Saltwater

Because apparently none of them learned anything from The Murder Coat.

“Okay, hear me out,” I said, pointing a chicken nugget at them both. “But there’s this film—”

Which, admittedly, I had already become way too emotionally invested in for something I’d discovered earlier in a Reddit thread titled SALTWATER EXPLAINED???”

Lila and Evie looked back at me from opposite ends of the couch wearing two entirely different flavours of unimpressed.

“Frankie, no.” Evie lowered her kebab slowly like somebody witnessing the start of a natural disaster. “That sentence has literally never led to anything good. Especially coming from you.”

Which was unfair. Rude and unfair. Plenty of my ideas had led to good things. Admittedly, most of them had also led to police involvement… but still. Rude.

Lila took a sip of beer. “Why are we watching this here?”

I grinned winningly at her. Detective Cool-as-ice, always hurring us to the point. I gestured at the television mounted across the wall.

“You realise nobody believes you bought that thing for rugby,” I said.

“I did buy it for rugby.”

“Lila. That television can see atoms.”

Evie snorted into her kebab. Meaning agreement.

“That’s not a sports setup,” I continued. “That’s a lesbian command centre. You’re two steps away from analysing Xena: Warrior Princess like it’s classified footage.”

Lila watched me over the rim of her beer with the deeply patient expression of somebody deciding whether murder was worth the paperwork.

Honestly, getting exactly that look out of her was at least forty percent of why I kept talking.

“I’m serious,” I went on. “You don’t buy eighty-five inches of OLED unless you’re prepared to pause Gabrielle reaction shots frame-by-frame.”

Evie wheezed. “Please stop talking.”

Lila still said nothing, which honestly told me more than a denial would have. I’d known her long enough to recognise the exact point where amusement became reluctant participation.

“Anyway,” I said, grabbing the remote before either of them could escape the conversation, “there’s this film.”

Evie groaned immediately. “Oh my god, do we have to watch one of your dire art films?”

“Yes, because unlike SOME people, I care about local arts culture.”

“You called the director of that vampire short film ‘a haunted vape cartridge.’”

“In my defence, he absolutely was.”

Lila stretched her legs out onto the coffee table. “What kind of film?”

“Mid 2000s indie thing. Shot around Newtown and the Basin. Screened once at the festival and then basically vanished.”

“That sounds aggressively Wellington already,” Evie muttered.

“Right? Apparently there’s all these rumours around it because a couple of violent incidents got linked back to the film years later and internet true crime people became obsessed with spotting the same background figure in different scenes.”

Evie sat upright so fast she nearly launched her kebab. “Nope. Immediately no.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No. I’ve seen this movie. White woman develops niche obsession, starts pinning screenshots to a wall, gets murdered beside artisanal pickles.”

“In fairness,” I said, digging into my tote bag, “that’s a strong aesthetic.”

I pulled out the DVD case and held it up triumphantly.

The cover was almost aggressively early-2000s indie cinema: washed-out colours, blurry coastline, lowercase title, and a woman standing ankle-deep in water looking like she’d recently experienced symbolism.

“Oh my god,” Evie whispered. “You brought a physical disc.”

“What did you think I was going to do? Summon it through vibes?”

Lila snorted into her beer.

“I found it in a bargain bin at Aro Video for two dollars,” I continued. “which honestly feels disrespectful to the mythology.”

Evie stared at me for a long moment, then slid off the couch with her plate tucked against her chest.

“I’m done,” she sighed. “The vibes have turned forensic.”

“Oh, come on.”

“You’ve got the detective. You’ve got the weird film. This is exactly how podcasts happen.”

Muffin immediately lumbered after her, nails skidding briefly on the wooden floor as Lila’s enormous Swiss Shepherd decided the kitchen probably contained both danger and snacks.

Horatio, meanwhile, remained curled in the armchair with the stillness of a creature who would happily watch us all perish if dinner remained on schedule.

Honestly, the fact that the cat was staying calmer than the humans did not feel especially reassuring.

“You’re being dramatic,” I called.

“Yes,” Evie replied from the kitchen. “Because I intend to survive.”

I crossed the room and put the DVD in the player. There was something weirdly ceremonial about physical media. Like we were summoning the film instead of just clicking on it. After two days of increasingly unhinged forum threads, seeing the actual menu screen felt bizarrely intimate.

Lila stretched out on the couch beside me, beer balanced against one knee as the opening screen appeared.

SALTWATER

The title sat there for an oddly long time before fading into grainy nighttime footage of Wellington.
The Basin Reserve emerged through rain-streaked camera blur, the little round cricket ground sitting improbably in the middle of the city like a green pudding basin dropped between traffic and apartment blocks. Headlights slid across wet streets while buses hissed through intersections that still looked almost exactly the same twenty years later.

“Oh wow,” I murmured. “This is aggressively New Zealand.”

From the kitchen Evie called, “If somebody starts monologuing about loneliness, I’m leaving.”

Almost immediately, a woman’s voice crackled through the speakers.

“People think cities remember things,” she said. “Really they just leave things lying around.”

“Jesus Christ,” Evie yelled. “I’m packing a fucking bag.”

I laughed, settling further into the couch. At first the film felt exactly like I expected: long shots of puddles, exhausted-looking people smoking outside dairies, somebody staring moodily through a bus window while acoustic guitar drifted sadly in the background.

Peak Wellington.

I was halfway through saying that every person involved in this production had probably owned at least one emotionally catastrophic scarf when Lila leaned forward slightly beside me, her attention sharpening in a way that cut clean through the joking atmosphere.

“Wait.”

The shift in her voice made me look over properly for the first time since the film started. Then she reached for the remote and paused the frame.

Rain blurred across a takeaway shop window near the Basin. Cars crawled through the intersection beyond it, headlights smeared gold against wet asphalt. A couple stood arguing near the curb.

And near the edge of frame, almost hidden beneath the awning of a closed pharmacy, a man stood perfectly still… staring directly into the camera.

Lila stared at the screen for another few seconds.

Then she said quietly, “I know him.”

A weird little surge went through me then — the specific electric feeling of a story suddenly becoming real. “Like, from down the gym, or – ”

“No.” Her eyes stayed fixed on the paused frame. “I actually know him.”

I straightened slightly. “From where?”

Lila rewound a few seconds, then paused again on the man beneath the pharmacy awning. Even through the grainy footage there was something unmistakably watchful about him — rigid posture, hands shoved deep into the pockets of a distinctive red raincoat, eyes fixed toward the camera.

“He’s younger there… but I’m sure it’s him.” She sat back, lost for a moment in her memories. “He was interviewed during a case a few years ago,” She went on. “Woman assaulted near Adelaide Road. He claimed he saw something.”

For the first time since the film started, even Evie stopped commenting from the kitchen.

“What kind of assault?” I asked.

Lila’s jaw shifted slightly. “Bad.”

My brain lurched suddenly sideways through about six half-remembered Reddit threads at once. I had the horrible, exhilarating feeling that I’d already read the next part. I was already grabbing for my phone.

“Oh my god,” Evie called from the kitchen. “She’s doing the thing.”

“I am not doing a thing.”

“I can literally see you building a six-part podcast series in real time.”

I ignored her and started scrolling through my notes app instead, pulse suddenly kicking faster.

There’d been one particular story people kept circling back to online: a woman assaulted near the Basin Reserve after becoming fixated on Saltwater. According to the rumours, she’d started insisting she recognised people from the film around Newtown in the weeks before the attack. Specifically, a man in a red raincoat.

I looked back up at the television.

The man beneath the pharmacy awning still stood there, half-hidden by rain and shadow, eyes fixed toward the camera like he’d known, somehow, that somebody would eventually stop the film right there.

My thumb stopped scrolling, and that weird, fizzy excitement drained out of me so fast it almost left me cold.

“What?” Lila asked quietly.

I turned the phone toward her.

The article photo was grainy, badly lit, pulled from an old Dominion Post archive. But the man standing beside the police cordon wore a raincoat in the same shade of red, the same rigid posture, the same heavy silver ring glinting against one hand.

Below the image, the date read:
September 14, 2009.

I’d felt this exact shift before, and historically speaking it never ended with any of us getting more emotionally stable.

Then Evie said from the kitchen, very softly this time:
“…okay, that’s actually fucked.”

***

Based on characters from The Murder Coat, a cosy thriller/murder serial set in Wellington, NZ.

Written in response to Day#16 Bradley Ramsey’s Halls of Pandemonium writing challenge.