In chapter 12 of her posthumous biography, Which Side of Helen, I mention that the impressionable soap opera star fell in love with a blue sea-turtle. She kept it in the pond of her reflected-mama thoughts. At night, beside her on the bed, it would perform a turtle’s version of a doggy-paddle and lie on its back at her command. It loved, (as she professed to me, whom she referred to as her shy bilingual housekeeper with the fake-as-alligator-tears limp,) to be tickled. She proposed to it and it said what only a sea-turtle could when cornered or hungry for scratch. On her honeymoon, the sea-turtle disappeared past the veranda, which overlooked white sand and orange-gold crust of sunsets. The actress, perhaps morose in the memory of her blue shell of a wedding dress or when she was stricken with polio as a child, or when she was made to perform tricks with her pudgy hands for her two stepfathers: one, half-blind, the other, semi-incestuous, ordered me to fill the bathtub to the brim with ice water. Puzzled, yet loyal to my mistress, I obeyed. Investigators are still looking for clues, but one vaguely described something he called “muddled pet sounds” coming from the bathroom pipes. C.S.Y. (or really seeing is why) has cautioned against jumping to conclusions as an autopsy(s) is on stone-cold hold.
Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey, where he daydreams of California. His work has been featured in Why Vandalism? Lacuna Journal, Literary Tonic, Catalonian Review, BreadcrumbSins, and others.