Free Shelter (1994) by Jayne Anne Philips

in the dark of her something cracks, loud as the crack of a gun, keeps cracking apart. Parson shakes himself to be outside her again, watching, and in a moment he sees them, the two girls, on their knees at the edge of Turtle Hole. Frank has not seen them, he must be nearly sleeping, staring at the unbroken surface of the water.
    See how the water holds still, as though enclosed in glass, sheer as first ice. But the night air is warm, just cooling, and as Parson creeps closer, so close he can see her face, the other girl stands, silent, waiting for Frank to look at her. When he does, she kneels back into the reeds, and the taller one appears, nearly opalescent above the dark grasses. She has a face like stone, stone shaped by hand: the brow, the wide-set eyes, the straight nose and parted lips. In jail in Greensboro, waiting to come to trial, Parson had seen from the high window two stone women tower above the courthouse steps across the street. At night, the street deserted, the building lit so their shadows fell across the broad steps, Parson imagined the end of the world, no people at all but just these buildings, sidewalks, long empty streets, and the statues fallen over. Now he imagines this girl as one of them, the whole white length of her lying not in the depths of Turtle Hole but in the stream, which was shallow and looked so clear, her face washed by water until the regular features and cast of eye are obscured. Until she is smooth as scooped stone, long and tapered in her body, a rock fish, a fish with breasts. Her breasts are like white apples, full and compact, young, not the large breasts men slept in, but breasts men mouthed and tasted, nearly tore with their teeth. The nipples are faint bruises at the centers. Parson sees Frank, unmoving on the rock like a light-blinded animal, so startled at the sudden appearance of her body that he has not really seen her face. He looks, keeps looking, and as he does, she lifts each foot gently, never altering her gaze, so the other girl can remove her shoes. Then she walks into the water as though drawn to its center, as though she would walk until she disappeared, and the boy stands and jumps in.
I threw it in the water,
Parson had told the men in Carolina. They were men in suits but there were no windows in the little room, they took off their jackets and rolled up their sleeves. There was the one who gave Parson cigarettes and called him son, and the one who shoved him from wall to wall while fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead. Parson remembered the heat and how the men had paced like winded dogs, big dogs who could only sweat from their tongues.
Who shot him? Who were the others? Did you shoot him? Where's the gun the gun the gun
... but Parson wouldn't answer, wouldn't say. They had come straight for him in the fluid, moving room just as the boy swam for this girl now; Parson dug his fingers into the dirt and watched her lift herself, hold to Frank's shoulders as though she might drink the whole deep bowl of Turtle Hole, drown as Parson had drowned in the cage room that smelled of those men. The girl was a fish, he'd told them, lost from Christ as they were lost, as Preacher was lost, gambling on evil, and the room had circled as the whole sheen of Turtle Hole now begins to circle, stirred to move by their bodies and the silence they make until the other girl wades in, her clothes wet and darkened, her darker hair a black cap. She is the dark one who puts her mouth on them, touches them, she and Frank hold the naked girl between them and the girl cries out. The sound she keeps making freezes Parson's blood, he has to lie down in the reeds and hold himself tight, clutch his ears, but she goes on and he begins to try to crawl away, move backwards like an animal in a narrow space. This is how that other one would have sounded had she opened her mouth and let a sound roll from her long white throat. In all the years he has seen her, navigating dark air like a sea, she has