to leave. To linger too late the party. Too dance too long after midnight. The quixotic quest for the final last word. And before long the best years became the worst. And the worst became the worser.

Until finally at the tender age of twenty, Krystal returned home. Her parents both wept for joy at seeing her, and she them. But at dinner, when Krystal quietly suggested her parents consider a divorce...well, it did not go over well. The police were eventually called, and Krystal's father was taken away for a few days. During that time, Krystal's mother went missing. She did not pack a bag or leave a note (in fact, Krystal was never entirely sure that her mother was even literate). She was just gone.

Krystal was not home when her father returned from jail. Instead, she got on a random bus to Boise City, and found herself a job selling scratch offs at a honkey tonk. Thank god pretty was acceptable currency just about everywhere. Krystal did finally get herself her GED. And then at the tender age of twenty-one, Krystal started her freshman year at Tulsa Community College.

Which is what brings Krystal here. To this moment. To this moment right here, sitting at the Ringside Roller Rinks, wearing a sweater and lacing up a pair of roller skates. Her date's name is George, and she and George went to high school together.

George always said he preferred to live his life "from inside out." No one ever really knew what the hell he meant by that, and anyways, no one ever really paid all that much attention to George to begin with. He wasn't the smartest guy in the class. And he certainly wasn't the best looking, although Krystal remembered him fondly for occasionally making eyes at her during biology, although he swore he never did any such thing, and at any rate, he never paid much attention to hallway gossip. 'I can't be expected to form an opinion on everything that doesn't effect me.'

George liked to read in school, and when the weather was permitting, he used to go to the darkened high school football field, jump the fence, and read by candlelight from the fifty yard line. He found it all sort of subversive in a no-one-will-ever-know-but-me sort of way. A way to own or claim something that wasn't never meant to be his anyway. Not that he was reading Dostoevsky or anything like that. Mostly thick mass market paperbacks in possession of covers with illustrated gnomes and dragons and whatnot.

And yes, on occasion, the pretty girl with the blonde ringlets and the Persian green eyes who everyone scored and laughed at and wondered about would come into his mind. She would come into his mind and linger the way smoke lingers at the end of a cigarette, wrapping round itself through itself into itself and then off into the sky, dissipating into the night. And when this girl's face would wander into his mind's eye, it was generally his habit to turn over and to look out and up at the stars which in those days wrapped themselves around the field like a fish eye mirror and to put his arms back behind his neck and to think about what it would be like to know her. But not in a weird way. Just to know her like you would know anybody, which always struck George as a queer idea, given the impossibility of ever really knowing anyone.

There's a splash in the Chikaskia, and where there were none before, there are now ripples of black night water fluttering out and over the surface. And the whole river seems to take one big breath in...but not out. But the river holds it, waiting for something to come up again. Waiting for a response.

A tiger owl turns at the sound of the river disturbed. Three field mice take the opportunity to scuttle from one bush to the next. A fawn one quarter mile away, already on her way to drink, is unperturbed at the sound.

The ripple does not make it to the west bank of the river, petering out into smooth cream-like folds along the water's face. But into the east bank, the ripples gently billow, rustling the shoreline's deposit of black silt. The ripples reach gently across the line and pull back into the dark abyss a few grains of sand and rough clay.

There is at this moment silence. Silence stretching in every direction. Not waiting silence. Or expectant silence. Or pregnant silence. But an archaic silence. With deep roots. That goes down to the bottom of the Chikaskia River. Which knows no bounds. Knows nothing foreign to itself. And knows no names.