Rusalki

Abstract

Rusalki Chrissa Wolfe (bio) "The rusalki lure through their movement—spinning, dancing, and singing." –Jack Zipes Everyone knows the best way to get rid of a body in Florida is to feed it to gators. Dixon had a favorite spot along the river. On special nights he brought his lady friends to this particular bend. Pressed dirt tracks crisscrossed the fifty thousand acres of swamp preserve, but none of them led here. Only stacked off-road 4×4s could forge the rutted silt path where it dead-ended at the water's edge. The black, tannin-stained river wound through the tangled roots of the cypress trees, their breathing knees reaching up from the putrid backwater. It was a sanctuary for predators. Dixon preferred twenty-dollar hookers for these nights. Experience taught him that if you give a twenty-dollar hooker a hundred dollars, she'll go anywhere with you—and you can still get your money back if the night goes as planned. So far, this night was right on schedule. Sitting on the downed tailgate of his old Chevy, Dixon enjoyed the last drag of his cigarette. Smoke billowed from his mouth like a dragon, the shroom tea causing psychedelic tendrils to curl through space around him. Moonbeams shuttered on the ground from a breeze as humid as an exhale in the June night. He flicked the Marlboro butt into the river ten feet away and watched the red glow stretch into a laser beam through the darkness. Dixon chuckled at the reptiles' shining eyes watching him from the far bank, a low rumble billowing across the water. With the first girl, he had used a butcher's knife. It was sharp, the logical choice for a beginner. It wasn't very efficient, though. Perhaps severing a single limb would have been fine, but it was grueling to dismember an entire body with such a small blade. Halfway through he [End Page 25] had wished for a chainsaw but knew it would be reckless. He felt pretty secure this far out in the swamp but didn't want to push his luck. With the second girl, he went bigger. A long-armed strike with the machete gave him more leverage than the knife but was still laborious. You see, the real fun was not the dismantling of pieces but the taking of life, when the pulse actually stopped in your hands. It was orgasmic; the body writhed and bucked and then gave one last agonal shudder before going limp. Once the body was drained, the fun was gone. Only meat was left. With this third girl, Dixon would try an ax. It would be less precise, but the weight should make quick work of the thick joints, always the most time-consuming part of the evening. And he was looking forward to annihilating tonight's body; this one had been a dud. She thrashed like the others, but even holding her neck double-long, she had never given him that last spasm he craved. Though he had mashed and squeezed and shook her body waiting for it to come, she just went limp in his hands. Feeling cheated, he wanted to destroy this body. As he lifted the ax for his first strike, Dixon was already planning for the next body: he would draw it out, make sure he got that final tremor. "Dixon." A soft voice whispered his name through the trees, echoing off the leaves and approaching him from every direction, the vowels rolling into each other on the wind. Dropping the ax, Dixon spun around to find its source. Behind him stood a woman in the river. She was the color of moonlight, bright even under the cypress canopy. In the grayscale of midnight, her hair floated silver down her back and around her shoulders, waving as if suspended in water. The edges of her nude body were soft, almost blurred. Dixon blinked several times to clear his vision, but she remained indistinct. And she seemed familiar to him, somehow. "Who the fuck are you?" "Don't you recognize me?" She swayed as he watched, rocking her hips to the rhythm humming across the river...