I won’t forget April 17. Or I can’t. The pillars holding up what I knew all fell at once, that comfortable pattern I saw in the regularity of every day.

It started in an art exhibit downtown. I walked down a hallway toward warm light and a rhythmic beat and stood in front a freestanding wall. I came to a dark room and a repeating video.

A girl in a red dress was dancing alone in a club with her arms up. The people sitting at the tables and lounge chairs talked around her like she wasn’t there. I crossed my arms and leaned forward to see her face through her dark hair. Her eyes were closed softly and she was smiling to herself like my sister did when she slept against the car window.

The sound of wind beyond the freestanding wall grew to a dull howling when I stood in the center of the next room. More videos ran on the walls, giving off a faint white glow in a room without lighting.

I didn’t know if there was supposed to be a sequence, so I started clockwise at nine.

The video ran a close-up of an old woman near a lake bed. She was a mother, holding her stare beyond the frame, against something. Fear. The video cut.

The old woman now sat on a bench far off in the distance. The girl in the red dress was standing in wetland grass by the lake in three different places at the same time with her arms outstretched against the wind. The dress clung to the shape of her thighs and her chest. The sun broke through dark pluming clouds.

The next wall held a funeral procession. People 8212; no, a family 8212; stood together in the sand holding hands as a priest read aloud from the Bible. She stood in the middle, in her red dress like she was really there. Far behind the ceremony against the waterfront there was a dab of red. The scene cut.

Two men from the funeral were carrying her on a stretcher through the sand where she sat hunched forward, limp and pale. Angel wings poured out from her back, spilling over one man’s grip. Her head was bobbing, lifeless. Sharp laughter rang out from beyond the freestanding wall. Someone had tied a blindfold over her face and it clumped her hair over her eyes like a curtain. That feeling came up into the back of my throat and spread to my neck.

On the third wall, an imposing tree with thick shaded boughs. There she was, two of her, strung up from the high branches by her feet with her wings drawn tight around her like a blanket.

The film cut. A close-up on her face. Eyes open and staring back. My God. Her wet hair dangled in the broken light through the leaves. The frown was that same smile, turned on itself. I looked away and swallowed.

The last wall. I was standing at the calm edge of a lake looking through a clearing to the still water and the low set clouds. The wind screamed. She was floating face down, drowned and naked with her skin bloated and her wings spread. Christ. I clenched my fist in my pocket and exhaled.

In the late afternoon on the peak of a low mountain not too far north, my roommate stood nearby looking west. The sun had come through the textured underbelly of the clouds and lit up a lake with the reflection. He said it was Lake Hodges, where he’d done some reporting on a memorial walk for Chelsea King. It hadn’t occurred to me we were in Poway.

I brought myself back weeks before, to the hours I spent in my apartment writing a piece for the newspaper about what happened there, about the rape and murder and the other girls.

I had looked up John Albert Gardner’s photograph before writing it. His face said nothing of what was done. There was a blank look in his eyes, nothing behind them but a departed memory of the killing. She was nothing.

Those events, those which only he could know, were still trying to build themselves up and fill in the voids left with the piece I’d written a month and a half later. It was unknowing, loose threads weaving themselves together in an attempt at some makeshift resolution.

By the car, I was fixated on how close we were to where it happened. I didn’t want it pulling at me anymore, the bold terror of violence like that.

Much of the surroundings of the lake had been burned by a fire some years before. Dead, naked trees stood in the shallow water against the sky. It would be dark soon and my roommate and I had already walked the broad path of the lake for some time. I would never be back. I knew that.

Off the path in a knot of brush there was a dab of orange. A balloon ribbon strung up. Another. They led us to a circle of sand enclosed by a chamber of tall trees tilted inward, leaving a ring of open sky. Footprints were everywhere in the dry lakebed before we stepped in.

A Ziploc bag hung on a branch at 12 clockwise across the circle. A sheet of paper, preserved: “May we resolve that our thoughts, words and deeds not add to the darkness in the world, for it was darkness that took Chelsea away from us. May God give us the strength to carry out this resolution.”

I started blinking fast and my breath staggered. I read it again.

“Tom.”

He stood through the brush looking down. The space on the ground enclosed by placed sticks. My stomach turned on itself. Crosses. A teddy bear. Flowers pouring over the plot of earth onto the branches. Her photographs. Her smile. Wilted roses were strung up from the branches. I shifted my weight. Shaking. The sun broke through the dark pluming above. Oh god. I put my hand over my mouth and stepped toward the water. I was standing at the calm edge of a lake looking through a clearing to the still water and the low set clouds. The wind screamed. God no. God.

8212;Tom Hammel is a political science senior and wants you to check out lauta.dk/floating_female.html.

8212;This fictional story does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Daily Aztec.