V – Ro Runkel
January 1, 2026
“They’re saying they found another body part in the river.”
Adam raised his eyebrow and cocked his head. “Another?”
Tonya nodded. “Another.”
“Body part?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Not ‘limb’? Not ‘arm’ or ‘leg’ or ‘head’?”
Tonya shook her head. “Body part.”
Adam hummed. “Which part of the river?”
“By the Winco. Like where Ernst lives.”
“Huh.” Adam took a sip of his drink. “Funny.”
Tonya looked over. “Not like funny ha-ha.”
Adam shook his head. “No. Like funny as in curious.”
Tonya nodded. “Like funny as in peculiar. Amiss. Questionable.”
Adam took another sip and hummed once again. “Yeah. Like as in not-normal.”
Over the last two weeks, two body parts have been found floating in the Tualatin River. The Tualatin River runs along the edge of town and acts as a de facto border between the places you should go and the places you shouldn’t. There are bridges over the river with tall chain-link fences and concrete walkways and bike lanes. There are little inlets on the banks on either side of the river where people go to get fucked up and there are large scabby patches of crushed cans and dirty duvets and shower curtains and the general kind of garbage that tends to accumulate wherever ill-advised things take place. It is not that surprising that this is the river where the body parts ended up.
“Did they come from the same guy?”
Tonya furrowed her eyebrows. “I don’t know. Probably, right?”
“You sort of hope so.”
“Seems like it should be easy to find out, what with DNA testing and all that.”
“What if they’re, like, decomposed?”
“I dunno. I feel like they can still tell, right?”
“They can on Bones. You ever watch Bones?”
“Only when I’m at a hotel.”
Adam nodded. “When I’m at a hotel I watch Hoarders. Or the movie channel. Once I was high and they played The Thing and I thought I’d been infected.”
Tonya snorted. “Isn’t that one about AIDS?”
“I dunno. I thought it was about The Thing.”
The river where the body parts were found floating in the brush is eighty three miles long. It is a tributary of a much larger river that runs north-south through the state. Over twenty eight creeks and streams run into the river. It is an oft-utilized dumping place for agricultural waste. For most of the 1970s, it was heavily polluted with industrial runoff and children who lived near it were cautioned not to swim if they had any open wounds. The river’s highest flow ever recorded was 26,400 cubic feet per second. The indigenous name for the river translates to “lazy” or “sluggish.”
“Y’know, I feel like they don’t have good old-fashioned killers anymore. They seem vestigial.”
Tonya raised an eyebrow.
“Are you using that word right?”
Adam contemplated.
“Yeah, I think so. Vestigial? Like, left over from the past? Like anachronistic? Like you know how sometimes kids are born with tails?”
“Hmmm,” said Tonya. “Get the dictionary.”
Adam rose from his seat on the floor by the frosted windowsill and walked over to the wall where all of his books were stacked in jagged-toothed columns with the spines facing out. He stooped and carefully removed the Merriam Webster dictionary from near the bottom of the easternmost stack. Tonya groaned. “Get the Oxford one.”
“Why? What’s wrong with old Merriam?”
“Get the Oxford.” Now Adam groaned and shuffled the Merriam Webster back into its place. The Oxford dictionaries were arranged side by side in a row, unlike the rest of the books in the collection, and they stood below the plasticky world map that hung on the wall of the dingy living room. He picked up volume V, holding it up to the light of the window and, gargoyle-crouching, began flipping through.
“Verdant. Vegetative. Vestibulocochlear. Vestigial.” Adam read. Tonya put down her tea and leaned forward.
“What’s it say?”
“Of the nature of a vestige – semicolon – remaining or surviving in a degenerate, atrophied, or imperfect condition or form.”
“Huh.”
“I think that’s correct usage.”
“Yeah, I guess so. I dunno. Are killers vestigial?”
“Well, you know in the seventies it was like there was a new killer every time you turned on the news. Ted Bundy and the guy with the glasses who ate boys.” Adam stood up and returned to the counter, where he poured more coffee and whiskey into his mug.
“Dahmer?”
“Yeah.”
“Y’know the guy who killed Dahmer in prison said he killed him ‘cause he kept shaping his food into body part shapes.”
“What, like limbs?”
“Like little meatball heads or mashed potato fingers and toes. Hey, give me some of that.”
Adam passed Tonya the flask, which she emptied into her black tea. She took a sip and winced a little, the skin crinkling around her eyes.
“Body parts in the river, man. Fuckin’ A.”
The apartment, which Adam had been renting on a month-to-month basis for three and a half years, was on the second-highest floor of a tenement on the wrong side of the river that had been built in the 1960s and hadn’t been meaningfully remodeled since. There was one bathroom per floor at the end of the hall. You turned the light on with a pull-chain. The building was constructed with what they call unreinforced masonry, meaning that in the event of an earthquake that registered on the Richter scale it would crumble instantly. The windows were old and paper-thin and all the heat from the radiator poured out back into the atmosphere. Adam’s apartment was cold. Adam and Tonya were wearing wool sweaters and pajama pants under their jeans.
“When do you think it’ll come back on?” asked Tonya.
“I dunno. Probably soon, right? Last time it was only a few hours.”
“It’s been a few hours. The sun is setting.” Adam looked out the window for the first time in a while and saw the painted light of the sky through the cakes of ice. It was pink and amber. The sun was setting. He shrugged.
“I think I have candles. Do you want to stay here tonight?” asked Adam. He got up and started opening and closing drawers and cabinets.
“I thought that was the understanding. I think driving is not advisable.” said Tonya.
“Oh, cause the roads?” asked Adam. Tonya picked up the empty flask and shook it. “Oh, yeah. Sorry. Yeah, you can stay here.” He took two candles out from the drawer next to the dishwasher that also contained potholders and chinese takeout chopsticks and tape and wire cutters. Tonya hummed.
“Do you have anything else to drink?” Adam put the candles into candleholders that he had removed from on top of the refrigerator.
“There’s vodka in the freezer. And I think I have some kahlua that Tippy left. Hey, we should make White Russians!” Adam lit the candles with a cigarette lighter.
“Eugh,” said Tonya.
“What?” asked Adam.
“Is this the Big fucking Lebowski?”
“No. Shit, the fridge. Everything’s gonna go bad.”
“Just don’t open it.”
“How long do you think it stays cool in there? A day?”
“I dunno. Hey, here’s a test: if the vodka in the freezer is still cold enough to drink without wincing, then everything’s gonna be fine and dandy. Shall we test the hypothesis?” said Tonya, whose voice, which always has an edge, had a stronger edge than usual.
“Is there a hypothesis?” answered Adam, whose voice, typically edgeless, had also taken one on. Tonya rose from her seat on the floor and made taunting eye contact with Adam as she opened the freezer and took out the half-full plastic fifth of vodka from the freezer.
“I’m sorry you don’t agree with my research methods.”
The last time snow fell in the county was three years ago. Seven inches accumulated and cycled through melting and freezing for five days before operations began to proceed normally again. Then, it happened in March. This time it happened in February, shortly after Valentine’s day, and instead of falling all at once, snow was intermittently coming down in great sweeping sheets for a few hours here and then for a few hours there, it would stop and the sky would stretch out paper-white in every direction, not so much cloudy (there were no individual clouds to speak of) but as if the whole of the horizon were swallowed up in a cloud big enough to envelop Earth itself. There is not a municipal fleet of snow plows, or large stockpiles of coarse salt to make the icy roads traversable. The power had gone out then, too. But only for a few hours.
“It’s actually fucking dark. It’s so weird looking into the fridge when the fridge light doesn’t come on. It makes me feel bad for the food.” Adam looked over Tonya’s shoulder as she rummaged around. “What’re you looking for?”
“Ice.”
“What the fuck? It’s 25 degrees. We can chip some off the windows.”
“Hmm. Yeah. Hey, you know the story about the leg brandy?” Tonya asked while unscrewing the vodka. She poured some for herself generously and then did the same for Adam when he held out his mostly empty mug.
“What do you mean leg brandy?”
“It was this king I think, or some kind of diplomatic person, a long time ago, in, like, Mesopotamia, and he was some kind of orthodox faith that required that he be buried with every part of his body, y’know, so when the Messiah comes they can get put back together? And he had to get his leg amputated for some reason, so he carried the detached leg with him in this barrel full of brandy as a preservative, y’know, like formaldehyde, and he’s moving or something so he sends his brandy-leg-barrel over on this ship with the rest of his belongings, but the ship gets lost at sea for months and months, and the sailors get real desperate, and they end up drinking all the brandy out of the barrel.”
Adam drank his vodka and then blinked and looked at Tonya. “Isn’t that from a book?”
“I dunno. I think it’s true.”
“No, I’m pretty sure I read that before. It’s like some literary fiction something. I think I maybe read it for school.”
Tonya shrugged. “Maybe. I swear I feel like I heard it from somewhere or somebody legitimate. Like the History Channel.”
Adam snorted. “Yes, the History Channel. You watch the History Channel?”
“Not really. When I was home sick as a kid sometimes.” Tonya poured them both more vodka and they both drank. “It’s fucking dark. Do you have any more candles?”
Adam drank. “No. I might have headlamps, actually.” He put his mug down and went rustling in his room. Tonya stood at the counter and looked at the popcorn ceiling. The vodka was beginning to do something. She thought about the river rushing by outside, and how she needed to pee, and the horror that was Adam’s communal bathroom with the piss on the seat and the buzzing light and the stray pubes, and she realized the cold wasn’t really bothering her— there was a term she learned during the year she went to school in Minnesota, that girls would use when they went out on freezing winter nights in their club clothes, “liquor jacket.” Adam returned with headlamps. He clicked them on and off in each hand in a loose rhythm and nodded his head.
“Do you wanna go for a walk?” asked Tonya.
“Yeah,” replied Adam. “Hold on.” He took another shot, then rustled in the freezer and pulled out a beat up pack of cigarettes. Tonya burst out laughing. “What? What? What’s so damn funny?” asked Adam, eyes wide, obsequious. She laughed and laughed. “It keeps them from getting stale!” said Adam. She laughed.
“Put your shoes on, fucker,” Tonya choked out. Adam rolled his eyes. “Where’s my jacket?”
“I dunno,” said Adam, pulling on his boots. “Look around.”
“Gimme a headlight.” Adam gave her a headlight, which she donned and then turned on. It shone straight into Adam’s eyes.
“Ah! Fucker!”
Tonya grinned and put on her coat. They picked up their boots from the little puddle on the floor where the snow they had tracked in had melted. Adam patted himself down– he called this “taking inventory”– to make sure he had his lighter and cigarettes and gloves and hat. Tonya put her hat on and tied the two long tassels that hung on either side of her face together under her chin. Her headlight cast an unsteady beam through the apartment. In the light they could see their breath. She grabbed the vodka. Adam wrapped a scarf around his head.
“Is this babuska? Am I babushka?”
“You aren’t Soviet. You’re too Irish.” Adam opened his eyes wide and took the vodka and swigged it and started singing Kate Bush. “You’re a fool.”
“Let’s blow this bloc, man. Let’s blow this popsicle stand.” Adam unlocked all three deadbolts and unslid the door chain and swung the door open. They went kneeling through the hallway and down the creaking stairs. Adam opened the door to the parking lot. All the cars were entrenched in snow, their windshields whited-out and their bumpers adorned with tiny icicles. It had started coming down again, in big wet clumps, each flake nickel-sized and fluffy and accumulating quickly. They trudged through the parking lot and looked behind them to see their footprints already starting to fade in the freshly fallen snow. Adam said: “let’s go to the river.”
“Literally why,” said Tonya.
“I dunno. It’ll be pretty.” Adam bit the tip of the middle finger of his glove to take it off and stuck his bare pink hand into his pocket to retrieve the Camels. He coaxed one out of the pack with his lip and lit it. He smoked hands-free. He put his glove back on.
“What if the killer’s there?”
“I don’t think he kills by the river. The river’s just the dump site.”
“Why do you assume it’s a man? Sexist.”
“Hey. Hey man.”
“Women can kill.”
“I know women can kill. Ok, they don’t kill by the river.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Also, for all we know, it’s only been one guy. Not serial. What if it was one of those situational things.”
Tonya snorted. “Oh, yeah, no problem, then.”
Adam widened his eyes. “Wait. Wait, I have a new theory. I have a new theory.”
“Do tell. Share with the class.”
“What if it’s his own body parts? Or they, sorry.”
“What the fuck?”
“What if he has that syndrome? Fuck, what’s it called. It’s not Raynaud’s.”
Tonya laughed more. “It’s definitely not Raynaud’s.”
“Cotard’s! It’s Cotard’s!” Adam lit up more. His cigarette bounced between his lips as he spoke.
“Oh, yeah! Isn’t that the one where you think you’re dead?”
“Yeah. And people, like, self-amputate ‘cause they think their limbs aren’t part of them. Or that they’re putrefying. You ever see Synecdoche, New York?”
“No. I remember reading about that, though. It’s in Ciba Medical Illustrations. There’s a lady with, like, half her shin missing. She carved it out with a paring knife.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Wait, so your theory. The killer has Cotard’s? As in there is no killer? As in the guy is self-removing the parts?”
“Yeah. Wow. That’s a good one.”
“Yeah, hey, Adam, give yourself a pat on the back. You should go into this. Forensic speculation.”
Adam smiled. “I should go on Bones.”
Tonya shot him a look. “You know Bones is fictional, right?” Adam looked confused.
“What?”
Tonya smiled. “Bones is fictional.”
Adam’s face dropped. The cigarette went from an on-lightswitch-position to an off-lightswitch-position. “You’re fucking with me.”
“I am not fucking with you.”
Adam stopped walking. They were halfway through the parking lot, and the blue velvet sky was shedding more and more snow. He put his hands on his hips and looked down. “Shit and goddamn.”
“Wow. Hey, man, where’s your Guggenheim?”
“Literally fuck you.”
“I think there’s a killer.”
“Man, you love the worst possible outcome.”
“Not true.” Tonya swigged the vodka. It was getting colder and going down smoother. “I’m gonna pee.”
“Out here?”
“Yeah. Hold on.” She handed Adam the bottle and jogged across the rest of the lot to the dumpsters. She went behind them and pissed. Adam walked on to the river. The trees on the bank of the river were scraggly and leafless and always threatening to die. Local nutria populations ate the root systems that extended into the river and local teens carved tags and hearts with initials into their bark and invasive insects ate great wells into their trunks. The branches were long and at some points in the river, like where Adam was standing, the trees on either bank entwined themselves with each other in great gnardled scabby knots that held onto dead leaves through the winter. On one of these knots someone had thrown a pair of shoes with the laces tied together, and they hung there looking sort of omenlike in the dark. Adam liked looking up into the jagged branches. He climbed them, sometimes, on afternoons when he was doing little else and decided to prioritize feeling serene. He had a fair amount of alcohol in his system and decided now wouldn’t be too bad a time. He started climbing.
Tonya pissed into the snow. Where her piss touched the snow it melted. She thought about the warmth produced by her body, by the human body, and about fevers. The idea of the body as a furnace trying to heat up the whole atmosphere. She felt the sweat accumulate in her armpits under the layers of clothes. Her wool sweater was striped red and blue. She had bought it years ago at the Goodwill. She remembered it was a good deal. She finished pissing and fumbled with her fly and button and gloves. Then she followed Adam’s footprints to the tree.
“How’s the weather up there?” Tonya asked.
“Still cold,” answered Adam. The cigarette in his mouth had burned down to the filter. He was smoking only the filter now. Tonya had the urge to tell him he was now only getting cancer without the nicotine but decided not to vocalize this.
“Any limbs? I mean, body parts?”
“Not that I can see,” answered Adam. “The bark kind of looks like matted hair.”
“Huh,” said Tonya.
“Anyone ever tell you you look like Joan Baez?” asked Adam.
“No,” answered Tonya.
“Maybe it’s the lighting,” said Adam.
“You can’t say stuff like that to me,” said Tonya. “Hey, give me one of those.” She made a V with her fingers and pulled it towards and away from her mouth. Adam dug in his pocket and threw her the cigarettes, and then the lighter. She caught them and fished one out with her mouth and lit it. She wasn’t wearing gloves and her hands were frozen and moved with an elderly hesitancy and tremor. She took a drag and removed the cigarette from her mouth, holding the burning thing with her upper arm dug into her torso and her forearm crooked at an angle.
“I wish it snowed more,” said Adam. He shifted his weight so he was sitting on one of the more robust branches and his leg was leaning against one of the less robust ones.
“Why’s that?”
“I dunno. It absorbs all the sound. And I like when you can’t hear the cars.”
“It’s not that you can’t hear the cars. Nobody’s driving. Where’d you put the vodka?” Adam pointed to the ground beneath the tree, where he had lodged it in a bank of snow. Tonya picked it up and took a long pull. She swallowed and grimaced.
“Fuck this, man,” said Adam.
“Fuck what?” asked Tonya.
“You know.”
“Do I know?”
“Do you think you’ll ever leave?”
“Leave what?”
“Do you think you will? Actually?”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m asking you. Do you think you will?”
“What do you think?”
“Do you think you will?”
“I think you know.”
“Do you think you will?”
“Do you hear that?”
“What?”
“Do you hear that? The rustling?”
“What?”
“The rustling. It’s the killer.”
“There isn’t a killer. Are you ever gonna leave?”
“I swear. Someone’s here.”
“No one’s here. Are you gonna leave?”
“Shut up. Listen.” Adam listened. The only sound was the breeze and the quiet sound of the river flowing and flowing and flowing. The snow fell silently.
“I’m gonna leave.”
“Alright, man.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Ok, man. You’re gonna leave. Tell me how it goes, huh? Send me a postcard.”
“Fuck you.”
“Nice, man.”
“Fuck you, I’m gonna leave.”
“Let me know how it goes. Fuck, it’s fucking cold.”