Some Strange Music Draws Me In

by Griffin Hansbury

“I’m not such a kid,” I said. “I’ve had sex,” though I was not sure that what I’d experienced, either in the barn with the Harvard boy or in the woods with Jules, qualified as actual sex. Embarrassed, frustrated, I held my breath, let myself sink, and watched the flashes of fish in the shifting light. Sylvia’s white legs like towers of alabaster. I turned away, not wanting to give her the satisfaction of my gaze, and looked out to the murky green darkness in the yawning center of the pond, where the bodies of girls were sunk. Staring into the gloom, I sensed the tortured spirit of the girl they didn’t find. It gave me a shiver that sent me crashing to the surface where I saw Sylvia swimming away, cutting foamy laps with her strong limbs. I floated on my back, arms spread, ears muffled with pond water. There were bodies and there were parts, and the two didn’t always match. Those bodies and parts interacted with other bodies and parts, and those didn’t always match either. To make matters more complicated, there were also souls, or energies, that could be influenced by the changing body, like when Jan Morris went from forceful to yielding. So what was I? And did everyone think about sex this way? It was too much to untangle. Even the mystical waters of Walden could not set it straight.