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/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/
My god. Of course Rose had read about the case in the newspapers that Michael brought, but this awkward investigator’s report was new to her. And Charles; Emily had gotten it from Charles. Surely he was dead by now? It sounded like her mother was dead. But Maria—still alive. Of course, she was barely older than Rose.
Michael’s parents didn’t run the pharmacy—they owned it and a cousin ran it. Michael’s father was a surgeon, of course, but this “investigator” might not have even talked to Michael’s father. He didn’t even get Rose’s own birthdate right—the birthdate of the victim!—and he seemed more interested in analyzing the alcohol content in beer than in really discovering anything about the case. In that whole analysis, Rose could detect the silent hand of her mother—and perhaps her father’s not so silent one—guiding the “investigator,” directing the man to clear up any justification for reproach of their daughter. That was what was important—that she, and by extension they, not be blamed.
Because of course, people were going to blame her. It’s the only way they had of feeling safe themselves. This brought it home again, what had become clear reading all those articles in Quick over the months people maintained interest in her case: she’d thought they would want to find her and took care, with Michael’s help, to cover her tracks. And to be fair, her parents did seem to want to find her—I mean, how cruel would it be to suggest otherwise? But it had become clear to her over those months, and upon reflection in the years that followed, that the real search—and what compelled interest in the case beyond a prurient glance at pictures of her clothing and backpack in the forest—the real search was for blame. How else was anyone going to feel safe unless they found someone to blame? And so it was the careful process of managing blame that had played out all those years ago.
And was Emily doing anything different, as she decided whose names to say in her podcast—and whose not to say?
Rose’s Journal
It didn’t take long for you to feel like you had to move. Michael’s mother was planning to come to the Villa to overwinter. You would be sharing a roof with her again. And what would be wrong with that? Someone to make cake, someone to comment on your hair and inquire whether you were practicing your piano on the instrument with a view of the cove.
The air was mild here in November. You ate on the Plaza with Michael, fresh octopus and rough Spanish wine in small glasses. They still called it sack. The light reminded you of home; it woke your soul up and told you to go…see…find out for yourself.
It wasn’t anything Michael had ever thought of for himself, just taking off without a word to anyone. But you convinced him: pretty soon he’d have to cut his hair, become a professor of something or other. Why not cut out for a while, see some things, test the waters….
It would be nice to have a little spending money. You both could work the Germans coming off the cruise ships on Las Palmas. You had the necklaces you’d started stringing together from beach flotsam; he threw his leather tooling kit into his backpack, you brought the purse you’d made from a linen pillowcase and fisherman’s rope. You would make your way back around the volcano on the bus or a banana truck, to save the bus fare. You would catch a ride on a freighter to Las Palmas, for a song.
The morning you took off, a boy from outside the village was selling a kid goat at the side of the road. The little goat was bleating for its mother. You knew it would become stew, its skin a supple purse, if anyone else bought it, and you begged Michael to buy it for you.
It kept bleating on your journey around the volcano, and Michael related the local lore: Before the Spanish conquest, when Bencomo was still leading the Guanches fighting in the canyons to save their island, they would separate the kids from their mothers, praying that the gods would hear the piteous bleating and decide to save them.
So you made it to Las Palmas, and sold a few necklaces, and talked to some nice English ladies, but then it was time to go back again to the villa above the cove, to receive Michael’s mother.
/*If you enjoy Nobody’s Property, please…
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Chapter Eight: Flyover Space