Free This is the Water by Yannick Murphy Page B

you have to do is go get in the car with Thomas, and go home, and at night, after he has patted your hand, and after images of your brother have paraded in front of you, all you have to do is sleep.
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    A t breakfast alone the next morning when Thomas has left for work and the girls are upstairs, you are bent over. Hunched, you are folding in on yourself while you eat your raisin bran, thinking about how you aren’t supposed to think about the death of your brother since there’s no forgiving him and no getting mad at him, there’s just no more him. You don’t have the energy to lift your head up. It’s not the weight of the world pressing down you feel so much. It’s more like the weight of the world is sucking you down from below, pulling you into its fiery reaches, its melting core. The raisin bran tastes like cigar ash, and you think you’ve swallowed a bug.
    This is you calling Chris, feeling bad that she’s upset about Paul, and asking if she’ll be driving to the next swim meet, and wanting her to come, telling her how nice the facility is, how even the hotel is nice. You know because you’ve been there before, for meets in the previous years. This is Chris saying, “No, I’m letting Paul take Cleo. At least he’ll be with Cleo, so seeing the woman he’s having an affair with won’t be an option.”
    This is you coming home that evening after picking up the girls from practice and after a meeting with a potential client in a café to discuss her wedding-day photo shoot. You tell Thomas, while the girls go upstairs, and he’s reading at the kitchen table because there he can bask in the last light of the day, how this client wants all of her photos done in black-and-white, even if it’s a bright sunny day and even though her wedding sounds riotous with color—tangerine-colored bridesmaids dresses and tiger lily centerpieces on all of the tables and ring bearers in fuchsia. “Isn’t black-and-white cheaper? She sounds practical to me,” Thomas says, and then he tells you about the article he’s reading, about people who are hypersensitive. The slightest touch hurts them. The slightest noise deafens them, and they can’t help it. It’s in their genes. You wonder, while Thomas reads to you from the article, if he’s ever noticed the picture of your own wedding day framed on the wall in your bedroom, in direct view from where you lie on the bed, where it can be seen first thing when you both open your eyes, and last thing before you turn off the light. In the picture your bridesmaids are in red, holding bright red bouquets of roses, everything contrasting nicely against the white lace of your dress and Thomas’s black tux. In the picture your lips are the same red as the bridesmaids’ dresses and your cheeks are flushed red from all the excitement of the day. You think how much of the color would be lost if the photo were in black-and-white. The red of the bridesmaids’ dresses just looking dark, and the white of your dress looking colder, not as warm as it does beside the red dresses. In black-and-white Thomas’s tux would just be dark like the red dresses, nothing setting him apart from the bridesmaids at all, as if Thomas matched them, as if he had been more connected to them than he was to you on that day. This is you noticing how when the sun has gone down completely, Thomas still works at the kitchen table. In the growing dark, his outline becomes more solid, his light-brown hair now almost black, a different man altogether than the one you married. These are the girls coming into the room, Alex whistling and Sofia turning on lights, changing the mood very quickly. Thomas’s hair now light brown again, his eyes flecked with sparkling green. Pans get banged around in the shelves because Sofia is starving as usual and wants to bake herself cookies. Alex turns the radio on loud. The dog comes to