The weather wanted everyone in the state of Ohio to remember Henry Clement Strudel. For weeks plump, gray clouds carried heavy July rain and the sky wailed for justice. Rooftops sagged from too much water, cars on freeways hydroplaned, humans sought shelter and weather reports said they didn’t know when the storm would let up. It’d been twelve days of non-stop rain already.
When the Great Miami River first flooded, rising high with dirt and garbage, it temporarily buried the narrow pathway and the white graveled bike trails. The waters have since returned to low tide and cerulean blue, all filtered out and clean. The air is ghostly silent even though it is summer.
Bicyclist and marathon runner, Miona “Gazelleche” Strudel stood at the mouth of the river, holding on to its peeled railing, her mind dizzy and her mouth tight. She sweat profusely as she focused on the individual ripples of the water that glistened in the summer sun.
On those memorable wet days when her father was alive, she ran fast and hard, her drenched clothes pressing against hot skin and shivering bones like a baptism.
Gazelleche was a silly portmanteau that Henry made up. She hated it and thought Gisele was better, longing for him to name her that instead.
She won’t run anymore. The last time she ran her father was alive and he’d called her name across the river to get ready for dinner. They lived in an orange two story shingled house on Peachtree Street.
They’d always been close and at the time it seemed like nothing could tear them apart, especially not the water. But it did.
On this clear Saturday afternoon, Miona biked to her father’s death place, fighting endless images of his floating body, face down, his locs rowing freely in the water. She tried to imagine good things like how his laugh opened up the sky instead of him drowning in a pool of his own blood.
She parked her purple ten-speed bike beside the deteriorating arrangement she’d put together two weeks before when he went missing. The twine tied roses, marigolds, and lilacs were dying and yet still retained a muted technicolor brilliance. Pale white votive candles and colored holders surrounded the framed and fading pictures of a smiling Henry.
She shuddered knowing this water was the last time the earth felt him and the last time he’d breathed. And she thought, why not die here as well?
Miona swayed as the sun began to set and swatted at the web flying straight into her vision. The mosquitoes bit her skin hungrily, concentrating on her wrists and hands. Perhaps these mother and daughter mosquitoes feasted on Henry, too. When an unidentifiable creature flew into the fleshy center of her full bottom lip, sticking to the haphazardly applied red lacquered gloss she brushed it off, smearing red everywhere.
She laugh-wondered about how colorless and colorful everything was. And yet Black was a special color, a brave color. Her flesh was Black like her vacant pupils, black like her dangling onyx earrings of butterflies, black like her three quarter sleeve dress, black like her father’s casket and his dreads, black and final like death.
If only he hadn’t been an activist…
“We need you to ID the body, Ms. Strudel.”
As Miona observed the river, her steadied feet sank into the concrete ground, her old sneakers blending with gritty dust and broken alcohol bottles. Her mind played that fantastical magic trick, encouraging her to glide through the kinetic waters where the generational ancestors were waiting, their gray, decomposed bodies floating with their astonished eyes wide open her father traveling among them. Only the surrounding fish were alive and bright.
Buried in the water below, she transformed into different beings.
First, her long legs became intricate green-blue scales edged with sparkling flecks around giant, flowing fins, her upper parts modestly protected by wild purple shells tied with opulent white pearls. Secondly, she emerged deeper into the river, her morphing body joined with its spirit, its history. Then, she was a big orange fish, a transparent nymph, a minuscule raindrop. And at last, a girl reunited with her beloved father’s ghost.
“You don’t have to be afraid to swim,” Henry always said.
Yet she was. Always, always afraid.
Her grief drove her into a blue-green vortex. She shape-shifted not unlike the creatures Henry told stories about during bedtime. If she held this vortex long enough, she could pretend there were no gnawing sensations of emptiness at the other end. That she was happy in this bright place of motion.
Let me not be land animal, no gazelle, no cheetah.
Let me not be mermaid, fish, nymph, raindrop.
Let me be his little girl again.
Let me be anybody but a grieving body.
Miona couldn’t eat or sleep after the men brought her back from identifying the body.
Were those blue-eyed and green-eyed men with pallor faces and lines for lips responsible? Those men at the door asking her questions? Did they shoot and push Henry Strudel? Did they?
“I’m sorry for your loss,” said one police officer.
“There was nothing we could do,” said the other.
“Why?” Miona asked, tears dripping down her chin. “Why did you do this?”
“We understand that you’re in shock right now, but we are not responsible for what happened to Mr. Strudel this evening.”
“Calm down, Miss. We’re just doing our jobs here!”
They drove her to the morgue, had her ID Henry, and led her to a cramped back office chair. She was sinking into a puddle, sobbing, her face wet. She could no longer see the strangers. Blurred ripples kept pouring from her eyes.
“Did your father have any enemies?”
“Did your father have any recent arguments or fights that you can remember?”
Miona’s neck was drenched from the combination of sweat and tears. Her shirt was also moist. The men kept talking and she only thought about how Henry was her home.
The water had robbed her of her home.
It wasn’t the bullet that killed her father. It was the water. The water took advantage of his unconscious state, manipulated his defenseless body, suffocating his nose and mouth, filling him with the same molecules that sustained his insides.
“The only enemies my father had were you people,” she said, wiping away her sadness.
Miona stood imagining herself inside the river– a jaundiced woman with yellowed eyes, nails and teeth.
She was dirty. Beyond dirty. She hadn’t showered in weeks. When scraped her nail against her neck, her back or her legs, old, dried sweat mixed with grime and rain caked themselves under. It looked like the black was coming off her and she did not want it to come off.
And suddenly, Miona couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten.
She had no menstrual cycle and her stressed body needed to release blood. So summer nose bleeds were heavier than usual. Tissues were not enough. For crying, for bleeding, for anything.
No one knew what happened. No witnesses. No one. No one saw a Black body fly off the railing of the Great Miami River. No one heard gunshots. According to everyone that was near the body, the day was peaceful. No suspicious activity. No fights. No loud sounds. No screams for help.
Miona ran on nothing. Biked on nothing. Slept on nothing.
“Thinking about jumping in, Gazelleche?” Henry asked.
“No,” she told him.
Certain parts of the river were shallow. The water so translucent that rough shaped rocks were visible, the piercing yellow-green mirroring the metallic luster of fool’s gold. It called to her.
“Honestly?” He persisted.
“Well, sometimes,” she admitted. “In fact, I was down there just now.”
“It’s a long way, Gazelleche.”
“Yes. It is a kiss of death to flee from here.”
“You would ruin all that pretty hair.”
Her once glorious hair was bushy, brittle, and dry with new streaks of grey.
“I don’t mind the water,” she said, even though that was clearly a lie. She had minded it.
He smiled, looking all proud as she remembered him to be. Always proud of her.
Miona stretched her bony legs and looked down at the graveled pathway. She pictured herself running along it, fleeing from broken hearted agonies to visit the grey ducklings and mallard drakes, observe the serene river at a closer angle, let its glorious scent fill her nostrils and take over the coppery stench of human blood.
She couldn’t run forever.
She couldn’t bleed forever either.
“Looks like it’ll rain again,” Henry said, glancing up at the heavens above.
The clouds were whirling fast, racing against the change from bright sunniness to dark misery. Sharp white pillows on the left side spectrum fought against the violent blue, the violent blue that brought tumultuous storms like presents one savagely rips apart.
Soon, the river would become soiled again, impure. An active imagination could not afford to play in dirtiness, especially when the owner of that imagination was quite unclean.
“I wish it would rain,” Miona said softly. “It should rain everyday.”
“It has rained long enough,” Henry said.
Miona remembered her father taking that wheel off the pink tricycle, tasting his peppery gumbo with grandmother’s old wooden spoon, him clapping at her graduations, him running alongside her in the spring and summer mornings. He was the supportive father witnessing her Black body always in motion, moving through gymnastics, dancing, running, and biking.
She stared at the water again, knowing that it was time to return to living, return to Peachtree Street. Return to the grating absence that continuously devoured her soul.
“Will you jump in?” Henry asked again, begging now, a silent please in between.
“Not today,” Miona replied aloud.
Janyce Denise Glasper is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and independent scholar from Dayton, Ohio. She obtained a drawing emphasis BFA from Art Academy of Cincinnati and post-baccalaureate certificate and MFA from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She runs AfroVeganChick and femfilmrogues with plans to launch Black Women Make Art (BWMA), an art history database about Black women visual artists past and present on January 1st, 2020.
