The Moat

FLASH FICTION

The Kappa Delta girls line the moat by their sorority house. This is their third ritual this month. They always follow the same format: a sister goes through a break-up & feeds any physical manifestation of her past relationship into the moat. Casual situation-ships have also been built into this timeless tradition. Brad from Chi Omega left his vape pen on your bedside table after a less than satisfying evening? Down the moat it goes! Today the heartbroken sister in question is a five-foot-four Kappa in space buns and a septum. The girls braid their arms together in solidarity with her. She hasn’t showered since the show a couple weeks back. She smells pretty bad but her sisters graciously look past this, blaming the moat for the vicious odor. Who could blame her? She was probably the first person in history to be broken up with via Improv performance. She never shared the details of that night with the other Kappas and they didn’t bother prying - they knew she was clinging onto whatever toothpick of dignity she had left. Apparently it involved tap dancing and regrettably impressive imitations of a sperm whale call. After the break-up bit, her ex prompted the crowd for another topic and the mortified Kappa waded through a crowd of three hundred people to find the exit, all to the fading echoes of audience suggestions. Legend has it that George Bush! and Dick pills! were the last words she heard before blocking the phone number of her then thespian-lesbian lover.

Now she stands front and center in a paper angel chain of collegiate grief. It’s time to purge. She unlatches her elbows, severing from her sorority sisters, and steps forward to kneel at the moat’s edge. Her murky reflection mimics her movements on the water’s surface. Beside her sits a cardboard box of items that her ex-girlfriend had shed around her apartment over the last year. She raises the world’s most dilapidated beanie to her nose and takes in a notably deep breath, as if to eternally store the scent in her lungs. Her hand returns into the box and raises an unanticipated item. In the cushion of her fist is a bright pink dildo and a tangled black harness wiggling beneath it. Her sisters let out a collective Boooooo, as if the low-grade strap-on had affronted them personally. The strap-strapped Kappa shrouds her silicone extension with the beanie and launches it into the air like a missile. The dildo dives, glans first, into the grimy moat. The explosive splash is followed by the anticlimax of the pink toy buoying on the surface beside its cloak of modesty. After a few minutes of silence, the artifacts from her past relationship descend into the underworld. The moat burps a few bubbles, satisfied with its newest sacrifice.

Above the surface, the Kappas dance to EDM in cultish fashion and toast their mimosas to their newly single sister and the extinguishment of her old flame. Below the surface is a terrarium of expired connections, static with the water surrounding it. Moss germinates over a reef of toothbrushes, polaroids and boxer briefs, now an ecosystem of new life. Algae sprouts from the fissure of a perfume bottle and an abandoned goldfish floats upside down in a plastic bag, separated from its swimming counterparts. The pink dildo has attached to a central rock, sturdy and erect like that American flag at Ground Zero.

Below the Kappas’ varicolored Hokas, the earth suddenly starts to shake and they pause the glorified beeping they refer to as music. Their heads turn to the moat, where the soiled water appears to be bubbling more than usual. The shaking picks up and the girls wrap their bodies around the corinthian columns that hold up the roof of their house. On the floor of the moat, rocks are colliding in reverse-pangea fashion. Used undergarments and empty toiletries are ricocheting from the moat’s bed to its surface at jet-speed, slicing unsuspecting minnows as they try to whiz by. The strap-on of the hour is now aggressively vacillating in the thick of the storm. Above the bright pink amenity are two succulents, now spreading their fleshy leaves to reveal eyes. They blink rapidly, adjusting to the sting of the contaminated water. A rupture spreads across the rock’s lower half to produce what appears to be a grin, indicating that this strange entity’s nose is none other than the phallic toy suctioned to its face.

One of the girls peaks around her protective column. The bubbles stopped, she reports. The shaking did as well, another adds. A thunderous grunt comes from the moat. This time, they all peak in anticipated horror. The bright pink head of their fellow Kappa’s dildo pokes out of the water, just by its sheepish tip but somehow it’s still menacing. A mountainous creature reveals the full of its boulder face above the water’s surface and the girls scream as it wrings out its long locks of algae. MONSTER!, one of them shrieks and fires her mimosa glass in self-defense. It shatters on the monster’s head, causing it to grunt back in agony and bespatter the Kappas in moat water. AMOR MORTUUS, it howls back, clarifying its name. They scream louder this time, crying for help from their neighbors on Sorority Row. Mortuus stands on its feet of stone, now towering and dripping over the moat and the house. Its neck is adorned with wreaths of discarded necklace wires and pendants engraved with the names of past lovers. A tapestry of hoodies, sweaters and lingerie cover its torso, and lipstick tubes shoot from its knuckles, forming department store displays for fingers. The bagged goldfish now sits upright on Mortuus’s left shoulder, the world’s cutest evil sidekick.

For days, Mortuus lumbers through the city with a hungry vengeance. Photo albums, stuffed animals and entire couches shed from its body, littering the streets in relationship remains. Exes everywhere share sentimental reunions with long-lost objects, despite the life-threatening circumstances. Mortuus snaps lamp posts like pencils, capsizes cars along the highway and compresses skyscrapers into frisbees for its own pure entertainment. It makes a pit stop at a supermarket, where customers are huddling together beneath conveyor belts. Mortuus picks up entire aisles of shelving units and tilts them over its cavernous mouth, swallowing cereal boxes, canned meats and scrub daddys in bulk. Once satiated, Mortuus burps out a small school of minnows, now thrashing at the feet of paralyzed consumers under the fluorescent light.

The end of Mortuus’s city expedition is marked by the monster’s nakedness. Every last garment, picture and sex toy has been stripped from its mossy body (aside from its adorable, bagged accomplice and now signature, pinocchio prosthetic). Mortuus sits its bare-boulder-bottom on a bridge, which almost immediately collapses under its weight. The slab of bridge holding its body lands atop a river, streaming endlessly behind and infinitely ahead. Mortuus relaxes its body on its new vessel and feels its sticky, chlorophyll mane drifting in the wind. It thinks of the water back in the moat, static and barren of life. The water below Mortuus is rushing, frothing with potential. The moat monster stretches its legs, stiff from decades of stuckness. It grunts with pleasure and howls at the world: I’M FREE!