The Ammonite Violin & Others Read Online Free Page B

some part of the murky, indivisible whole. There are gnarled old willows growing close together, here and there along the shore, trees planted when my grandmother was a young woman. They lean out across the pool like patient fishermen, casting limp green lines leaf-baited for fish that have never been and will never be.
    No one much comes here anymore. Perhaps they never did. I suspect most people in the city don’t even know the park exists, steep-sided and unobtrusive, hidden on three sides behind the stately Edwardian-era houses along Euclid Avenue, Elizabeth Street, and Waverly Way. The fourth side, the park’s dingy north edge, is bordered by an ugly redbrick apartment complex built sometime in the seventies, rundown now and completely at odds with everything else around it. I wonder how many grand old houses were sacrificed to the sledgehammers and bulldozers to make room for that eyesore. Someone made a lot of money off it once, I suppose. But I’m already letting myself get distracted. Already, I’m indulging myself with digressions that have no place here. Already, I’m trying to look away.
    Last spring, they found the boy’s body near the small stone bridge spanning one end of the pool, the end farthest from the brick apartment complex. Back that way, there are thick bunches of cattails and a few sickly water lilies and other aquatic plants I don’t know names for. I’ve seen the coroner’s report, and I know that the body was found floating face up, that the lungs were filled with water, that insects had done a lot of damage before someone spotted the corpse and called the police. No one questioned that the boy had drowned, and there was no particular suspicion of foul play. He had an arrest record—shoplifting, drugs and solicitation. To my knowledge, no one ever bothered to ask how he might have drowned in such shallow water. There are ways it could happen, certainly. He slipped and struck his head. It might have been as simple as that.
    No one mentioned the hoofprints, either, but I have photographs of them. The tracks of a large unshod horse pressed clearly into a patch of red mud near the bridge, sometime before the boy’s body was pulled from the pool. You don’t see a lot of horses in this part of town. In fact, you don’t see any. I’m writing this like it might be a mystery, like I don’t already know the answers, and that’s a lie. I’m not exactly a writer. I’m a photographer, and I don’t really know how one goes about this sort of thing. I’m afraid I’m not much better with confessions.
    I could have started by explaining that I happen to own one of those old houses along Euclid, passed down to me from my paternal grandparents. I could have begun with the antique bridle, which I found wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket, hidden at the bottom of a steamer trunk in the attic, or... I could have started almost anywhere. With my bad dreams, for example, the things I only choose to call my bad dreams out of cowardice. The dreams—no, the dream , singular, which has recurred too many times to count, and which is possibly my shortest and most honest route to this confession.
    (No, I didn’t kill the boy, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m no proper murderess. It’ll never be so simple as that. This is a different sort of confession.)
    In the dream, I’m standing alone on the little stone bridge, standing there stark naked, and the park is washed in the light of a moon that is either full or very near to full. I have no recollection of getting out of bed, or of having left the house, or of the short walk down to the bridge. I’m cold, and I wonder why I didn’t at least think to wear my robe and slippers. I’m holding the bridle from the trunk, which is always much heavier than I remember it being. Something’s moving in the water, and I want to turn away. Always, I want to turn away, and when I look down I see that the drowned boy floating in the water smiles up at me and