We Found a Dead Body by Bodhi Jet Atkinson

We found it by a dirt track that ran next to a lagoon. We found it walking to a school dance. We found it, I’m told, in Southern Gothic ways.

The lagoon was full of eels, as well as manure and pesticides from a nearby golf course.

My mum told us of how she used to catch eels with milk cartons, and how when my uncle was two he drowned in the lagoon. I’m not sure how she utilised milk cartons, or how he drowned, or if one of those things led to the other. I couldn’t even tell you his name. It’s a half-forgotten family tragedy and, excepting for circumstance and location, is mostly irrelevant to this story.

Houses in the area are done up and worth a fortune now, but back then they were shabby and the lawns unkempt and they all had the same always-drawn white lace curtains stained with nicotine.

My grandfather built the house we lived in. It was made, in large, with asbestos, and, because he worked for an artificial grass company, was insulated with artificial grass. As a result, the roof sank and dipped and bubbled until eventually it was replaced.

The dirt track led all the way to Mackellar Girls High, where the dance was. It was late afternoon, and the sun was out, so it must have been summer and quite warm. A woman that lived at the end of our street, by the dirt track, called us over. My brother says she was old. A little old lady that was probably scared. I don’t remember her like that. She seemed, at least to me, both old enough and young enough to have taken control.

She hung over her fence, the brick kind, and asked that we go check on the man by the lagoon. She said that he’d been there a while, and the dog had been barking, and that someone better go check on him.

I see it from a distance. I see it through the long grass that flanked the dirt track. I see it from down low, like a feline. I see it from behind slouching blades of foxtail weed, with butterflies and bees at eye level. I see it sliding down the bank, almost imperceptibly. I see it without sound. I know the dog was barking, but I can’t hear it. I can’t even see the dog—only the leash, and the promise that, on the end of it, there must be a dog. I see a big, silly, fleshy belly poking out from under a flannel shirt. And I see blood. 

I ran home. It was only a minute on foot. I was frantic and nonsensical and my father yelled at me for these things. I think now about how that living room, the one my grandfather built, had witnessed this once before, only all the more tragic. That at one time in its life, someone, perhaps my aunty, barged in, frantic and nonsensical, and my grandfather probably yelled at her for those things. I think about how, since then, the ceiling had bubbled and sunk and collapsed and was replaced anew. And those under it were new too, and if they weren’t new, they looked new, and the furniture was new and the carpet too.

I wish I could say it was me that stayed with the body while my brother ran back. Mostly because I feel my role was largely insignificant, and in this sense, I’m jealous of my brother, who would undoubtedly have more to tell. I wish I could say something about that woman who first called us over. That her face, upon seeing my dad arrive and embrace my weeping brother, became flush and shameful. But I don’t remember seeing her again. I wish my mother was there and I could say that something momentous happened; that some kind of generational trauma, submerged in the lagoon for all these years, finally breached. That’s such an obvious story. It’s screaming out. But my mother wasn’t there. I wish I could say, at the very least, that I cried. But I didn’t. And I went to the dance that afternoon, happy for the story to tell. I walked it around like a dog on a lead. People stroked it and doted on it, and I regarded it as mine.

That same night, a mother told her children that their father was found dead. She was crying and smoking and trembling, and her kids were crying, and the white lace curtains were drawn, and the ceiling was crumbling, and later a neighbour brought over a casserole and took the kids for an hour so the mother could make arrangements.

I am bound to that mother now in ways unfathomable, for at some point that night, somewhere in the extreme rear of both of our minds, still years from expression, we each began to gather as a thought in the other.

Today, that mother is in an apartment, hours from the dirt track. She sold her house a decade ago for massive profit and moved north. On the phone, a friend mentions they paved the dirt track leading to Mackellar. Tells her it looks completely different. It’s a bike path now.

That’s where Arnold died, says the mother, all tragedy exhausted from the retelling. He had a heart attack walking Dixie, hit his head on a rock and bled to death. Two kids found him. Poor things must have been terrified.

Above her, the ceiling crumbles. The curtains, now and suddenly white lace, stain with nicotine. And there we are, my brother and I, bound at the collar, nameless, faceless, unreachable, inescapable.

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BODHI JET ATKINSON — Bodhi is a writer based in Sydney, Australia. A graduate of Sydney Film School, his work has appeared in HAD, Sundog Lit, JMWW Journal, Typishly Literary Magazine, and more. Find him on Twitter/X @BodhiJet, Bluesky @bodhi-jet.bsky.social or Instagram @bodhijetatkinson. 

Art by JAYE FRISINA — When Jaye was little, she would skip school to go to the library, and then go home and draw on the walls. She has a long love affair with ink in all its forms, and often combines words with drawings. Find her at ThirteenthStory.com or @thirteenthstory.bsky.social.