I wait until four in the morning then quietly leave my motel room and empty the drinks dispensers of complimentary ice whilst no one is looking.

There is one dispenser on each of the three floors and I take everything they have. Every night I do this and every day they are restocked. The walls are white, the carpets dark red, and there are scratches on the door jambs.

I collect the cubes in a plastic bag because a tray or glass makes too much noise and I carry it to my car. I open the trunk and empty the ice out onto that which I’ve already collected so that there is a thick, glistening bed of it.

It used to be that I could buy it in sacks from the nearby all-night supermarket but the assistants became suspicious as to why a lone man was buying up all the ice they had in the early hours of the morning and that meant that the managers became suspicious and that meant that I couldn’t set foot in there without every CCTV camera in the place turning to focus on me. That and the fact that the motel eats up what little money I have left.

And if they would have ever have bothered to have stopped me, those bleary-eyed night managers, those slouching immigrant cashiers and embittered security guards, and if they had asked me what I needed the ice for, I’ve always wondered if I would have told them;

“For the bodies.”

**

I park the car in the dried tyre marks that I left the last time I was here, deep into the swamp and away from the lights of the nearby roads. There is the stench of slowly rotting plant matter, of sweet and heady pollen and varied gases, of air polished clean by the storms of the last few days.

Most of the foliage has grown back into place but there’s still enough of a path that I can find my way to the clearing and then to the edge of the water. The surface sparkles like my ice.

I sit on the corpse of a fallen tree that is slowly being consumed by the swamp, devoured branch by rotten branch, and notice how far up the water has come this time. The water moves past me almost imperceptibly and I find myself studying each and every rock that pokes through the surface, imagining it to be a skull or a buttock. I see twigs drifting by and think they are femurs; I see a clump of algae and think it is a dark, shrivelled piece of skin.

The moon moves across the sky and brings with it a new light. I sit up when something breaks the surface and at first it’s just another piece of swamp debris but then it changes and it’s hair – long, blonde hair. Some unseen movement takes it around a small crop of rocks and I follow it, hurriedly pushing my way through creepers and thick vines, not wanting to lose sight of it.

I crash towards a miniature shore created from where the grubby water twists suddenly and I reach down and snag the hair. I pull as gently as I can and the body flips over, rolling towards me. I drag it free of the swamp and this time it’s a young man.

**

I’m in the car and it’s a day or so later.

I’m about four hundred miles from the motel and the blonde man I found in the water, he’s in the trunk. Last time I checked, the ice had melted and refrozen around him so that he was beginning to resemble an insect trapped in amber. I read the address on the driving license that had been in his jeans pocket out loud to myself one last time, then I recite his name.

“Benjamin Ceedar.”

I get out and walk along the street until I come to a house with a garden that has become untamed. The neighbourhood has that nervous edge to it that comes when you have enough to money to seal yourself off but still feel an obligation towards community. A man lurks in his tool shed next door, a carving of some sort in his hand, and he watches me as I walk up to number 1156 and press the buzzer just beneath a nameplate reading D & P Ceedar.

A woman in her late sixties opens the door but she doesn’t say anything and me, I never know what to say.

But then I never need to know.

She just looks straight at me, swallows.

This must be what a traffic cop goes through when he has to report an RTA to the family of the dead.

The woman turns from me, calls out, “Daniel.”

A moment later a man with liver spots over his balding head and glasses held together by a thin copper wire appears beside her. He looks at me in that same way and his hands go to his wife’s shoulder. I see his knuckles turn white.

This is the moment they have been waiting for.

“Mr. and Mrs. Ceedar,” I say finally because it feels like we could stand there forever, silent emotion bouncing between us like light refracted from a crystal.

And the old lady, she breathes hard and says, “Benjamin.” Her lips flutter. Her hands are shaking.

I bow my head in acknowledgement then hand her the drivers license and then she begins to cry and the old man, he has to fight it back for her sake.

“Three years,” he says, nostrils flaring with the effort of keeping his voice steady. “It’ll be three years next Tuesday.”

I tell them, “I’m sorry.”

And I have to be sorry, even though I’ve never met Benjamin Ceedar, nor his parents, have no clue as to who he was and what kind of a person he was but I’m sorry, I’m always sorry because their pain, their pain is brilliant and clear and it is mine.

“Can we see him?” Mrs. Ceedar asks.

“Of course.”

I return to the car, pop open the trunk. I push away the icy shrapnel that covers the body and lift it out, carry it up the driveway towards them and now they’re sobbing, their bodies shaking with it, and they step aside to let me in and I put their dead son down on a sofa. His ratty jeans and plaid shirt have dried now, his hair having tumbled into a blonde mass.

“I told him to cut that hair,” Mr. Ceedar says through gritted teeth. And he bites his lower lip and leans into his wife shoulder. And everywhere there are photos of Benjamin, this man I’ve never known.

They look like my parents, like everyone’s parents. Their pain is everyone’s pain.

“I have to go now,” I tell them, stepping back from the body.

They’re kneeling next it, holding its hands – his hands, Benjamin’s hands.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Ceedar says before leaning over her son and kissing his forehead. “Thank you for bringing him back to us.”

* *

But I don’t bring them back.

I just deliver them.

I’ve added Benjamin Ceedar’s ID to the folder that contains the others. Drivers licenses and college photocards are crammed together alongside photographs with inscriptions on the back. There are passes for secure buildings and credit cards. Even store receipts and business cards, torn pieces of poetry and love letters, all these things that identify us.

Identify them.

You have a person’s wallet, their purse, and you have their life.

Or what was their life.

Rain batters the window of my room and I want to go back to the water, but I’m tired, so tired. I finger through the photocards, re-read poetry that is burned into my mind. I announce the name of each body and I think of their families when I had returned the bodies to them. How they had all had that same crumpled, weary look on their faces when I had arrived and how the look was gone by the time I left. It is closure, for them. The not knowing, that is the most painful part.

The not knowing.

A dark, gothicky romance-horror along the same lines as La Mer. Currently unpublished.

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