THEO JASPER holds a BA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University. He is the recipient of the Citino Poetry Award, the Reba Elaine Pearl Burkhardt Roorbach Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the David O. Frantz Thesis Award. Theo is a transgender writer and finds his inspiration at the places where nature and queerness merge. He has a pet cat and two frogs, and can often be found wandering in the woods with his partner and best friend, Olive. You can find updates on Theo’s poetry chapbook, Genesis, and his forthcoming creative nonfiction collection here.
Peat, or decaying plant debris, layers over itself at the bottom of a water source—such as a pond or creek—which creates new soil for other plants to grow. These new plants often have roots in the water and leaves in the air, soft plants like cattails, water lilies, sedges, duckweed. All life on earth came from the water, the microorganisms in mosses and algae. Primordial.
In the fourth grade, we learn the states of matter, how water wants to fill whatever space it is in. I remember this wording, this sentiment explained by scientists, some of the biggest advocates for precise language: wants. The tendrils reaching in all directions when a glass is spilled on a flat surface. Water is replenished by itself: melting snow, stream runoff, underground springs, crisp rainfall.
Peat wants to remain wet. Without thought of replenishment, the snow would simply melt, and that fresh cold water, clean and clear, bleeds back into the peat, back to the earth, in and out, forever itself.
Angela Kennedy will be murdered. Her father does not know this yet. Lifting her small body to his chest, Dick is grateful. Jean has done good work with the walls, smoothing the paper down with convenient flat objects. They have a bed and one room, built unevenly, on a hill. A few cans of peaches are stacked in a small castle shape on the table.
He grabs one, and a familiar sense of worry tunnels its way through his ribs. A new father, Dick is unsure how his baby will survive. If the canned peaches he can barely afford are enough, if the house he is building for his baby and wife will be strong and reliable. So far, they have four walls and a ceiling, an outhouse standing alone in the yard.
It is 1962. The plot sits on Langan Lane, a street in the Coal Run neighborhood just outside the city limits of Zanesville, Ohio. Named for the abandoned mines it sits on top of, Coal Run’s ground has long been contaminated from mining. Groundwater in this area is contaminated with sulphur and other pollutants, making it unsafe for drinking, cooking, or bathing. The ground contamination is so severe that even rainwater collected from wells or cisterns is quickly unsafe for use.
Dick’s family has lived on this ground for generations; his mother’s house is within walking distance. The Coal Run community is isolated from the city around it, and it is the only neighborhood in the greater Zanesville area that has more non-white residents than white ones. Dick and Jean’s new baby has lighter skin, and Dick thinks this is for the best. She has blonde hair, which makes him recall a relative, someone his mother had maybe mentioned: an Indigenous woman named Pretty Hair. Dick’s family, the Kennedys, are racially ambiguous, and Dick is told he has some sort of Native American descent. Census takers call the Kennedys on Coal Run “black.”
With his cousins and brothers, he spent his childhood roaming the abandoned Coal Run mineland. He was unlike some of his family members who preferred to stay in, only going into town for necessities, which did not tend to include food—cucumbers and carrots grew in box gardens, chickens pecked their way around the grasses, squirrels were abundant and easy to shoot. Fondly, he remembers pulling turtles from their dens in the muddy walls of ponds, the savory taste of turtle soup. They sold the uneaten turtles for a little money, but it wasn’t enough. Dick dropped out of school before the seventh grade to start working, helping his family pay for water and food. Still, the Kennedys are hardy; they build their own houses and shoot small game and rely on the land of Coal Run, even in its contamination.
As a young adult, Dick meets Jean at the Lind Arena, a locally owned skating rink and social hub in Zanesville. Racial segregation is rampant in the small town, and non-white people are restricted to skating on Mondays. It is on one of these nights that Dick approaches her, Jean’s brown curly hair covering part of her face. She is poor, too; her mother had to give up many of her siblings during the Great Depression because she couldn’t afford to keep them. The unmistakable scent of tragedy lingers on her, as if the weight of the mouths her mother couldn’t feed rests in her own.
He asks her to skate, and she agrees. Music grinds out of a jukebox, the slick wood of the rink glistens against the lights. Within a few minutes, they are chatting, skating in rounds. He takes her hand, tentative, and she falters—going down, her dress flies above her head, exposing her underwear. Dick’s watch is caught on her dress as she falls, yanking his body down with hers, an anchor on a sinking ship. When they untangle their bodies and their laughter, he discovers the watch is broken. Decides there is no way around it, now—the two are intertwined, by accident or fate, even on the path to certain destruction.
Yes, Jean has done good work with the walls. He decides he will tell her this when she comes inside, having hung the laundry on a clothesline strung between two trees.
Angela looks up at him, her young face strangely expressive. With a small metal spoon, he excavates a peach slice. She sucks on it happily, a trickle of juice running down her chin. That tunneling worry burrows straight into his heart. It will have to be enough.
When Jean comes back inside, sunlight at her back, he forgets to tell her about the walls. He is tired from working and building, hauling clean water from the city’s water plant. For as long as he can remember, his family has been collecting and rationing clean water. They’ve attended city and county meetings for years, attempted to get public water access extended to their community on Coal Run. Now, a new father, it is Dick’s burden to bear.
He sent a letter to the city, hasn’t heard back yet. Streams cut through Coal Run, dipping off into reservoirs and small bog-like canyons. The creek (pronounced “crick” on Coal Run) sweeps alongside the rickety roads, transferring pollutants between the ground and water. The woods do not produce much greenery, with most of the forest made up of dead trees, wiry shrubs, and creekwater that runs orange.
When Dick and the baby fall asleep, Jean sits on the floor and looks through the mail. A letter from Zanesville, something about the water lines; Jean reads the word denied. She isn’t really sure what to make of it. Her eyes float towards the window, to the dark air in the woods outside. She remembers that she has heard coyotes in these woods. She doesn’t know yet, but she thinks it isn’t good.
Wind blows the clothesline outside, filling up the shirts and dresses as if they were alive. In the black wind, a coyote howls, almost as if afraid, as if in response to these beings, these figures. Tall and menacing and cloaked in white.
She crawls into bed with her small family, in their small room, alone in a large wood over acres of abandoned mines. And, against this, they sleep.
Bogs are another kind of wetlands, which are, if you remember, areas where the ground stays drenched. Like freshwater marshes, the grounds of bogs are made of decaying vegetation in the form of peat. Bogs do not have drainage, and unlike marshes, the water does not filter in and out. Stagnant.
Most plants will suffocate in bogs. This is due to the decaying plant matter (you remember this, the peat) which uses up all of the oxygen in the still water. The abundance of decaying matter in bogs makes the water very acidic. Your sundew, pitcher plants, and bladderwort set up, ready to catch insects out of the air, providing for themselves through consumption what their roots cannot.
Peat layers the bottom of bogs, making it unsafe to walk on. Sphagnum moss lines the bog like carpet, like quicksand—one wrong step, and you fall right through.
The surface of the water competes with sky for glossy stillness. It is dark and silken, as you might guess. Thick with decay.
Dick requests public access to water many times over the following years, and receives the same response from the city each time: denied. Zanesville cites low water pressure as the explanation. Dick builds a bathroom onto the house, just in case.
In the meantime, the family needs clean water for cooking, drinking, and bathing. Dick gets in his truck twice a week and heads to the city’s water plant. Here, he pays top dollar for clean water, which he then loads into jugs and packs into the truck bed. They empty the water into the cistern (pronounced “cis-tren” on Coal Run). Dick’s family is privileged on Coal Run for having a cistern; most people can’t afford the installation, the extra cost of hauling.
Getting clean water wherever you can find it is common sport for the Kennedys on Coal Run. Dick’s cousin, Jerry, built a house next door in ‘88, and has a similar system, although he also utilizes rainwater in his routine. Dick waves when he sees Jerry outside on rainy days, hands deep in a basin, washing his clothes.
Angela grows up. She gets into trouble here and there. A few nights in jail, an arrest or two. It is not uncommon in the family.
She has a few children, the first of which she has at 16: Jessica, Violet, and Cody. Her life is tumultuous and raw. She is unable to find stable employment or housing. She works odd jobs, gets money here and there. She’s been charged a few times for solicitation, has a reputation with the cops. They first recognize her for her name, one of them Kennedys out on Coal Run.
Because of this, the children live with her parents, Dick and Jean, on Coal Run. It is better this way.
Next door, Jerry Kennedy wakes early, checks on the game hanging to dry in his basement—looks alright. He strides into the brisk sun, his dark brown skin glistening like the glossy wet face of a rock. Jerry seems knowledgeable, secure in his own person. A guitar rests on his porch from the night before. The whole family listened to him play, and Dick walked over from next door. Years ago, they cut a path in the brush between their houses, and they take turns mowing to maintain it.
This morning, Jerry sees something strange: a hot tub poking out from behind his white neighbor’s new house. The sprinklers are running so close that Jerry could almost run through them—well, imagine that. Last week, a well was infested with dead rats, which they found out after someone said, seriously, “this water tastes like dead rats.” His white neighbor’s yard, the grass, the mud, gets potable water right from water lines, newly installed for this very family.
As they will learn, he is not the only neighbor who has been granted public water access on Coal Run in recent years. In 1969, 1975, and 1991, white families on the same street were granted the ability to tap into public water lines.
The city keeps making promises, and each time, they expressly avoid Langan Lane/Coal Run. Like a nervous system, water lines run directly to the houses of people who never had to ask for them. The pulsing white veins of Muskingum county.
It is December of 2001, and things are beginning to freeze. Angela’s oldest daughter, Jessica, has blonde hair, an orange-peach tint to her skin. Angela moves out and her daughter slips right into her place. Jessica has never taken a shower. They cannot afford for all of them to bathe in separate water—one tub a day. Jessica makes sure to always go last.
Jessica has two children now. She was pregnant with her second child just a few months ago, almost went into early labor when the second plane hit the Twin Towers. In the delivery room, she sees a news report, the dust kicked up by bombs. Who it might be alright to kill, when it might be alright to kill them—the move from victims and casualties to enemies and eradicated.
The report turns to real footage: heroic shots of uniformed men, smoke in the background, the limbs and voices of children, shot up in the blast. Jessica turns the TV off.
Jerry Kennedy goes himself down to a county hearing. The building looks important, dignified, governmental—he is nervous.
When it is Jerry’s turn, his palms are sweating. One of them Kennedys out on Coal Run. County Commissioner Dorothy Montgomery straightens against the image of him, the flag hanging low and dead beside her.
He finally speaks. Says his mother has lived on Coal Run for seventy years, has never taken a clean bath. He would like her to see running water in her lifetime.
For a moment, Montgomery feels powerful, heroic. She stops a moment before delivering the blow. Her eyes shifting, she examines his potential weak spots. She begins by flatly denying water to Coal Run. White citizens at the meeting stifle laughs, and Dorothy’s eyes spark. Jackpot.
She flexes her power, drunk on attention and superiority. “Until President Bush drops spiral bombs in the holler,” she emphasizes, referencing the hollow of land Coal Run sits on. Bombs on the news, kicking up bodies. There is a roaring, a wave of laughter in the room.
Montgomery continues, again emphasizing the dismissal, a crude denial of the inherent violence of this reality: Jerry’s “grandchildren’s grandchildren [will] not have water.” Again, there is laughter.
Jerry feels large and naked, somehow both a scorned child and a grotesque spectacle, fighting his way through a militia of eyes. Against his better judgment, Jerry decides to stay until the end of the hearing.
At the very same meeting, the county approves a waterline project for a nearly all white area on Chandlersville Road, a few miles south of Coal Run.
Creeks are like small streams, which are like small rivers. They are not exactly wetlands because they tend to dry up during some parts of the year. Creeks can be naturally occurring or manmade.
If you remember, there is a creek (pronounced “crick”) running through Coal Run. It runs orange water through the hollow, cratering the land around it. Cradling the land around it.
Things do not tend to survive in these woods. This is good news. Well, for the mushrooms. Mushrooms break down organic matter by releasing enzymes into their prey. Water is integral to this process. Without water, mushrooms cannot release these enzymes. Some species will even absorb water from moist areas and transport them to arid areas when the substrate gets too dry. They do this frequently, and with fervor.
Similar to the water in bogs, if you remember, mine-contaminated water is suffocating, acidic, unfit to bear life. Mushrooms grow alongside Coal Run’s creeks: yellow, flowering, blossoms of gills, cups, and stems.
Each generation, children will go to this creek. Boots on, searching closely for frogs, salamanders, scraps of life in the dark waters. Black air only persists, thick enough on its own to suffocate most things. You need to remember this.
Despite what the census categorizes them as, the Kennedys are not exactly black. They are the descendants of the multiracial community mostly isolated in rural West Virginia called The Chestnut Ridge People.
The CRP are a diverse group: since the colonization of the United States, these people have been said to represent a variety of skin tones, ranging from fair to rich, and a mixed heritage. CRP are said to be descended from a myriad of Indigenous nations, including Cherokee man Sam Norris and Lenape woman Pretty Hair.
Some have African heritage, and the history of racial discrimination against the Chestnut Ridge People means that most of them were classified as “colored” and were socially and legally restricted from interacting with white settlers. Many of these people have dark skin and features which resemble people Indigenous to this land.
In Zanesville, the CRP Kennedys were restricted from going to “white only” establishments, visually categorized as black, and repeatedly isolated and scrutinized by the white community around them. Due to this, many lived, hunted, cooked, grew food, and socialized in their Coal Run community.
Dick makes his eggs dark every morning. Bacon grease sizzles in the air, making it feel wet and hot. Jean sits at the kitchen table, the proof of her breakfast being a thin ring of milky coffee imprinted on a floral tablecloth. It is an imprint that is re-stained every morning; their breakfasts, re-tasted; floral wallpaper, a few iron photograph carousels, their pictures never changing; the scent of soap and bath water which, each morning, they share.
Jean watches him, extra pepper on his eggs. He walks through the back door and it closes behind him. Through the window, Dick examines the sproutlings, the green arms, she remembers, of her cabbages, onions, leeks. Jean has to stop herself from rolling her eyes, what, does he think he can make them grow better than the dirt can?
The outdoor dog, a golden scraggly thing, gallops over to Dick, smelling the bacon on his pants. She thinks of her life, the way her arms ache from working, from hauling water. Jean remembers her father, a man she loved, saying to her, do what you love, and you’ll never work a day. She has been poor her entire life; she is unsure if she was ever happy.
His eyes full of love for his family and his land, Dick spots Jean watching him through the window. His smile almost reaches her. She turns away.
Like others who live on Coal Run, Cynthia Hairston will be threatened. The white people of Zanesville are deeply racist, and they heard about the complaints. It is a starch white town, white like the clothes Jean hangs, the ones that become full and mobile in her window at night.
A coworker, grave and spitting, warns Hairston, “you people out on Coal Run act like the Klan don’t exist out here anymore.”
On the morning of the first public hearing about water access in Coal Run, Cynthia walks outside for the mail, sun high and proud. There is water in the street from a hose in her neighbor’s yard, left on overnight.
When she finds it in her driveway, she does not scream.
She does, however, look around. Suddenly aware there may be eyes on her. Slowly, she backs away from it, that gnarled chunk of flesh.
She isn’t sure what it is at first, but god, the smell. It takes her a second to focus.
The severed head of a pig. Meticulously placed near her front door, as if it were natural as rain. Like it just ended up there, peat in the bottom of a bog. Like it had sprouted right from the water.
Three short months after Jerry Kennedy is denied water access at the county meeting by Dorothy Montgomery, the wind stops blowing on Coal Run: it happens.
And it rings, like the sound of running water, the commissioner’s promise that water lines would not be extended to Coal Run unless all of them were dead. Bombed, fragments of bodies. Back to the land, the groundwater.
Three months later, in a hollow of decay, if you remember, in the thick peat which lines a creekbed: a body is found.
It is the early morning. A nineteen-year old pulls on his boots. Some newspapers will say that he went out this morning to hunt. While this might be true technically, I think it misses the essence of what he was doing, the nature of a search.
The young man was, in fact, looking for mushrooms, their heads poking up in this new spring. Searching for the blossoms of death, of rot. Making his way under a footbridge, he will find what he is looking for.
It will take a few days for them to identify her body. When an autopsy is finally performed, they will detail the brutal manner of her death:
Beaten and bruised. Stabbed over
and over. Throat slit. Gunshot wounds,
one to the chest, one to the back of her head,
blonde, pretty hair matted. Teeth missing.
Badly decomposed. Dumped. Identified by fingerprints,
peach skin, a Coal Run Kennedy, already on file.
And this coroner’s report, this litany of all the ways someone can die, over and over, will be mailed to Dick and Jean’s house. Sitting in a mailbox, on the kitchen table, on Coal Run. In Jean’s wrinkled hands, her eyes scanning every detail, a few days after it happened. A thin ring of milky coffee on the tablecloth, bacon grease in the air; they will read what happened to Angela, their only daughter.
The city will claim it was a mistake—they only meant to send the death certificate, not the autopsy. A simple mistake, nothing more. Brutal threats and then a death, a record of her suffering left on her mother’s porch, enemies and eradication. A severed pig’s head. A dead daughter. Beaten, stabbed, throat slit, shot execution-style. Like the videos on the news of US soldiers in Afghanistan, spiral bombs kicking up dirt and bodies.
There are articles in Zanesville’s Times Recorder. The first article identifying Angela’s body lists her remaining family, the nature of her death.
It blurs into the information at the end of the article, a bow signifying the start and end of an investigation: a list of her criminal record. The only photograph of her in the article identifying her body is a mugshot.
In another article, Colonel Brian Hoover of Muskingum County Sheriff's office draws attention to a solicitation charge. She had a past of engaging in sex work to keep her life afloat. To put food on the table. So she could pay her water bill.
“What they do places them in harm’s way,” Hoover educates us.
“It’s a personal choice they have to make,” he says, empathy glistening in his sensitive, all-knowing eyes. “But from our standpoint, they are running a high risk of being harmed.”
There will be no further investigation.
All life came from the water, the ground. For decades, and generations. Layers and layers of peat.
They made a mistake when they dumped her in the creek. For nearly three weeks, her body was rinsed in those trickling waters. Her peach skin glistened with runoff. Angela was my grandmother, and we have learned that what is released into the groundwater becomes part of it—we will not be so easy to remove.
I hope the man who found my grandma felt lucky to have seen it. An integration, a natural funeral. The mushrooms as pallbearers leading the procession, every pale droplet of water running over her skin like a dirge. Her peach hair must have curled into the brush, resting, finally, among each solemn reed of grass. I hope she felt the earth welcome her body, the clean water rinsing her hair between its fingers.
And, as I’m sure you remember, peat is infinite: she is still here, in an eternal creekbed, free and wet and calm, forever us, forever herself.
Volume 15.2 ✧ Summer 25
Theo Jasper
