Ave marie, NIMÜE, VIVIANE: a glance at k.E. Warmoth’s debut short story collection

AVE MARIA, NIMÜE, VIVIANE

by K. Edward Warmoth

The feedback hiss from the contact of body and water receded and Ellen felt Kerry’s dingy voice elbowing its way into her thoughts. “Does it hurt your chest when you hit the water?” She used wet, wrinkled hands to push thick, wet hair from her eyes as she blinked at him.

“Are you referring to my boobs?” Kerry’s face flushed, a demonstration of blood lighter than water, as his head bobbed on the lake surface, a shoulder appearing either here or there. 

He stuttered through attempted clarity. “No. I guess. Yes. No, I just mean: can you feel the pressure of the water on them?”

An unintentional giggle escaped Ellen and the water as she turned to paddle back towards the dock. “Do you feel the pressure of the water on your chest when you dive in?” She garbled the word “pressure” as she fought to keep water out of her path of speech, its surface made choppy by the movement of ambling arms, jacking jaw.

“I guess, yeah,” Kerry admitted with defeat as he watched her scale the dock ladder. Ellen was wringing lake water out of her hair when she spoke again, pinning Kerry to the lakescape with her gaze.

“Do you think if breastfeeding were to end... if moms were to only use that powdered stuff that you mix with water... in the bottle. Do you think maybe we’d all stop caring about breasts?” Without pause, Kerry, unmoving aside from the faintest flailing of arms and legs, shot back.

“I’m pretty sure I was a formula baby.” 

“So, no then,” Ellen half-muttered, pulling her towel from the dock bench and letting the sun set on her shoulder blades as she walked back towards camp.

...

Placing the Walkman on the neutral gray of the sleeping bag, Ellen began setting the nail polish bottles in a circle around it. The “Sunflower Yellow” immediately came to life when contrasted with the matte black of the portable CD player, a stir of pins and needles cascading upon her still damp arms. None of the other colored bottles seemed to come into their own next to the device, save for possibly a Pastel Blue in the five o’clock position. She quickly swept the remaining bottles back into the makeup bag she had been given specifically for the trip and took up the chosen ones in her hands. Staring at them intently, she tried to pull a design out of the universe for her to recreate. So often had she stared at the sleek and lifeless form of the CD player that there had been the suggestion by her mother to adorn it with some sort of image, something else with which her eyes would be able to feast. 

Eight p.m. always marked the “wind down” segment of Camp Flat Stone’s daily activities. Some song was sung, a pledge was recited and a non-specific prayer was uttered in group, around the nature reserve’s lazily designed flag (a tired evergreen leaning to the right under an implied blustery wind in a sea of royal blue). The moment hands separated from prayer, an hour was allotted for lounging around the campfire, free conversation, or schmoozing with the counselors who were only a few years separated from the oldest of their voluntary inmates. Ellen had, as usual, taken the opportunity to retreat to her sleeping quarters and ruffle through her possessions. It was an activity rooted in anxious boredom and innocuous neuroses; each familiar item was picked up and observed and then placed aside with care until the whole lot had been gone over. Her body was an automata of routine while her thoughts had free reign. 

The pitch her mother’s voice adopted when Ellen had been purposefully obstinate was the first snapshot that crept into view of her thoughts, passing then to the fish tank that had once sat neglected in the old house’s dining room. From here it latched onto the men who had drained and disassembled the cloudy confinement on moving day. One of the workmen had a jaw too angular to fit seamlessly into her memory and saw its reflection now in Adam, a camp counselor whose oblique jaw had demanded some sort of attention from Ellen at first, until the weak and affected movement of his arms as he caught the first dodgeball of summer had brewed a disgust deeper than her stomach, it seemed, and his jaw became as if sanded down to a nub. The warm annoyance she had felt towards him when, with obvious disdain, he had accepted her entrance alongside Kerry into their formerly all-male hiking group the first week filled her brain now. Pictures and the stamped coins of memory gave way to temperatures and torrents of singular emotion. She had intrinsically known from a young age (they all knew), that the intensity of hate is always the bridegroom of hunger at the altar of the male gaze. To come face to face with the loathing that is without lust repelled Ellen and landed her squarely in the lonely, rotating mill of her own mind. There was no greater malice than hatred from a position of equality. 

She was screwing and unscrewing the top of the Pastel Blue when another counselor entered the cabin. She was obscenely tall and broad-boned; a blonde woman whose name Ellen couldn’t recall.

“Hey, I think Dean’s getting his guitar out. Sure you don’t wanna come join us by the fire?” Overtly-friendly voices made Ellen feel a deferred sense of embarrassment; it always would. She quickly pulled the tiny brush from the nail polish bottle and put it to the Walkman, already regretting her anxious positioning of color.

“Positive,” she replied, doing her best to sound thorough and occupied. The counselor did nothing to argue and left the cabin with a harmless bang of the screen door. 

Eventually, the rushed placement of Pastel Blue from the nail brush had been integrated into a greater system of color. After an hour of hunched-back dedication, Ellen had pockmarked the plastic surface with a field of blue dots and then adorned each with halos of Sunflower Yellow. She anticipated a cosmic gallery of frigid, beryl angels, formless except for their oblong corona, floating in the inhumanity of space. This is what she would no doubt picture the next time she listened to the headphones, on her trip home, when running out of battery power didn’t mean extended inoperability. Until then, resources had to be conserved.

Placing the disc player to dry on the corner of her pillow closest to the open screen window, Ellen returned the nail polish to the bag with their counterparts and hopped off the bunk, ruffling the sleeping bag in the process. Aggravated, she smoothed its surface onto the bunk, stepped back to observe her work and then exited the cabin into the night. 

Significantly cooler since she had retreated inside, the twilight air allowed her admittance. It took a moment for the buzz of steel guitar strings to separate from the vibration and chatter of the gloaming’s insect-life. A handful of campers remained around the bonfire, the rest no doubt sneaking warm beer into their stomachs, only partially hidden in the brush. Counselors could occasionally be seen in the darkness, although most had disappeared in couples or groups to wherever it was they went after evening prayers and before the tyranny of sleep. 

Ellen paid little mind to the bonfire group and picked her way towards the outhouses, squinting to identify a wayward tree branch or the duplicity of dark and depth. Upon reaching the showers, she stopped to readjust her flip flops, stretching her toes out in the process. From the bonfire, the scratchy chords of a song from a beer commercial floated over followed by raucous laughter. She shuffled on to the bathrooms, swatting away the mosquitos drawn to its single, ghastly light. 

Once inside and breathing through her mouth, Ellen sat on the rickety toilet seat and rested her elbows on her knees, supporting her chin and staring straight ahead into the warped wood of the door. The spray of her urination faded into voices behind the outhouse. Ellen held her breath to try and ease the flow and better hear. It was Adam’s voice.

“...just how it is when you’re older, y’know? Guys gotta take care of themselves and the world’s just not gonna understand. Hell, a lot of other guys will pretend to not even understand! But I think if I’ve learned one thing here, it’s that God made us for love, right? To love, to be loved. It’s always gonna be difficult and you...” Adam’s voice, despite its peacock cadence, disappeared into the din. Ellen slowly raised herself, pulling up her pants and stepping onto the toilet seat simultaneously. Bringing herself to the level of the narrow, screened windows at the top of the outhouse, she watched as Adam and Kerry walked back towards the cabins. Kerry’s shoulders sagged and his gait shouted of uncertainty while Adam’s entire being seemed to float about the night, his step purposeful and authoritative. Ellen felt the heat in her stomach and on the back of her neck. Shuddering without knowing why, she stepped off the toilet lid and out of the outhouse. 

Taking her time washing her hands and face, Ellen felt the presence of other girls entering and exiting the shower lodge behind her back. No salutations were displayed but Ellen hadn’t expected them. She patted her face dry and tried to scrutinize her complexion in the grimy mirror but didn’t trust what it offered. She was yet to discover if “all the fresh air” cleared her skin up or clogged it with sweat and dust. She had been told both would occur, somehow. 

By the time she was passing the first of the boys cabins on the way to her own, the group by the fire had lapsed into quiet chatter and giggling. Some of the members had retreated to their bunks but the remaining group was still large enough to inform Ellen that she could begin attempting rest in a mostly empty bedchamber. Nothing gnawed at an only-child’s patience more than the incessant whispering and explosions of laughter that filled the girls cabin at night. 

As she rounded the side of the final boys dorm and saw her own not far off, she instinctively glanced upwards at the window she knew bordered Kerry’s bunk. Expecting to see it empty as he was surely by the fire, begging Dean to fumble through playing an Anthrax song on his acoustic, Ellen was taken aback and left with cold recognition as she not only saw his huddled form in silhouette through the window, she was also aware of a soft sobbing. The disheveled shadow trembled and there wasn’t enough light available from her vantage point for her to know if he was facing her, aware of her voyeurism. 

“Kerry? Are you okay?” The jump that ran along his body proved that he hadn’t been aware. He replied with an annoyed sigh and attempted to square his shoulders, an odd sort of shuffle when one is lying down.

A sniffle and then a “yeah.” Ellen stood her ground. The heat below her stomach and on her shoulders returned and her lip trembled with what she could only identify as a sense of madness. 

“Kerry...” he had stopped shivering and rolled onto his back. His face was blank and he answered as if from very far away.

“It’s always gonna be difficult, Ellen.” He closed his eyes and pulled himself to the side of the bunk furthest from the window. She stood there for a moment, grasping at what, of no doubt many things, was always going to be difficult. When she knew he wasn’t going to say any more on the subject, she meandered back to her bunk, again on autopilot as her mind danced around knowledge it did not wish to allow to take root.

Holding her painted Walkman between her hands, Ellen stared at the Sunflower Yellow and the Pastel Blue upon the black, a tide rushing into the frame, thinking now that it could have never looked like angels.