Arrow Rock Literary Journal

I. EMERGENCE

I still can’t sleep when it rains.
Something about the way water hits the roof
makes me think of your body hitting water.

The sound your skull must have made
cracking against limestone before the quarry
swallowed what was left.

The summer we were seventeen
I used to watch you standing at the quarry edge.
Your jean cuffs rolled, cigarette hanging
from those lips that would later
turn blue, split open, feed the fish.
You’d drop rocks and count seconds until they hit water.
One Mississippi,

Two Mississippi,

Three Mississippi, dead.

We found cicada shells everywhere that summer.
Their translucent bodies burst open along the spine,
emptied husks still clinging to bark
like tiny corpses crucified.
I crushed them under my thumb just to feel
something hollow collapse.

God, we were fucking invincible then.
Immortal in that way only kids are
before they understand how easily a body breaks—

II. SEVENTEEN YEARS OF SILENCE

There’s a theory about memory—
how each time you remember something
you’re actually remembering the last time
you remembered it, not the thing itself.
So maybe I didn’t see your fingernails
torn and bloody from clawing at limestone.

Maybe I didn’t hear that wet, sucking sound
as they finally pulled you from the water,
Skin sloughing off like wet paper.

Marcus got married last year.
Has two kids now. A boy and a girl.
His laugh still sounds the same,
but there’s gray in his beard.
He jerks awake sometimes, gasping.
His wife told me once, thinks he’s drowning.

Sarah became a nurse. Works in pediatrics.
I wonder if she ever sees a child’s cracked lips
and thinks of your mouth, how it gaped open,
how the coroner wired it shut for the funeral.
She moves every three years. Runs from something
she refuses to name.

As for me—
I stayed. Someone had to guard the ghosts.
I’ve memorized the autopsy report.
Water in the lungs. Blunt force trauma.
Blood alcohol level twice the legal limit.
Official ruling: accidental death.

But accidents don’t leave fingernail scratches
on the cliff face,
do they?

The missing are always perfect in photographs.
But I remember the pimple on your chin that last night.
How you picked it until it bled.
How the scab is probably still there,
preserved somewhere in the silt at the quarry bottom,
a tiny constellation of your DNA
that refuses to dissolve.

III. RESURRECTION

Your mother stopped me in the grocery store yesterday.
First time we’ve spoken in years.
Her hands now gnarled like exposed roots,
fingernails bitten to bloody crescents.

She asks if I heard the cicadas starting to sing.
Says, “Seventeen years. Can you believe it?”
I can’t. And yet my body remembers—

the weight of your arm around my shoulders,
how it felt to help carry your casket,
the unexpected lightness.

She leaned close. I could smell her breath,
sour with secrets kept too long.
Said, “You know, he left a note. We never told anyone.”

I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t ask.
Just stared at the blue veins in her temple
pulsing like something trying to escape.

Now the new generation claws its way up.
Their red eyes blind from seventeen years underground.
They tear through their own backs to emerge,
leave behind skins like crime scene outlines.
They scream until their organs rupture.
All that waiting for a few weeks of desperate noise.

Was it worth it, I wonder, as I trace the scar
on my forearm, the one that matches yours.
Blood pact made with rusty pocket knives.
We thought mixing blood made us brothers.
Didn’t understand how infections work,
How some things, once inside you, never leave.

We’re meeting at the quarry tonight.

I’ve already swallowed enough whiskey
to sterilize my courage.
In my pocket,
your shoelace
a faded photograph:
your face already half-turned away,
as if you knew what was coming.

Maybe this time I’ll find the nerve
to tell them what I saw. Your hands,
not slipping but letting go. The way you looked
not down at the water but back at me first,
your eyes asking a question I’ve spent
seventeen years refusing to answer.

The cicadas are screaming for mates
that might already be dead.
Their bodies will litter the ground soon,
rot-sweet in summer heat,
picked clean by ants until only wings remain
translucent as the lies we’ve told ourselves.
I trace the edge of the quarry limestone.

It crumbles like teeth.
Something scuttles across my knuckles.
A cicada, freshly emerged, still soft.
I could crush it. Should crush it.
Instead, I let it climb into the air,
And allow it to scream in the darkness.

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Georgia Coomer is a senior at Lindenwood University pursuing an English degree with an emphasis in Creative Writing. Her poetry and prose have appeared in multiple publications, including The Albion Review. When she isn’t wrestling semi-colons into submission, she can be found playing the latest Persona game.