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Latter-day Cipher

By Latayne C. Scott

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One



There on the damp pine needles Kirsten Young lay on her back, a serene Ophelia in her dusky pond of blood., tThe dark irises of her bloodshot eyes stareding unseeing into the branches above her. The sun had burst through the clouds of the sudden downpour and now blazed above the canopy of conifers and aspens in Provo Canyon. Deep in its recesses, the light filtered down in vertical sheets of champagne dust that played across the body.

Her skin, once the faintest of olive, now was pale as churned creamjust as it turns to butter, mottled and mordant in the dark pooling of what everyone called her hot Italian blood. An angry oval bruise, dark as a plum, marked the side of her forehead.

The slit in her throat cut deep. There were hesitation marks like those a suicide makes, trying to summon the courage to complete the act.There were hesitation marks like those a suicide makes, trying to summon the courage to complete the act. There were hesitation marks like those a suicide makes, trying to summon the courage to complete the act. The final cut had been made deeply on the right side, almost curling to her left.

Her left arm lay loosely at her side, still bearing at the wrist the friction marks from the plastic rope that had bound her. Her right arm crossed her naked chest between the breasts, with the elbow supported by a rock underneath the triceps so the arm stayed in place. , defying the gravity which would surely have dragged it down. As it was now, hHer fingers curled slightly around her own shoulder, as if she gave herself a final hug in death. The tip of her thumb touched, delicately, the edge of the open wound under her left ear.

Perhaps you truly could see the universe in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour.

Another microcosm, a single drop of water suspended from a pine needle in the foreground of the tableau, formed the tiniest of lenses; accurate to every detail, but it showed the world upside down.

Its focus, tThe scene on the forest floor was meant to set things aright.

No, no, she wasn’t Ophelia at all, he thought. She was Eve, temptress and sinner cast from the garden of Utah, wearing only a hasty apron of cottonwood leaves heaped around and across her plump belly, from just below the navel to mid-thigh. Tiny rivulets of blood snaked down through the leaves.

The other four wounds, the little ones, were postmortem, made after she’d already bled out.
Above the right nipple, incised with surgical precision, the first cut penetrated deep, a backwards L. It depicted a carpenter’s square: the straightedge, true-maker, indispensable for right angles.: the straightedge, true-maker, the indispensable for right angles The desired angularity could not, alas, be achieved on the soft roundness of this still-warm flesh.

Nor could the second, the compass.: oOn the left breast, a chevron gaped open with edges that wanted to lose their definition, a tiny V on this day of defeats and victories.
A third inch-long slit carefully cut into the muscle just above the knee that would never again bow.

A final slit traversed her stomach just above the navel, a sign of nourishment for a body that would never again eat; of health for one who would only decay.

They were all symbols only for the initiated would understand.

But below her navel mark, Kirsten harbored her own tiny secret, one that held the seed of her killer’s downfall, her own unwitting fleshly vengeance.

In the sheeting light, her murderer stood above her like the angel guarding Eden, the knife-sword flashing this way and that in his gloved hand. He had brought along a plain white sheet he’d bought at a garage sale and kept stored in a plastic bag. But he changed his mind about putting it over her. She was beyond the veil now.

His shoulders sagged beneath the once-white jumpsuit. The leaves embroidered on the green cloth apron he wore were speckled as a measles plant. The Exacto knife lay at his feet and he picked it up and threw it and the sheet into the stream. Then he laid the note carefully on the ground, its edge secured by a rock.

The white cap still contained his close-cropped hair but it had lost its starched definition. It, too, sagged as he backed away from Kirsten, brushing over with a fallen pine branch with a fallen pine branchthe near-invisible footprints they both had made when they came.

His breathing was heavy as he recited. They’d said it was “the pure Adamic language” he’d learned that first time, at age nineteen, scared half to death by all the vows and disembodied voices behind the veils, scared to death by all those vows and disembodied voices behind the veils:

“Pay lay ale. Pay lay ale. Pay lay ale." 

He swallowed hard.

"Oh Lord, hear the words of my mouth."


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