There’s the house. There’s the gazebo, and then there’s the pond a little farther down the slope. There’s the clump of moss entangled with some driftwood where the water gives way to the rocks.

It’s an idyllic scene, the kind you’d see oil-painted in a gilt frame on the walls of your grandparents’ house. Perhaps it’s the same house as the one in the scene, perhaps not. Perhaps it’s a happy household too, except it’s not, because there’s a spatter of dried blood across the floorboards of the rusted-out gazebo, and the mellow tunes of “When Doves Cry” are trickling out of the ajar first-floor window, lending the whole scene some portentous overtones.

And then there’s the matter of the police officers, undeniably present and increasingly so as they advance across the backyard to the gazebo in full squad, fallen leaves crunching under their boots. Gun at hand, the officer out front zones into the pattern of blood on the ground, and the droplets remind him of the dots his father used to ask him to connect with his pencil as a kid—which is what he does today on a momentary, subconscious level, and thinks it might be a seahorse after all.

And it’s an educated guess, proven somewhat right as another police officer knocks on the seahorse-patterned front door of the house once, twice, three times and then kicks it open with his boots, praying nothing is lurking behind. And nothing is lurking behind and eerily so—there’s not so much as a stench of rot lingering inside the house, nor a whiff of bleach. The house stands in perfect equilibrium, perhaps save for some toys and errant cables dispersed across the living room floor, which offers a glimpse into the troubled inner life of a feline or a child, just as much as those magazine-sized posters of female pop icons in the girl’s bedroom upstairs, which might or might not hint at some poorly disguised mommy issues.

Irrespective of its reasons, each detail is photographed and diligently filed away in the police reports—including the varicolored plush animals marketed to a much younger age group than that of the girl’s; the excess number of shoes in the foyer and in the upstairs cabinets; the attic that doubles for some reason as the father’s office—which leaves the pond as the last of the places yet left unchecked on the premises, this bloody pot standing at the foot of a paled rainbow as a reporter would later put it on live TV upon the discovery of a blue shawl under one of the waterside rocks, which still carried the traces of the blood the police officers had sampled from the floor of the gazebo earlier that morning.

Now, there’s an industrial-sized dredger standing by the pond, ready to salvage what it can from the bottom of the water like the scoop of a gift machine, and then there’s the vector of forensic divers dipping in and out like some haggardly fish: one brings out to the surface a pair of polka-dotted pajamas while another holds a moss-clad Barbie like a trophy; then the first diver reappears shortly after with a little girl’s flowery headband clutched tight in his hands, looking strangely clean and soiled at once.

No one in the scene is yet aware that whatever they find in the pond will stand for another lie, that all they’ve found serves as a smokescreen for what’s left untold about the family, like that eight-by-eleven sheet of art paper still squeezed behind the radiator in the living room—the first place the policemen had checked—a souvenir the family had bought on their trip to Rome last year and is now defiled by a child’s drawing on the flip side, the one that still audits the signs of the last happy day they spent together as a family, their pouts well-buried behind their crayon smiles, the shingled roof of a middle-class house clashing hard against the mountains in the background, the family cat a pillow in the girl’s arms.

That’s a wrap, the supervisor shouts.

Sarp Sozdinler

is a writer of Turkish descent whose work has been published in American Literary Review, DIAGRAM, Electric Literature, Fractured Lit, HAD, HOBART, The Kenyon Review, The Masters Review, Maudlin House, The Normal School, and Vestal Review, among others. His stories have been selected or nominated for anthologies (Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, Wigleaf Top 50) and awarded various recognitions at literary contests judged by such authors as Jonathan Escoffery, Laura van den Berg, Paul Yoon, and Allegra Hyde. He’s currently at work on his first novel.

Author’s website: https://sarpsozdinler.com