NOW WE BOTH SHALL DROWN!
Art by Christina Gutierrez (2022 archive)
There is an old fable about a Scorpion and a Frog. It goes something like this:
The Scorpion needs passage across a river. It enlists the help of The Frog. When it asks The Frog for help, The Frog simply responds with “If I let you onto my back to swim us across, you will sting me, and I will surely drown!” To which The Scorpion replies that; “If I were to sting you while you swam across, we would both perish! Why would I make such a mistake? I value my own life as well!”
The Frog lets The Scorpion onto his back, then. When the pair is halfway across, The Scorpion plunges its stinger into The Frog’s back, paralyzing it. As The Frog sinks, it shouts to The Scorpion; “You fool! Now we shall both drown!”
The Scorpion simply responds by dancing a jig on The Frog’s back, before telling it, “I can’t help it - ‘tis but my nature.”
That picture book now sits abandoned on the shelf, untouched - at least, until you picked it up and read it, as a dead body laid out before you. (It’s something you would proceed to think about a lot.)
Samantha Scarpino was a seventeen-year-old girl, born on January 3rd, 1990, the only child of a loving single mother whose eyes wrinkled every time she smiled. She was a member of the Saint Joseph Catholic School’s newspaper as well as an accomplished jazz musician, playing the bass clarinet, piano, and oboe. This, however, meant very little to the colleges she visited at the time. Jazz was out of style after all, meaning her fanciful dreams of majoring in music were smashed swiftly. It was a quick, clinical rejection, lacking any real malice, making her inadequacy seem more factual than it probably was.
Samantha Scarpino was seventeen when she committed suicide, taking a whole bottle of Tylenol and waiting alone in her room.
She was also seventeen when you took her place.
You stretch your fingers across olive skin. Flex limbs that don’t belong to you. The park you buried the remains of original Samantha in, the bits you didn’t need to take when you wear the skin of another, is quiet, wind howling through the trees. Dark hair falls in front of your face, and you move to brush it out of the way. You’re struck by your fingers—nails bitten down and fingers rounded and smooth—nothing like the claws you’re used to having. You can feel sharpness poking the inside of your new skin, claws waiting to tear through the disguise at any moment, an indication that this disguise will fall away fast if you’re not careful.
Your kind are to kill and replace their targets. But Samantha Scarpino seemed to have done the job for you. Suicide isn’t a concept you’re unfamiliar with—the mindset of such a person eludes you, sure, but it’s not as if you’ve never seen it. People get desperate in their last moments. Often, if they are armed, they’d rather go out on their own terms than face the bringer of their imminent demise. But you’re not very familiar with suicides that you haven’t in some way incited. Suicide that’s premeditated, and due to factors outside of your control. A slow burning fuse rather than a final act of hysteria.
You think back to that story, having found the book in Samantha’s room after she had committed suicide. You wonder, for a moment, if that’s what The Scorpion’s plan was. To take its own life, uncaring for the other it would drag down with it. Suicide is, after all, a selfish act by nature.
But there’s no use pontificating over the actions of a creature who doesn’t even exist, you decide as you climb back into Samantha’s house through the window she left open, a crime undiscovered and untraceable. You doubt the original writers thought of that interpretation when they were writing it, anyhow.
If you are The Scorpion, Delia Forsche is the river. Something you needed to get across.
She stands at five foot one and yet somehow manages to be one of the largest personalities you’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting. And worse, she seems to have turned that attention onto you rather onto the late Samantha or Sammy as you find out she was called. (A strangely childish nickname for someone who seemed so reserved.) As Sammy had used to run the school newspaper, Delia had, for some reason, decided that would make her the perfect candidate to solve the mystery of one Jameson Yorke, a child who had vanished just a few weeks prior. (You know what happened to Jameson Yorke. A body you couldn’t inhabit, skin that rejected you, even after death. A strong will can keep your kind from fully assuming that form.)
There’s something intriguing to you about Delia Forsche, so you agree to help. It’d be more suspicious if you didn’t, after all.
Delia invites you over to her house. Her surly mother greets you when you knock on the door and demands to know if Delia is selling you something. This must have been a repeated problem. You deny the claims, and she begrudgingly lets you inside. The house is dark with shutters closed and curtains drawn, and the walls are made of hewn wood and brick. It’s littered with photos of who you presume to be Delia’s family as well as numerous pieces of Catholic iconography. As you stare up at a wooden cross hanging over the stairwell, a strange unease fills you though you’re not sure what for. The sensation of being judged perhaps. Nevertheless, you go upstairs.
Delia greets you when you reach her bedroom, and you take note of how it looks both just how you imagined it and nothing like you had thought. Posters line the walls of bands and video games you aren’t familiar with. You look over to the CD player covered in dust in favor of the shiny new iPod that’s plugged into a smaller speaker set, and you see there’s an album cover of two girls lying next to each other in a strangely romantic position. A small part of you wonders how that got past her mother. There are a few stuffed animals on the windowsill. One of the cat-like ones is missing an ear. It’s very clean. Much cleaner than you would have expected from someone with her sporadic personality.
The two of you start discussing potential suspects as well as how much of the information released in the public statement is accurate. Delia speaks a mile a minute, so much so that you have a hard time keeping up. Music floods out of speakers. All the while, the sounds of guitars and harsh, angry vocals nearly drown out your quiet voice. But it’s not unpleasant.
You’re not sure how to describe the sensation you’re feeling actually.
You ask if you can borrow the iPod plugged into the speakers. Delia laughs when she sees the look on your face, and against your better judgment, you go red out of embarrassment. Humans lack complete control over their own bodies for some strange reason. It’ll just be another hurdle to get through until you can find your next target.
You surmise that you could kill Delia right now, take her place instead. Perhaps The Scorpion didn’t have a reason. Maybe it just stung The Frog because it could. (You notice a silver cross necklace shoved under the bed, forgotten. When you bid Delia farewell, you take it while she isn’t looking. You’re not sure why, but you’re drawn to the accessory and despite yourself, you catch yourself admiring it adorned around your neck in the car windows on the way home. How unbecoming.)
It turns out that the people at Saint Joseph’s aren’t exactly the most receptive to Delia and her questions. You trail behind her as she tracks students down, ticking names off a list of suspects when she’s done speaking to them. Though, it’d be more accurate to say that it’s when they lose her. Most students just walk away wordlessly. A few say that their parents warned them to stay away from them. One calls her a word you’ve never heard before, which you later find out is extremely offensive. This doesn’t perturb Delia, and you are glad. Dealing with her sadness would be too inconvenient, so you prefer to see her cheerful and smiling. For practical reasons, of course.
While outside a convenience store, however, Delia mentions cabin fever. Her restless need to get out of Pratfall and move as far away as possible, perhaps to the coast, as she’s never been to the beach. You wonder if that’s how the original Sammy felt. You wonder if the original Sammy and Delia would have been friends. Probably not.
When she asks you what you want to do when you graduate, you confess to her that you’ve never been on a plane before.
She also notices your necklace--the one you took. However, instead of getting angry, she simply laughs and says you can keep it. She confesses that despite the fact that she’s in Catholic school, she’s not a religious person. You had suspected that with her propensity for changing her hair color every other week, addiction to grunge music, and rather suggestive looking albums in her room tended to give that fact away.
Still, you feel a bit strange when she tells you to consider the necklace a gift. You’ve never been given a gift before.
You decide it’s nice.
The first time the two of you listen to music together it’s on a late October night. Tired from the lack of leads the two of you are getting, Delia turns on her iPod, the strangest series of electronic plips and waves coming out of it. She lays down on the carpet, and you join her. When you look at the iPod, a nightmarish smiling face greets you. It’s the album’s cover, and regrettably, it’s also the first time you’ve ever felt actual fear in your life. Delia laughs at you when you jump, and says she also hates it.
After an indeterminable amount of time passes, Delia turns the music off and asks for your favorite song. You then realize you don’t have an answer for that. Maybe you should listen to more music, in case Delia asks you the question again. It’d be suspicious to not have an answer.
As you walk home, you realize that if Delia asked you to do this again, you’d probably say yes. Strange.
When Delia gets too focused on the investigation, you know you should probably do something to distract her. After all, if she finds you out, it’d make things more complicated than they need to be. You remember how Delia would always complain about wanting to leave Pratfall, so you decide to be a little rash. You steal a motorcycle from outside a store, the chain is easy enough to slash through with your claws. Your real claws poke out from the skin you wear now. You had learned to drive from a previous face you wore, a mechanic who fixed things and who loved to take his friends out on his bike. If you didn’t want unnecessary blood on your hands, you had to have learned quickly. (You marvel at how quickly the skin knits itself back up when you retract your claws as if there had never been anything there at all. You’re not sure why it does that when you wear it. Injuries like that take weeks to heal on actual humans. Another strange quirk of your biology, you suppose.)
So you and Delia drive and drive and drive until you’re out of gas, sitting under a wind turbine in the middle of the Ohio mountains. You fuel up the bike, asking Delia a question about the investigation, but she’s got her earbuds in, iPod in her pocket. You lay down next to her, and she hands you the right earbud. You oblige and let the sound of angry, cathartic rock wash over you.
You wonder if The Scorpion and The Frog might have known each other beforehand. That The Scorpion teased the idea of crossing the river to The Frog over a long period of time, wearing him down until it finally agreed to help him across. Certainly, it would be a devious strategy, but then again, the author most likely wasn’t thinking about that either.
It is when the two of you arrive back at the Forsche home, lying on the carpet over the wooden floor of Delia’s bedroom and your pinkie fingers brush and you turn on your side to see the other’s upturned smile and flushed red face, and oh, you realize something. Something that terrifies you to your very core.
Delia Forsche is not the river.
Delia Forsche is The Frog.
Delia gets closer to the truth every day. With each witness she interviews, each shred of evidence she digs up, all of it points to the place where Jameson is buried—Pratfall National Park. The same place the original Sammy is buried as well.
You feel a bit sick.
For the first time in your life, you’re not sure you can go through with it.
You pontificate that strange and unfamiliar train of thought, lying on the carpeted floor of Sammy’s room, listening to the dulcet tones of music filtered through the tiny speakers of a cheap pair of earbuds you found at the store for five dollars. The album was one you had downloaded for free off the internet, and the song in question sings about feeling out of place, trapped in a body and not being able to get out.
You check the title. It’s fittingly titled “Bodysnatchers.”
You switch the track off.
Delia calls you one day. She shouts excitedly over the phone about how she’s figured out all the clues. That she knows where Jameson might be.
You wonder if The Frog was excited to cross the river.
You wonder if The Scorpion hesitated. You wonder if The Scorpion felt any kind of attachment to its victim.
It’s a late Wednesday night when the two of you begin your trek to the park. The walk is silent, as your mind is swirling thoughts. Delia, sharp as always, asks you what’s wrong. Instead of answering, you ask if she’s ever heard of The Scorpion and The Frog. She gives you the most peculiar answer.
“Oh, I’m not the biggest fan of that one.”
You ask why not.
“Because the ending’s too sad for me.”
You ask why that is.
“The Scorpion says that it’s his nature to be evil and all that, but I dunno. A person being bad just because that’s how they are always seemed like a cop-out answer to me.”
A cop-out?
“Yeah! Sorta, like, and I dunno, I could be spitballing here, but I feel like the concept of someone being inherently evil is just kinda dumb. Like, sure, sometimes people suck and all that, but seeing someone do something shitty and just being like; ‘yup, they’re just evil. That’s it.’ I dunno dude, it just always rubbed me the wrong way.”
So you think there’s always a reason behind actions?
“I mean, not always, but doing bad shit is a conscious choice, y’know? I don’t really think nature plays a part in it. More so a person’s mindset. And call me stupidly optimistic, but I think that there’s always room to change and be better.”
You’ve reached the spot. You see the tree that Jameson is buried under. Delia steps forward, looking around, short hair framing the back of her wide neck. Maybe it doesn’t matter who The Scorpion was or what The Scorpion was like. Maybe all that mattered was that he went through with killing The Frog. With killing them both.
What a stupid story, you think, as your hands elongate into claws and reach for Delia’s throat.
