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FICTION

Of Evie, I Dream

By Samantha Kathryn O’Brien     VOLUME 57 No. 3


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It’s month seven of my husband thinking he killed a woman he didn’t kill, couldn’t have killed, and now we are in therapy. He has this dream where he smashes a rock over her head, her skull splitting open like a rotten watermelon. And another where she’s crossing a stream, wobbling precariously on the loose wet stone, and he pushes. And countless others, versions of her death where he’s responsible, so vivid and visceral that he’s convinced himself they’re memories. When he’s lucky, she’s oblivious. She’s trodding along and humming, her skirt hiked up to her knees, unaware of the great bulk of him behind her. When she goes, it’s good and quiet.

“And when you aren’t lucky?” says Dr. Mettle.

My husband’s face goes dark here. He’s in the bad place. We don’t have sex anymore, don’t go to parties. I rub the ball of my foot against his ankle to remind him of me, but his ankle doesn’t respond.

“I see the look on her face when she knows she’s about to die,” he says.



In a montage video that started circulating the internet after her death, former students remember Evangelina “Evie” Grieve fondly for incorporating fun, alternative methods of learning in the classroom: listening to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon to frame their analyses of The Catcher in the Rye, beginning each class circled up on the floor in silence before Evie would strike the meditation bowl, letting a deep, melodious note reverberate throughout the classroom, followed by fifteen minutes of free-write. In the video, a student affectionately parrots the way she’d drift off in the middle of a sentence, with a faraway look in her eyes, before snapping herself back to Earth.

“What was I just saying?” the student imitates. “Can anyone tell me what I was just saying?”

Another student says that when Evie departed the living world, she could feel it.

“There was something wrong that night,” the student insists. “There was this brutal darkness. I went outside and looked at the sky and felt this terrible vacuum in my chest.”

A photo circled the internet in which she beams in a grassy field, alive. Her reddish-brown curls spill all over her shoulders, and atop her head is a big, wicker sun hat. Her skin is milky white as if she’d spent her entire life burrowed beneath the soil; she’s smiling thinly like she knows something, or like she’s already dead and is watching you lose your mind over it.

Evie was forty-two when her remains were found on the border of New Hampshire and Maine, a quarter of a mile off the Appalachian Trail. It was July; she’d started hiking in March, from the belly of Georgia in reckless pursuit of the Canadian border. The medical examiner ruled pre-death trauma or foul play “unlikely.” Aside from a trace of THC in her system, toxicology reports were clean. (We knew it! triumphed the vocal conservative faction of the school district’s moms and dads, parents who, while she was alive, frequently complained to the board about her unorthodox methods, demanding to know how, exactly, a close read of Led Zeppelin lyrics was meant to prepare their overindulged children for the AP Lit exam. She was on pot!) Her body, when found a couple of weeks after her death, was strangely well-preserved. Aside from a few scratches and bruises, she was unmaimed, and she’d assumed a peaceful aspect, her pale pink lips turned upward as if she’d lain down in the dirt and gone to sleep.

The day of her death was remembered by many as the hottest in years. So when the coroner ultimately declared her cause of death “exposure,” everyone in their right minds agreed that this made sense. In Coos County alone, six dogs were steamed alive in their locked cars, while their owners lingered too long in the soothing, arctic chill of grocery store refrigerator aisles. A ninety-three-year-old, retired art history professor fell asleep in his backyard reading and never woke up. Even my husband and I, who loved to live within kissing distance of death, experienced something like fear that day. We started hiking at sunrise, and by ten, we were sweating, bickering, and irritable—by noon, bent over and vomiting in the shade of a tree. We were dehydrated, so our vomiting was more convulsing and spitting, rocking ourselves back and forth on a riverbank. By two, our knees buckled. We sprawled beneath the shade of a tree, our brains throttling themselves against our skulls. Somehow, we hauled our bodies into town, where we sucked down Gatorade at a gas station, checked into a motel, showered, and lay awake for hours staring at the ceiling atop starchy, stained sheets. This felt like the height of luxury. On the other side of the mesh screen window, a cloud of mosquitoes, humming and thirsty.

The last people to see her alive, we were taken in for questioning, but it quickly became clear that there wasn’t a case against us. We had the hotel receipts, alibis from the diner where we gorged ourselves on chicken pot pies, and the movie theater where we caught a triple feature. Still, every night since the news broke, my husband has taken to waking in the night screaming, and if not screaming, crying, drenched in a cold sweat. In these horrible midnight moments, he’s convinced not only that he was the one who killed her, but that he’s killing her, again and again and again. It’s different every time, he explains to me in the breathless moments after waking, as we lie there in our sweat-soaked sheets. Sometimes he watches her drown; sometimes he drowns her. In one dream, she quietly and inexplicably dies in his arms, and I don’t know how to express to him that this makes me violently jealous. I try to remind him that for the 175 days we spent hiking the Appalachian Trail, we were never apart, hardly for an instant. Even our shits achieved remarkable synchronicity on the trail. Each morning at the same time, he and I squatted on opposite sides of the same row of trees. Together, we’d yowl as weeks of starchy, freeze-dried foods tore through our rectums.



I met my husband somewhere in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, a cascading moonscape of ice blues and frosted greens, a faint whistle of wind through skeletal shrubbery. In my memory of it, a turkey vulture is always spreading its wings and swooping, relentlessly pecking at some bloodied carcass. My ponytail is big and swingy, and my backpack is piled high above my head. My thighs are tan and muscular beneath black athletic shorts, and my tightly bound and bandaged feet scream for relief.

I started hiking to Canada from the Mexican border in March of that year. I was twenty-four years old; I left my waitressing job in LA to hike the Pacific Coast. A New Jersey girl by origins, I’d ended up in California after a fight with my father. He was remarrying a woman called Agnes, and as anyone who’s been the precious, only daughter of their single dad for their entire living memory will understand, this was no easy pill to swallow. The restaurant was the sort of nostalgic, seventies-style diner in which all the female waitstaff were expected to wear tight blonde bob wigs and short white dresses, gliding around the tiled floor on roller blades. I was really good at it; I felt it was practice for my real career, which was becoming a film actress. Right before I decided to hike the coast, I scored my first role in a commercial for erectile dysfunction medication in which I played an overly compassionate wife. After a day of filming, the director took me out for drinks. We sucked down Aperol spritzes in a hotel bar and retired to his room, where he fucked me brilliantly, mercilessly. At best he was average-looking, a middle-aged man with a paunch and a ring of gray hair around an otherwise bald head, but I was delighted to be fucking him. It was clear that he’d hand-selected me from the middling masses. With each impassioned thrust, he seemed to be expressing his conviction for me and my promise as a fledgling actress. In the breathless moments after, I asked him why he’d cast me. He paused, glancing at his left hand. With a jolt of pain, I realized, somehow for the first time, that he wore a gold band on his ring finger. He was stroking up and down my belly, which was doughier than usual, on account of the endless free milkshakes at the restaurant during shifts. I bristled, tightening my body beneath the sheets.

“Because you reminded me of my wife when she was young,” he said.



Hundreds of miles later, my bones protruded, my skin was tough and leathery, and my toenails, which had long since turned black, now oozed lime-green pus. Every step I took caused me to wince and yowl in pain. I started stopping every thirty minutes or so to remove my shoes and socks, then dunk my toes into the frigid alpine streams. The cold was so violent, so total, that it eliminated all sensation. I imagined the water as a knife, severing my toes at the stems, before carrying them away and away, down the stream.

“You know the only way to make the pain go away is to remove the toenails,” the man who would become my husband said. I lifted my head from the riverbank, over which I crouched and assessed him, approaching. He struck me as the same as every other male thru-hiker ever: thin as a rail, burnt, his greasy hair bunched in a low loose ponytail at the nape of his neck, dust-caked, his beard patchy and coarse.

“I know,” I said, faintly irritated. I’d grown accustomed to this on the trail, men doling out advice, certain I wouldn’t know how to pitch a tent or light a camp stove. “I would just rather not.”

He tilted his head side to side in a way that I couldn’t read, weighing his options. His alert green eyes lent him a startled quality, as if he’d been plucked from his alien planet and deposited here, and he was trying to figure out how, and when, and why.

“Do you want me to do it?” he said. “I’ve had to do it to myself before. It’s rough, but it’s worth it. Especially seeing as we’re a day and a half from town.”

I wanted nothing more than to say no thank you, to tell him off, but my feet screamed for relief. In the past week, every time I’d put my hiking shoes on, I’d yelped in pain, and the mere thought of having to do it again in a minute’s time made me want to cry.

“Will it hurt?” I said, stupidly.

He nodded. “But then it will feel so much better.”

Later, when recounting the story to friends and family, people would ask about the pain. My father, in particular, was addicted to hearing the story in the same sick way that people are addicted to picking at a scab, prodding the pink, vulnerable flesh beneath. He would twist his face up and ask, “Oh, but didn’t it hurt, my lamb?” He, who grew up poor and worked his entire life to give me everything, didn’t understand this hobby of mine, this pull toward self-deprivation, hiking for days on end, living off seeds, sleeping in the dirt.

And I suppose it did hurt, though I don’t remember anymore. I do remember watching the man who would become my husband—and yes, even that first day, I found myself possessed by the impossible conviction that we would marry, that any other outcome felt absurd—and the look of pure, placid calm on his face. He rolled out a sleeping pad for me to lie on and pulled various items out of his first aid kid: bandages, Bactine, and a horrible, industrial-looking set of tweezers. As he loosened my nails from their flesh-beds and dressed the bare, sensitive skin with cream and cotton and bandages, I trained my eyes on his face. Yes, he was calm, and there was something else there too: Joy, perhaps? Glee? His face glowed, like a child who’d been given permission to lick the cake batter off a spatula.

•     •     •


TO READ MORE FROM THIS STORY, PICK UP A COPY OF VOL 57 No. 3





SAMANTHA KATHRYN O’BRIEN is a lecturer at Cornell University, where she received her MFA. Her writing appears in Washington Square Review, Los Angeles Review, The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, Cagibi, and elsewhere.


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