first listen ↑
then read ↓
/*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.*/
The hands were missing, the feet were missing. The thoracic cavity was intact. Who was this niece of hers to read all of this aloud, with the taunting, repetitive guitar refrain making you just want it to be over, while Emily sipped her tea or whatever, sighing, pausing, clearing her throat as if it really mattered to her? But then it did bring home to Rose that this was all a performance, and it wasn’t about her—Rose—really much at all. Emily was performing anguish, reluctance, the storyteller’s remorse. Or maybe revealing why it was impossible for her to tell this story at all.
She didn’t know that the body was not her Aunt Jenny’s body. She still thought it was!
Bencomo sat on the sofa with his hands in his lap for a few moments after the episode ended, then stood without saying anything and let himself out the front door, headed toward the cove. There were no visitors leaving or arriving today, no household tasks to get in the way of what needed to be said. She followed him, as she had so many times, down the gritty path.
This little, rocky beach had made her; it had undone her. The tide was out and many smooth stones were exposed. Bencomo picked one up and skipped it through the water, placid, now, as it paused before renewing its assault on the beach. The stone skipped six times, then sank. Her brother, Jim, had liked skipping stones. There was an art to it: your body had to be loose, but your toss sharp and precisely angled. When the stone sliced across the surface, there was no better feeling. Why was that? It just was. A skipping artist; Jim had said it would be possible to be a skipping artist, if one could eat off that. But to eat, in this world, others had to want something from you.
She tried a toss herself, but she was nervous and the stone plunked and sank when it hit the water. Too much of an arc. Still, she tried. “He told me when he came that spring—Michael—he gave me the poster and told me that they’d taken care of it. No one would be looking for me any more.”
Bencomo, silent, got nine skips this time.
She gripped another stone, rubbed it between her fingers. “He thought I would be happy about that. They’d found a body—there were always bodies, especially near the American bases, well not all the time but often enough.”
There was a body that no one was looking for. Exhumed, examined, exiled to a pauper’s grave. There was Michael’s father, on the forensic team, an expert in anatomy, with access to dental records and the ability to detach a jaw and conveniently lose it. There was Michael’s mother, who wanted a daughter, who wanted to do everything for her son. And there was Rose, mess that she was, out in the cold, wanting an adventure, wanting to say yes! to someone who would take care of her.
But until now, she’d never seen—or heard—the autopsy report.
“After that, he thought he owned me.” She tossed the stone and it skipped ten times, through a wave. No better feeling! “He asked me to marry him, over and over. He had needed this one thing settled, he said. But of course I said no.”
“I thought it would be me,” Bencomo said, turning to look at her.
“So did I,” she said.
Rose’s Journal
Most people here seemed to accept you as something beyond the pale, nobody’s property and so not requiring supervision or consent. They treated you decently because they were decent people—Bencomo being perhaps the best example of this—and not because anyone had any claim on you.
But this created a problem for you. Increasingly it felt that Bencomo’s intense stare was the only attempt he would ever make on you; without the ability to seek any formal arrangement by asking for a man’s blessing, there was nothing else for him to do.
How you longed for that place that Michael had shown you, that place where yes, yes, yes could happen, where wishes were expressed but not always granted, where any act could be accepted or refused but the person always embraced.
Where there was no contract, enumerating claims, defining terms, limiting, as contracts do, the past and the future, leaving the present, the only actual place where people live, desolate and lonely.
Michael had shown you that place, and now you wanted to go back there—with Bencomo.
When Michael was away, the walks with Bencomo got longer and you started to understand why he was always smiling. As you walked the paths that laced the tilting plane, fog cooled you; you could see fog droplets condense on the grass seedheads along your way. When a droplet got heavy enough it would slide down to the gritty earth and dampen a spot at the plant’s base. You imagined the web of thirsty roots under the surface waiting, like nerve endings, for every drop.
When the rains came Bencomo didn’t walk; there was no need. You would putter around the villa cleaning things that had already been cleaned, reading books you’d already read. Perhaps stringing together a necklace or two. You wondered what Bencomo did at his cottage all day. Of course he took care of his animals—the chickens and cats he’d told you about in tentative English (better than your Spanish), the little yellow dog who accompanied you on your walks. You imagined him puttering around the cottage, mending things or having a little bread and cheese for lunch, listening to the sound of rain and seeing, in his mind, the aquifers filling.
You didn’t imagine him meeting with his friends, talking independence for Tenerife, talking about collectively owning the waters he controlled with his little key.
The day after one of these rain days, you walked with him again. The rain had not been heavy and there was a banana plantation that needed more water. This required several stops uphill with the key, redirecting the water to its destination.
The walled banana grove filled and became a big bowl of pudding. You followed Bencomo, carefully you thought, as he walked down the central berm between rows of banana trees to check that the distribution of water was even, that each plant would get its fill before the water could percolate down through the blasted basalt beneath the topsoil.
Your sandals didn’t have good purchase here and you slipped and slid into the pudding beneath one of the plants. The cry you let out made you feel foolish. You were sinking in above your knees and your skirt fanned out over the mud. You felt your feet being sucked down further. How deep did the pudding go?
He’d been ahead of you, but he turned at your cry and sat down quickly. He braced his legs against the stalk of the plant that seemed like it would consume you along with its drink. He held you under the armpits and pulled you toward him until he could clasp his hands behind your back and hug you to him and continue to pull. Finally there was a sucking sound and the mud released you. He fell backward onto the firm berm and you came with him, landing on top of him with his arms still clasped around you. You were laughing. He smiled but he still looked into you—into your soul, you thought, and laughed some more at the cliché—and as you lay along the length of him you felt him getting hard against your thigh.
You had been asking him this question on all your walks on all these days and waiting for his answer. Now here it was—and were you really going to do this, here, between the banana plants with the sharp smell of fresh mud in your nostrils? Yes, you were.
“Is it okay?” you asked as you worked his belt buckle, pulling it just that bit tighter so you could slip the tongue of the buckle free. He nodded as he lifted his head up to kiss you. You bit his lower lip, lightly. It was full and soft. You crouched above him and your muddy skirt fanned over his chest. You pulled the crotch of your underwear aside and guided him and he moaned as he pushed inside you. It didn’t take long. It didn’t need to.
Your last pill pack had ended and you were going to have to find a way to avert disaster in that way, as in so many others.
/*If you enjoy Nobody’s Property, please…
*Do you have comments/suggestions?
*If it’s not for you, shoot an email to stopcastingporosity@substack.com with the word unsubscribe in the subject line. We get it! Time is precious. Guard your time with your life.*/
Chapter Twelve: Terminal Burrowing