LAKE BERRYESSA
Tria Andrews
He thought he had forgotten her, Anna Marie, but she was the first one he thought of as he struggled for breath—her charred skin, the vultures, and the skeletal remains of a drugstore lawn chair.
He was quite certain her mother did not know Anna Marie liked to lie out topless in a drugstore lawn chair, smoking lopsided joints and slathering on baby oil, while the vultures circled her lifeless body. This was Anna Marie, porcelain in the winter and red as your insides every summer.
Anna Marie with hair thick as a waist and waist thick as a braid, bruised like a tumbling apple everyone wanted. She offered him her body like a canvas.
So, really—unless anyone else understood the heat of his breath buried alive inside her ear, her arms outstretched as they were, and pinned just right—who could blame her? And who could blame him? She threw the first punch to watch her body change colors beneath him.