Water Beneath the Rocks
by Molly Harris
Frankie walked alongside the highway. Her feet were covered in cuts and blisters from being barefoot for a couple of days now. Droplets from the heavy, summer storm rained down. They hit her head hard, dripping off her locks of hair, darkening her blonde strands. The rain waterlogged her dress, making the fabric heavy. The flowers on it looked wilted—too dark and crinkled.
She kept her head down, looking at her feet moving forward. The cuts on them stung. Out of her peripheries, she caught glances of car tires gliding through the water. Their headlights bounced off the slick concrete; the pulsating red and yellow reminded her of emergency lights.
Frankie thought she heard a voice saying something, but she ignored it and kept walking. When she heard it again, she finally looked up.
A man stood in front of her, waving one arm. He was tall and thin and old. His clothes hung off his body, and the collar of his shirt gapped and hit too far down. He stood beside his pick-up truck. He’d pulled over to the shoulder where she was walking.
“I saw you walking. Do you need a lift? This storm’s not gonna get any better,” he said.
Frankie sized him up. Lanky, couldn’t really grow a beard. Thin hair that stuck to his wet forehead. “Yeah, I could use a lift.”
She loaded herself up into the passenger side seat, slipping slightly on the brown metal.
“Where’d you come from?” the man asked, wiping the rain from his forehead, and starting back up the ignition.
“Aren’t you gonna ask me my name first?” Frankie replied. She used the dashboard as a footrest, letting the rainwater trickle down the cheap plastic. It mixed with the blood from her soles, making it look pink.
“What’s your name, then?”
“Frankie.”
“Well, I’m Mannie.” One of Mannie’s hands gripped around the steering wheel while the other rested on the clutch. Bony, long fingers with uncomfortably long, cigarette-yellowed fingernails. “Now, where’d you come from?”
“New Smyrna.”
Mannie scoffed. “How’d you get all the way out here? Coast’s about twenty minutes out from here.”
Frankie remembered sitting on the beach, feeling the sand scrape her ass. The sun had slowly left the sky until the only light left were the fluorescent red and blue lights of Crabby Joe’s Bar and Grill reflecting off the Atlantic. She pushed her hands under the sand, feeling it get colder the deeper she dug. The ocean kissed her feet, but her heels had blisters, and every time the salt of the sea touched her, they stun. A man had walked up to her, drunk. He asked her if a hundred could score him a good time, staring at her like he expected a no, but she just followed him to his car that was still parked in the packed sand.
“I got dropped off around here,” Frankie said to Mannie.
Frankie only heard the heavy rain pelting the top of the truck. She watched the drops race each other on her window, like she used to do when she was a child. Mannie looked over to her bloodied and bruised feet on the dashboard.
“What happened to your shoes?” he asked.
She remembered the man’s wife coming home. There was no hotel. This was not a professional transaction. Frankie pulled on her dress, trying to stumble out, but her feet caught in the bed sheets. She ducked flying objects as she ran to the door, barefoot and without the money. The wife screamed at her that the devil would find her one day. Frankie slammed the door on her way out. She heard her shoes knock on the door, and then she heard a woman crying. It was then that she started walking.
“Lost them,” she told Mannie.
“Well, you don’t have pretty feet for a lady,” he replied.
She took a close look at her feet, how they puffed purple-blue. Some of her toenails had blackened, either from dirt or blood. Tiny calluses rose on her like white mountains.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Do you want me to take you back to the coast?” Mannie asked.
Frankie just stared out the window. “What’ll it cost me?”
“Nothing,” Mannie said. “I’m just headed to Cassadaga. I own a shop up there.”
Frankie looked out the window, hyper focusing on the rain drops, how the shape of it distorted the yellow Spanish Moss and the blacktop of the highway. “Well. I guess that’s where I’m headed now, too.”
Mannie just nodded, and the rest of the trip was quiet except for the barrage of rain and the wind sideswiping her passenger-side window.
###
Mannie’s tiny bungalow was painted in faded pastels. A palm tree sat on the west side of his property—its long leaves shading the house’s robin-egg blue.
“Well?” he asked her. “Do you have any weapons, any drugs?”
She told him no, but he still patted her down. She let him, holding still and holding out her arms. She remembered when she was younger, and her mom had picked up a hitchhiker. Her mom let him stay for the night, but she stripped him in the living room. Frankie had been eight, peeking a glance into the kitchen. She saw matted hair, a naked man, but he had been hiding nothing. He slept on the couch before he left a day later. He never said anything to her.
Frankie looked at Mannie’s living room. She stood on a dirtied welcome mat that surrounded dirtied white carpet. She could see little bald spots where it had been torn up.
“I used to have some shoes,” she told him. “Before I lost them.”
She looked at the walls, a nasty cream color. She could tell that, like the carpet, they had started out as white. She didn’t mind. She hated the sterility of pure white walls. Her eyes caught an altar put in a space where she thought a TV should have gone. It was covered in scrapes of fabric, half-burned candles with half-burned incense sticks poked into their wax. A small statue of the Virgin Mary sat in the middle, painted in the same pale blue as the outside of the house. Frankie thought it looked like a clown—the red of Mary’s lips had printed wrong in a factory, so they were off-center and sat half-on, half-off her mouth. Next to the statue stood an obituary in a worn frame. The woman looked young.
Mannie stared at Frankie with a look she couldn’t comprehend. His eyes were too sad, his shoulders sat too relaxed, and his eyebrows, thin and pale, were pushed together.
“Why’s there a picture of the paper over there?” she asked, nodding to the altar.
“That’s my daughter. She ran off. They found her a couple towns away,” Mannie said. “If you’re gonna stay here for a while, you better wash up. I can’t have you getting blood on the carpet.”
“Where’s the bathroom?”
Mannie pointed outside. Frankie walked across the small living room, towards the sliding doors to the backdoor. There, she found an empty tub with a fire pit underneath it. A small outhouse not too far off from that. She stood on the grass. “Where’s the sink?” she called back into the house.
“There’s a hose ‘round the side of the house. Use that,” he called. She could see him when she peered back inside, standing by the stove, preheating the oven, a frozen pizza in hand.
“Fuck this,” she mumbled. She walked around the house, turned on the hose, and watched as the water turned red as it pooled by her feet.
When Frankie walked back to the living room, she sat down on a dirtied yellow floral chair. Its armrests were made of PVC piping, like garden furniture, and the cushion was detachable and made of a rougher material than most chairs. When she sat down, if she shifted, the cushion moved with her.
“I thought you were taking me to your shop, not your house,” Frankie said.
“Shop’s more in town. Didn’t want you going in there and dirtying up the floor.”
Frankie gripped the piping of the chair, watching the knuckles whiten from pressure, watching the colors match. “What kind of shop do you own?”
“It’s a metaphysical shop.”
“Oh,” she said. “Why do you own a metaphysical shop?”
“Do you know where you are?” he asked her.
“Yes, sir,” she said. She looked towards the altar and then back at him. “Cassadaga. You told me.”
“Cassadaga is the water beneath the rocks. That’s what it means. Founded by George Colby and his spirit guide, Seneca, our speakers from God, they made this spiritualist camp almost a century ago because they understood the power hidden underneath our feet. Here, the two of us, we’re at the center of energy right here. This. This is where the veil between the spirit world and us is thinner.
“Something brought you here. These spirit lines throughout the globe. Laylines. They spread out like spiderwebs beneath us, spreading out like rivers, connecting us, connecting different people together. That’s why we’re here right now. In this room. Do you follow what I’m saying?”
Frankie stared at him. He had been hitting his palms together for emphasis, and he still had them raised in-front of her. His hairs, the few of them he had left, were sticking up. Mannie was a lonely old man, she figured. Missed his daughter. She could work with this.
“But, there’s not actually water under us, right?” she asked. “There’s no hot springs?” Frankie saw Mannie deflate, bringing his hands to his lap. “Do you think I could have a glass of water?”
Mannie looked awkward. He didn’t look at her. Frankie thought he was disappointed. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll go grab you one.”
When he came back, he handed a red Solo cup of water to Frankie. He apologized for not doing the dishes—he hadn’t been expecting guests.
“Can I stay here, then? Since you know. The lines and everything?” Frankie asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” Mannie mumbled to himself. He sat down himself at another lawn chair across from Frankie. “I just have one rule for you. Don’t talk to the people at the Hotel.”
“What’s the hotel?”
“The Hotel Cassadaga. The big old yellow building in town. Don’t talk to them. They’re frauds. They’ll promise you salvation, but they won’t give you anything but lies. And if they talk to you, don’t mention me. They don’t like me much.”
Frankie sipped on her water. She looked back to the carpet. “So, can I stay here?”
She heard the creak of Mannie’s lawn chair as he leaned back. “Yeah, you can. I’m not much for women walking alone.”
###
Frankie walked through the streets of Cassadaga the next morning. It had just rained, and the fog still lingered in the foreground. The air felt heavy, dense.
Cassadaga was small. She’d only been here a couple hours, but she could map it out. The Hotel Cassadaga loomed in the center of town—a goldenrod yellow adobe building that felt like ghosts to her. People walked in and out like specters in an old-timey movie. She could see the differences from the locals and the tourists. The tourists seemed more animated, like they were in an amusement park and not a town. They flocked here for a break from reality, but Frankie couldn’t help but think that was unnecessary for most of them. The locals were more subdued; they kept a wide breadth between themselves and the tourists.
She had figured out where the only park was, where the sacred mediation pool was housed. She went there to sit, but it didn’t make her feel better. She had sat on one of the benches with some enlightening quote etched onto it, but the pool was inorganic. She could smell the chlorine, and she noticed the lack of aquatic life inside of it. Sitting there didn’t offer her the same comfort as back home. She used to jump off bridges into the river, drinking and smoking with friends and her sister by the shore. Fish nipped her feet, and she remembered her sister laughing. Here, there was nothing but still water. It felt sterile. Artificial.
So, Frankie kept walking. She saw Colby’s temple at the end of the road in front of her. It rose from the horizon, a clay-made castle painted in the same yellow as the Hotel. The trees around it held cobwebs of Spanish Moss.
Frankie heard a voice. When she turned around, she saw a woman sitting on a porch. She had wrapped herself in shawls, which was impressive considering the heat. The porch was covered to protect from mosquitoes—sheer pink and purple fabrics hung inside of the screens. They billowed, circling the woman as she exited her porch.
“Sweetie, come here,” the woman said.
Frankie stood still, staring at the woman. She looked so small underneath her shawls. Frankie thought that she could be picked up by the next strong wind.
“I have some medicines I’ve made from the rain. This is a sacred place, during the sacred summer season. This rain, it only comes here. It could heal your heart, honey,” the old woman said.
Frankie approached her. “That’s a load of bullshit,” she said. “You’re from the Hotel?”
The woman wasn’t fazed. “Of course I’m from the Hotel.” The woman sat down on her steps. “I just take their money, sweetie.”
“I figured,” said Frankie. “The man I’m staying with told me not to listen to you.”
“You seem like a smart girl, honey. Are you staying with Mannie? He’s a good man.” The woman never looked at her. She sat on her porch’s steps, her fabrics blowing in the wind underneath the wirework. “Do you want some advice?”
“No, I’m okay,” Frankie said. “I don’t need it.”
“Honey, you think that when you sin that you’re with God. I have to tell you girl, this isn’t the truth of the matter.”
“Um, well, thank you, but I told you. I don’t want your opinion.”
“If you feel like a sinner, sweetie, maybe go to the Devil’s Chair. Most children around here, they go there. They take a beer, leave it there overnight. When they return, the Devil’s drank the entire can. He’s a drinker, you know. Maybe you should go down there, have a drink with him. That’ll be good for your spirits, honey.”
When she got home, she asked Mannie what it was. He explained it to her, that it was just a grave out in St. Helen, it wasn’t a far walk.
He made tea, throwing the tea bags in the kettle. If her mother had seen that, she would have been pissed. She’d never seen anyone do it like that, throwing the bags in cold water, heating it all up together. She didn’t think it’d taste good.
“Kids,” Mannie started, “they think the Devil will tell them their future.” The kettle whistled, and he took the tea bags from the pot. When he poured it out, the tea was a dark brown, too dark for tea. “What do you wanna see?”
Frankie sat a bit after that, holding the mug. It warmed her hands, the ceramic. Frankie had never imagined herself getting older. She was twenty-two, but she felt inhuman. She was going through the motions like it was like a dream since sixteen. She never thought she’d make it this far. She thought something would have killed her by now—the drugs, reckless behavior. She didn’t know how she was here now, sitting in Mannie’s kitchen in Florida, but she thought it would do her no good if she dwelled on it. She couldn’t dwell on it.
“I don’t know,” she said instead, stirring in a sugar cube, watching it melt in the black of the drink.
###
Frankie went the next morning and stood in the unnamed cemetery. It was midday. She walked to Lake Helen, but it wasn’t a long walk. They weren’t too far from each other.
Frankie held two cans of Miller Lite. She remembered being younger, sitting on a riverbed in her hometown, popping them open, one for her and one from her sister. They had been underage, sneaking sips. Despite how much older they’d felt, they still ran and chased each other in the mud like children. Frankie remembered how the trees loomed over her and her sister, shielding them from the prying eyes of their parents.
Now, she felt like a child again. She stood among the gravestones and the memories of the dead. She didn’t know why she came. All she knew was that she was looking for the mourning chair Mannie mentioned. When she found it, she saw it was made of red bricks and placed in the middle of three walls that surrounded two graves, but the names had rubbed off with time. When she sat down on the chair, she placed down one of the Miller Lites. The brick felt bumpy; the stones cold—a relief from the summer heat.
She didn’t know what she’d say to the devil, so she just popped open her can. She could only hear the carbonation from the beer with how quiet the dead were.
Frankie sipped on her beer and listened to the silence. The old psychic was full of shit.
When she finished, she got up and walked into the woods that separated Lake Helen and Cassadaga. The thick balcony of trees only let some of the light flicker down. This unnerved her. When she was younger, she’d only gone to the woods with Caroline, her sister. Caroline always knew where to go and where not to go. They’d sneak off at night to climb trees, sitting above each other, drinking beer. Here, the woods were different. Sickly tall with foreign mosses hanging off them. They weren’t as green, mostly a dehydrated yellow. They couldn’t survive the overwatering and the heat.
Frankie couldn’t move her legs to leave. She stood in the forest, listening to the sounds she hadn’t noticed before. Something slithered in the undergrowth, and she thought it was coming towards her. She shut her eyes and waited for the bite.
But the bite never came, and when she opened her eyes, they welled up. She blinked a couple of times to clear the tears. She moved her leg up just to prove she could. The woods were darkening. She found what looked to be a path, and she followed it back to Cassadaga.
Frankie found herself standing in front of the Hotel. Its goldenrod hue subdued by the dimming light. Up close, she noticed the paint peeling. It didn’t look impressive.
When she walked inside, it was empty. The lights were on, but all the guests were asleep. She saw a board hotel employee alone at the desk, reading a book. It didn’t look any different than a Marriot. The walls, beige, held shitty artwork of airbrushed wizards. It looked dumpy.
Frankie wanted it to be full, bustling with people. She wanted to be Jesus in the temple, throwing over the stalls of the disbelievers and the nay-sayers.
But nothing was here, so she went back to Mannie’s.
###
Frankie stood on the porch, watching the stars move above her. She gripped a coffee mug. She liked the quiet before the storm. How the birds quieted, and the trees stopped their movements. She saw Mannie out of the corner of her eye, joining her.
“What the Devil say to you out there in Lake Helen?” he asked.
Frankie watched the steam from the coffee twist up from her cup. She thought she could see it curl up with the humidity in the air.
“How’d you know I went to Lake Helen?” she asked him.
“Lady at the hotel,” he replied. Frankie didn’t need him to say that she shouldn’t have gone. She already knew.
“He asked me what I was doing there,” she said.
“What did you say back?”
“I said nothing.”
They were quiet, watching storm clouds pass quickly overhead until Mannie asked her why she never wore shoes.
“I told you,” she said. “I don’t have any.”
“Where you from where they don’t make you wear shoes?”
“Missouri.”
A breeze kicked up dirt. She wasn’t looking at Mannie, but she felt how cold he was beside her. He wasn’t comfortable.
“Why’d you leave, kid? You’re too young to be doing all this,” he said.
“I’m twenty-two,” she said, indigent. “I left home because my mom, well, she’s too sick, and she doesn’t treat my sister right, and I guess I don’t care for my sister either, but my father died, and it’s, like, we gotta pick up the pieces from that, but I’m not gonna do that. It’s not my responsibility to care for everyone. I’m sick and tired of everyone looking sad, you know? I can’t fix things. I can’t fix anything. I’m not good at it.”
Frankie stared at her feet. They looked too white on the dark concrete. They were healing, but she still didn’t like the calluses she saw. Rough like stones, it was like she wasn’t even stepping on her own skin anymore. She heard Mannie swear, and even though she wouldn’t look up, she knew he must look disappointed.
Mannie just mentioned how he could feel the rain coming. The air was heavy with humidity. Frankie had wanted empathy, a release, some validation of the sins she’d committed, but Mannie wouldn’t give her that.
“I tried calling my sister yesterday,” she said, still not looking at Mannie’s face. It was a lie, she had no money, but she wished she did. She wished she called her back at home—Caroline, alone, standing by the phone, making sure their mom took her pills at the same time every day, going to school, working at the gas station, going through the motions because Frankie left, and now it was her job.
“Yeah? What she say?” he asked. Frankie looked at him. He looked worn, tired. Older than yesterday, his wrinkles pulling down his face, the skin underneath his chin.
“She didn’t pick up.”
“Girl,” Mannie started, “you don’t mean nothing to no one, and that’s nobody’s fault but your own.”
He walked back inside the house, the screen door closing with a soft click. Frankie just stood, hearing the first clap of thunder rumble over the woods and the swamp and all of Cassadaga. She didn’t know why she was still here. She didn’t know if she wanted to know why.
The rain started quick, raining down her cheeks.
She walked into the kitchen and saw Mannie at the table. Water pooled by her feet on the white-and-black checkered tiles.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said, “about all this psychic bullshit.”
Frankie only heard the hum of the refrigerator in the silence between them. She felt the vibrations under her feet. Maybe it was the laylines. She was waiting for Mannie to tell her about his daughter. She was waiting for Mannie to say anything. She had been waiting for anyone to say anything to her. He just looked at her, tired and old, too long fingers curled around a steaming mug, his too long body hunched over the table.
“The new moon is tonight,” he said.
Frankie stood, her body deflating. Tension leaving her body—her teeth ceased their grinding, her hands unclenching. “Cool,” she said.
“You could come. We’re heading out to the beach.”
Mannie stood and turned on the faucet, letting it run before it got hot, and he dumped his drink. She heard the clang of dishes shifting in the sink.
He asked her again if she’d come, but she stood silent, still wet.
“The new moon is a time for renewal,” he said. “For rebirth. It’s cleansing.”
Frankie doesn’t know who he’s talking to. He didn’t look at her, standing barefoot in her kitchen. She watched him leave. She heard the click of the locks as he left.
###
Frankie thought of her memories as a long corridor. Doors at every side of her, trembling, trying to be noticed and opened. She couldn’t look at them. Whenever she did, her chest felt tight and it was hard to breathe and she felt like she was dying, anxiety bubbling up from the pit of her stomach. So, she shut her eyes, focusing on her skin and its damp, focusing on the fabric of her dress and the rough fabric of the chair she sat on.
When she opened her eyes, the storm had stopped. She went back outside and towards the bathtub. It was full of rainwater, and when she put her hand in, it felt cold. It stung her hand and her fingers in quick pinpricks. She kept them under the water for too long. She felt as if she was on the brink of something breaking.
She grabbed an oven match and some fresh wood and newspaper from inside.
It feels ritualistic, she thought as she watched the fire beneath the tub catch. It was old—yellowed, some signs of early rust near its base. She wondered how she would know when it was hot enough, how to keep it from getting too hot.
Frankie didn’t feel human when she got in. She felt too naked in a stranger’s backyard. The tub wasn’t clean, but neither was she. She scrubbed off her dirt with soap, the water blackening. When she was done, she leaned her head back.
The Milky Way spread out above her like an oil slick. She could see the stars—she found Orion’s Belt in-between clouds. She felt too hot, lifting her hair from the back of her neck. She thought of the doors, trembling, and she heard thunder in the distance.
When the rain started, she stayed until the water felt cold, the fire was put out from the tub overflowing. She looked down at her own body, flushed pink and rail thin. She grabbed her dress and put it back on.
She walked out of Mannie’s house, leaving the doors open.
She’d walk to the highway, and she’d go north.
Molly Harris is a writer, editor, and educator in St. Louis, MO. She's the deputy editor at Boulevard Magazine and an associate editor at december magazine. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has been previously published in Door is a Jar Magazine, Westwind, Litro Online, and elsewhere. See more of her work here: www.mollyjaneharris.com