Photo by Josu00e9 Martin Segura Benites on Pexels.com
This story is part of the project A Writer’s Shindig. Ted Wallenius’s story is the fifth of 6 short stories written for the project. You can read more about our collaboration and read all the stories posted thus far at A Writer’s Shindig.
Everyone left the Corner Bar. Janey left with her escort. Two-Cents and Stacy rode in TwoCents’s black GMC, and Tim went with them, in the back seat. The peed-on man went home to take a shower. The bartender wiped down the counter and went home to his TV dinner.
After Stacy stepped inside without saying a word, Tim and Two-Cents sat together in Two-Cents’ driveway. Tim asked Two-Cents if he could buy a half gram of the Bolivian marching powder. Two-Cents gave Tim the cocaine and Tim went back across the street to his own house, changed into a dark shirt and black jeans, and waited in front of his living room window.
After midnight Tim saw the black truck start up in his neighbor’s driveway. It was a cold, windy night and he knew Two-Cents liked to warm up the GMC before leaving. Tim did a quick snort, spooning it in with the baby spoon he’d never had any use for. Then, feeling fine, he walked across the street. He opened the rear side door of the GMC and lay down across the back seat. A few minutes later Two-Cents came out and got into the driver’s seat. He drove straight to the Broken Pony without ever realizing Tim was in the truck with him.
When Two-Cents stopped the truck and got out Tim lay still and flat for a few more minutes. He maneuvered the plastic bag and the baby spoon out of his pocket and did another snort. Then he opened the back door, stepped carefully out onto the gravel lot, and looked around to get his bearings. He could see the main building with the rearing stallion on the face of it and the illuminated signage for the brothel. Behind the main building there were three sheds. Janey told him the one he needed was the one in the middle.
The middle shed had a good, sturdy ramp and a keypad lock. Tim walked carefully up the ramp and pressed the numbers Janey had given him into the lock. He heard the latch release with a click. Now he’d have to be fast. She told him there were cameras, and he’d have to turn on the lights to see what he was doing. He opened the door and stepped into the shed.
The light switch was beside the door. Tim Whiting clicked it on, fearless. He knew he could do it. People stole motorcycles all the time. The storage shed flooded with light. Tim’s eyes widened and blood roared through his heart. There it was. He couldn’t believe it.
Janey wasn’t lying. It was an honest-to-God Vincent Black Lightning, right there in front of him. It was up on an orange rear wheel stand, perpendicular to the raised platform, bathed in the lights like an angel’s chariot. The lights gleamed off the chrome in aerials and disappeared into its black sides.
Tim climbed on, feeling the frame and the leather beneath him. He scooped the last bit of white powder straight from the baggie into his nose and dropped his pewter baby spoon on the floor with a clatter. The keys were in the ignition. He thought that old kick starter would be a bitch to fire so he reared up off the saddle for it, but when he kicked it down with his boot, the engine, filled with a mix of high-octane gasoline and synthetic motor oil, turned over like a kitten purring.
Tim pushed the bike off the stand, put it in gear, and let go the clutch. The Vincent jumped off the platform. He gave it a little gas to get the rear wheel spinning and turned it like a jungle cat in the small space, facing it out the door and down the ramp. Tim smiled so wide he felt like his face was going to split open. He saw them now, people running out of the Broken Pony, gathering open-mouthed in the gravel court. Tim Whiting gassed the Vincent and roared down the steps. He went right through them, watching them dive out of his way like tenpins.
With a swooping turn Tim was off the gravel and out on the highway, wind whipping through his hair. The feeling of exultation that poured through him seemed to come from deep inside the motorcycle, roaring up through his thighs to his chest and out his open mouth as he yelled out his triumph.
“I feel free,” Tim Whiting thought.
Behind him Tai Botman spread his legs on the blacktop, took aim with the Colt Python he’d grabbed up in his office when he saw the intruder in his shed on his security camera, and squeezed off a shot that rocked Tai backwards on his heels and set the night on fire.
Tai Botman slid down the berm from the highway and dusted off his hands. “Why’re you looking at me like that?” he demanded of the assembled persons standing in the gravel courtyard of the Broken Pony. Since it was Friday night, there were two bouncers, both useless. There was a maid, a bartender, also useless, four johns, and six working girls who weren’t working. Tai wanted to shoot each and every one of them. His motorcycle had just disappeared down US 50, heading in the direction of Utah.
Tai said, “I didn’t hit him.” There was nothing out there. No cops, no emergency rooms, hardly even a gas station until Ely. No one who could catch a ‘52 Vincent Black Lightning.
Janey was in the doorway. She knew Tai had hit him. She’d heard Tim start the Vincent, put a robe on and made it to the door just in time to see the almost imperceptible wobble with the blast from the Colt as the taillights of the Vincent Black Lightning tore away into the darkness. Tai wouldn’t have seen it, not while he was trying to wrangle that elephant gun.
“You,” Tai said to her. “You did this.”
Now Two-Cents was in the doorway behind Janey, naked but for a purple towel wrapped around his midriff, his pimples red in the courtyard halogens.
“And you,” Tai menaced. He raised the Colt Python, six inches of stainless steel barrel, five more .357 magnum semiwadcutters ready to go in the wheel. He pointed the muzzle at Two-Cents’ face. Two-Cents raised his hands, knowing he was about to die.
“Cut it out, Tai. That’s brandishing,” Janey told him.
“I don’t give a shit, Janey,” Tai said. “It’s not even a felony. You stole my motorcycle.”
“It’s my motorcycle,” Janey said, “and I didn’t have anything to do with this.”
“Bullshit,” Tai said, but he lowered the pistol, which was a good thing for everyone, because the cavalry pulled into the courtyard with their red and blue lights flashing.
While Tai talked to the two officers, who knew quite well who he was and how much money he paid them to keep his business operational, all on the up and up of course, Janey went back inside, ignoring Two-Cents in his towel even when he reached out to see if she was okay.
Janey worked the dial on the wall safe in Tai’s office. The easiest way to crack a safe is to watch someone else dial the combination. She got it right on the first try. She removed the title for the Vincent Black Lightning and tucked it into her purse.
• • •
In the darkest part of the morning Two-Cents pulled his black truck into the driveway, crept into his house, went to the bathroom to wash his hands, and crept into bed beside his wife, Stacy. She didn’t wake, only mumbled a little at the shifting of the blankets and the mattress. Two-Cents pulled the covers up to his chin. It was cold in the house but under the blankets he felt the safety and security of his own bed and his own wife in a way he hadn’t before Tai Botman pointed that pistol right at his face.
He lay still, listening to Stacy sleep. When she coughed he turned towards her. Making sure his hands were warm enough, he put one on her stomach. After a moment he felt her hand come to rest on top of his, and then he rolled to her side and put both his arms around her.
Two-Cents had never had a gun pointed at him before. He was just a coke dealer. When people saw him they smiled. Still, he knew what business he was in, and he knew death was always a possibility. He thought about that movie Scarface, the Brian De Palma one, where Hector the Toad handcuffs Tony’s associate Angel to the shower plumbing and then dismembers him with the chainsaw. Two-Cents thought how they don’t show the murder in the movie but watching it you still know what’s going on and how awful it is. Once he started thinking about it Two-Cents couldn’t go to sleep.
“Hello,” Stacy said into his shoulder. “Where’ve you been?”
“Nowhere,” Two-Cents answered. Stacy muttered a little bit, but she didn’t say anything out loud. She started to fall asleep again, held fast between his arms.
“You know, Stacy,” Two-Cents said, “Maybe I don’t want to do the drug dealer thing anymore.”
“That’s okay,” she mumbled. “I think that would be a good idea, to quit doing that. What else would you do?”
“I don’t know,” Two-Cents said. He had transportation. He was an American citizen. He had a high school diploma. There were no convictions on his record. He didn’t mind washing dishes. It was kind of soothing, all that hot water and steam, the idea of reusing something, of making it new and useful again instead of just consuming it, up the nose, in it came in its bundles for the scale and out it went in tiny vials.
“Maybe get a straight job,” Two-Cents said. “Maybe just work and stay home for a while. We could make it, couldn’t we?”
“Yeah?” Stacy said. “Stay home? With me?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Two-Cents said.
He thought about what that meant, to have another person to listen to him groan when he put his socks on, another person to share a laugh with him when that cat fell out of the tree on TV, another person to cook spaghetti and put a ladle of the sauce into it and stir it all up to get it coated and tear up the lettuce nice and small. To go to bed and know that another person was going to be there too, nearby, undemanding in sleep. A companion.
Now Stacy shifted in the bed. She put her arms around him too and held him tight, there in the safe darkness under the covers. “I think I’d like that,” Stacy hummed. “I could switch into the bakery,” she hummed. “They’re looking for a full-time manager. It’s union. Better pay, and health insurance for both of us.”
“You know how to do that?” Two-Cents teased her. “Make all those curlicues and roses?”
“Yeah,” Stacy said. “I know how to do that.”
After a while, Two-Cents said, “Me too.”
“You know how to make flowers out of frosting?” Stacy teased.
“No,” Two-Cents said. “I mean I think I’d like it too.”
“There’s other things I can do for you, you know,” Stacy told him. “I’m good at it.”
“I know,” Two-Cents said. “It just . . . I just . . .”
“It’s okay,” Stacy told him, and that’s how they fell asleep, warm, safe, and together.
Photo by Josu00e9 Martin Segura Benites on Pexels.com
This story is part of the project A Writer’s Shindig. Ted Wallenius’s story is the fifth of 6 short stories written for the project. You can read more about our collaboration and read all the stories posted thus far at A Writer’s Shindig.
While she gathered her things together at the Broken Pony, packing the things she wanted to keep, making a pile of the things she would throw out, another pile of the shoes, clothes, and costume jewelry she knew the other girls would want, Janey Jones thought about her Dad and his friends.
She remembered them, all of them, sitting in the shop around the corner from the house, Mom in the kitchen making fried chicken and biscuits and Janey, already impatient with the trappings of domestic life, not wanting to see how to make gravy, not wanting to wash dishes ever, not wanting to smell cooking grease or have flour on her hands, waiting for her mother to give her permission to run down to the shop and let her Dad know that dinner would be ready in half an hour.
Janey, pelting down the alley, white Keds tipped with dirt, the dress her mother had made her slashing at her knees and the white paint chipping off the sides of the houses and falling in the heat of the summer evening, running down to the shop where her Dad sat relaxing, waiting for his friends. They would all be there for poker after dinner and she wanted to see them, they always smiled at her and gave her soda pop and sometimes they asked her to run an errand for them: go to the liquor store and talk to Bobby there and bring back the pint he owes me, or get us some club crackers and a salami. Things like that.
Sighing and unbuttoning their vests so she could see the jewelry, the gold chains hanging on their necks and smell their aftershave mixing with the scent of their leather shoes, sometimes they even lifted their hands and asked Janey for advice on their cards, not because they thought she knew the answer but because for that sort of man asking a pretty girl was the same as making your own luck.
Before dinner nobody was there yet at the shop and it was just her Dad sitting with the ledger in front of him. When Janey came in he closed the book and shook his head like he was tired of all those numbers. Then he picked up his guitar and strummed the steel strings. It was a Lowden Fsize acoustic with a cedar top and a mahogany and rosewood neck, a beautiful instrument, he’d won the money to buy it playing poker and from bets on football. In her memory he could play it just like Richard Thompson, making the strings go so fast that the air in the shop seemed to vibrate and the sound that came out of it was like twenty guitars, not just one. Janey’s father was a bookmaker, that’s what he did, until one day when she was twelve years old with her red hair still in pigtails Mom cried in the kitchen and he didn’t come for dinner. Janey ran to the shop but he wasn’t there; there was no one there.
Janey tried to forget the way he’d been short-tempered with them all that week because he didn’t come home ever again, and that wasn’t the way she wanted to remember her father.
She wanted to remember him smiling at her and taking her chin in his hand and saying, “Hey, squirt, how about you run over to the store and get us a couple packs of cigarettes.” His friends went somewhere else to play poker. The shop with its sashed windows and the paint peeling up from the glazing went too, because there was no reason to pay rent on it, and the guitar also passed into other hands and was gone forever, because then they needed money so they could live.
When she was finished packing, Janey Jones picked up the Hermés bag made of shiny white crocodile leather and took a look around the room that had been her life for ten years. Without her paintings on the wall and the clothes in the closet there wasn’t much to it. Her stuff was stacked on the bed. Janey humphed, knowing she might miss the girls sometimes, the late-night camaraderie, the horror stories, shrieking in laughter about some guy’s twisted dick, commiserating about the crushes the girls were always falling into and, immediately, out of. Janey knew she was ready to move on.
Janey Jones walked into Tai Botman’s office and set the Birkin bag on Tai’s desk. The bag was stuffed with cash. Some of it fell out the top onto the desk. Tai, who was busy doing the month’s numbers, frowned at the interruption. Then he realized it was Janey, saw the cash, and changed his frown to a smile. Janey Jones was his best girl. None of the others could touch her. They came and went. Some of them started out like gangbusters, on hot streaks that would make Tai think he was maybe on to something, but they always fizzled out, got grumpy, started pleading sickness, found boyfriends to take care of them and lost interest in the business, or just went home to Kansas.
Janey’d been his best earner for over ten years. She wasn’t the prettiest, the narrowest, the most talented, or the nicest sex worker he’d ever met. She just brought them back, again and again, repeat customers like the day is long. Even Tai couldn’t really figure it out.
“This is it,” Janey said.
“What?” Tai replied.
“The last payment,” Janey said. Tai Botman clicked at his keyboard. Janey shifted in her chair. She pointed at the Birkin and said, “Here’s the last five grand. You wanna give me a hard time for paying it off early, Tai? Charge me a fee?”
Tai steepled his hands. “The last payment? Payment for what?”
“My motorcycle,” Janey said.
Tai Botman shook his head in wonder. He said, “Ten years ago, we took a trip together to Las Vegas. While we were there, we went to an auto auction. We went out and had that big steak dinner at the MGM Grand and then I wanted to go see the cars. That was how it started. At the auction you saw it. The motorcycle you’ve longed for ever since you were a teenager. Sleek, simple, black and chrome. It was up on a podium at the back. It was just cherry. You’ve always had good taste, Janey.”
“There ain’t nothing beats a ‘52 Vincent and a red headed girl,” Janey agreed.
“They never even rolled it out onto the auction floor,” Tai said. “You begged me to buy it for you. You said you’d pay it off in installments.”
“That’s right,” Janey Jones agreed. “It cost you sixty thousand dollars. I kept my part of the agreement. $1000 dollars a month, for one hundred and twenty months. That’s fifteen percent interest, you leech. You know that? Gimme the keys.”
“What then?” Tai said. “What are you going to do once I give you that bike?”
Janey had the four packed suitcases sitting on the bed in her room, which she’d had to rent from him for ten years too. Four suitcases plus seven dress bags plus ten hatboxes. Four crates of shoes. That was just the best ones. And the jewelry and the furs.
For ten years, she’d had to have an escort when she left her Mound House neighborhood, even to go to the store for tampons. She hadn’t been able to own a car or have a bank account. She wasn’t allowed to go to school, or to have a phone that Tai or one of the bouncers wouldn’t take from her and look over every night. She wasn’t allowed to use a computer that didn’t have all the good stuff locked off.
It wasn’t Janey’s fault if she’d turned Tai Botman’s business into a lucrative gig for herself. It wasn’t her fault if he hadn’t managed to skim off all her earnings, with the rent and the licensing and food and the medical and all the rest of it. It wasn’t her fault if she knew men who had more money than a small-town pimp on the edge of America’s Great Basin, that desolate sink for all that was wretched in humankind, would ever understand.
“Once I’ve got my bike I’m outta here,” Janey said. “I made a deal with myself, a long time ago. Once I’ve got my Vincent you’ll never see me again.” She was aware as she said it that he wouldn’t like it, but her own feelings on the subject outweighed the smarter decision, which would have been to stay silent. Tai should know. He should know her. He should know how Janey felt, and he should respect it. It was the new millennium, after all. Well into the new millennium.
“I want you to look at something,” Tai said. He slid the Birkin bag out of the way, spilling more twenties on the desk in the process, and turned his computer monitor around so that Janey could see. On the screen was her motorcycle. It was an online auction site. She couldn’t help but look at the price. The condition said FAIR. The starting auction price said $338,000.
“Now, I hold the paper on the Vincent,” Tai said. “It’s in the safe right over there.” He pointed at his wall safe. “I bought it without your help. And I realize that we talked a bit about how you could take it from me, but I always thought we were just sort of joking around, you know, because we liked each other.”
“What about my thousand bucks every month?” Janey asked. She’d known, of course. She’d known he’d pull this shit.
Tai said, “The value of that motorcycle can’t even be calculated. It’s in mint condition. It’s got 476 miles on the odometer. I change the fluids every sixth months. The brakes, the engine, they’re all pristine. The gas in the tank’s been taken care of, the carb, everything. The battery gets a trickle charge. It’s sitting on new rubber but I even have the original tires in storage. It’s hot, baby, a thousand cc’s of two-stroke, V-Twin glory. Rollie Free used the ‘48 prototype to set a land speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats just 400 miles in that direction,” Tai Botman gestured east. “They maybe made thirty of the ‘52’s, and there’s only 19 left that anyone knows about. This is one of ‘em. Maybe the prettiest one. There’s no way I’m giving you that bike for $120,000. That’s ludicrous. I don’t care if your Dad loved the song. I don’t care if he sang it to you when you were a girl. The bike is priceless, Janey.”
Tai stood up. He went to his safe, spun the dial, and opened the door. He took out bundles of hundreds. One hundred bills to the bundle, ten thousand dollars in each one of them, held with its fat strip of glue paper. One, two, he set them in front of Janey, three four. Until there were twelve of them. Then he set down two more. “Interest,” Tai said. “For holding your money. Like a bank. I can even continue to keep it for you, if you want. It’s probably safer than putting it under your mattress, but you do what you want.”
“On that note, Janey,” Tai said, “how are you ever going to get all that stuff you’ve got stacked on your bed out of the Broken Pony?”
“I need to go out,” Janey said. “Will you please call me an escort?”
“Sure thing,” Tai said with a smile.
• • •
“There’s a guy over there wants everyone to smell him,” the bartender hissed at Two-Cents. It was Friday night, and Two-Cents and Stacy had invited their next-door neighbor to go for a beer at the Corner Bar. Now he, Stacy, and Tim Whiting sat huddled in a threesome on stools, alternatively watching the rare bubble rise to the surface of their beers and the bottles in the back bar mirror. “Says a girl peed on him over at the Broken Pony.
“What’s the Broken Pony?” Two-Cents asked.
Stacy kicked him in the ankle from her stool, making him wince his pimple covered cheeks. She mused how most of the time she couldn’t get Two-Cents to say a word, and when he did talk it was to say something stupid. “What’d you do that for?” Two-Cents demanded.
“You know why,” Stacy said, taking a demure sip from her beer, examining her strappy red platforms for any scuff marks, then returning them to the railing beneath the bar. The shoes were new and she loved them. She had glitter nail polish on her toes.
“You think that really happened?” Two-Cents asked.
“He sure smells like something happened.” The bartender made a face, nodding in the direction of the customer in question, who was nursing a bourbon at the far end of the bar. “It is not pleasant.”
The door to the Corner Bar blew open and Janey Jones came flying through it. As the door slammed shut behind her, Two-Cents’ pock-marked face turned bright red and he buried his nose in his beer, refusing to look up from the bar-top. Stacy eyed the newcomer with interest. The Corner Bar, which rarely had two females in it at the same time, seemed to grow warmer.
Janey wore acid-washed blue jeans with holes in them and a black shirt covered with rhinestone sparkles.
“I like your blouse,” Stacy told the stranger. Janey’s long red hair shone in the light.
Two-Cents pondered the luck that would have his wife and his moll sitting next to one another at the bar and wondered if he should feign illness, or at least run to the bathroom and do a quick bump.
A troll-faced man lumbered in behind Janey. He sat down beside her and somehow disappeared. He didn’t actually disappear, it was just that with the sparks flying off Janey they all forgot about him.
Stacy watched, fascinated. Two-Cents, overcome with shame and the need for something to lift his spirits, nudged Tim’s shoulder. The two of them crept off to the bathroom like girls.
“Give me a shot of Patron,” Janey ordered the bartender.
Without taking his eyes off her, the bartender reached for the back bar and brought the bottle forward. He reached below the bar and set a shot glass in front of Janey. He could tell without looking that there wasn’t enough tequila in the bottle.
“You want me to chill it for you?” the bartender asked.
“I don’t care,” Janey snapped. “Do whatever it is you do.”
The bartender shrugged, squeezed the last drops of tequila into a tin, added some ice, and started stirring. Frost crept up the metal sides of the tin. He covered it, strained the clear liquid into the glass, hoped against hope it would be enough, saw that it wasn’t.
“I’ll have to go back to get another bottle,” he said.
“Just give it to me,” Janey said.
“It’s not enough,” the bartender protested.
Janey stared daggers at him. “Just give it to me like that, you putz. I’m not paying for it, he is. And don’t you ever argue with me again.”
She drained the tequila without changing her expression and turned to her escort. “Pay the man,” she said, which he did before fading into the background again, like lumpy elevator music.
Stacy couldn’t take her eyes off Janey. “Are you a—” she began.
“I used to work at the Broken Pony,” Janey said. She turned on her escort. “Go wait in the car,” she ordered. He didn’t move, just shimmered back into substance on his stool.
“What, you think I’m going to split out the back door? Go wait in the car.”
Driving wind blew into the Corner Bar as Janey’s escort opened the door and made himself scarce.
“That’s a bitter, bitter woman,” the bartender said to no one in particular.
Two-Cents and Tim Whiting came back from the bathroom, sniffling like they’d had a good cry together. They turned up their noses when they passed the lonely peed-on man at the other end of the bar and hurried back over to where Stacy and Janey sat.
“Hi, Two-Cents,” Janey said.
“You two know one another?” Stacy queried. Two-Cents turned red again.
Tim Whiting thought of an incident he’d seen with Stacy and her husband Two-Cents. He’d been in his living room, slouched on the couch, a can of beer in one hand and the remote in the other, nothing important on the television set. There’d probably been drool hanging from his lip or pillow lines on his cheek. It was around five o’clock, summertime, quitting time for people who still had to go to work.
Two-Cents pulled into the driveway and sat like he usually did, a shadow behind the tinted windows, working on some business deal or other, checking over his accounts, or contacting his dealer, or whatever it was he did in there. For some reason, Tim stood up and went over to stand behind the curtains and look over at his neighbors’ drive across the street.
Unbeknownst to Two-Cents, bent over his phone in the driver’s seat, Stacy came out the front door into the driveway and crept like a ninja along the side of the truck. As Tim watched, she ducked down to pass the driver’s side window and crept towards the back corner of the truck, where she paused, lying in wait like a mongoose.
When Two-Cents opened the door and stepped out, distracted, she bunny-hopped towards him from behind and reached up to put both her hands over his eyes. At first Two-Cents straightened in surprise, perhaps even anger or fear that he was about to be robbed, but then he realized it was his wife. He turned and wrapped his arms around her, and then the two of them went into the house together, smiling.
Now Stacy turned on Two-Cents. She had rage in her eyes. “Is this the girl you’ve been stepping out to see?” she demanded. “Don’t bother lying to me, Two-Cents. I know it is.”
Two-Cents set his head on his hands on the bar. He glanced at his beer.
“You know, you’re really a piece of work,” Stacy said. “Does the word ‘husband’ mean anything to you?”
Two-Cents didn’t say anything. What was he going to say?
“Do you remember when we took our vows? In the church? In the church, Two-Cents. Your mother was there. You know, it’s not just me you’ve got to please, it’s the man upstairs. He’s judging you too, since it doesn’t seem like you have any ability to judge yourself. Or restrain yourself. How much of our money have you given this woman?”
Embarrassed, Tim Whiting turned to his other side, where Janey Jones sat on her stool, out of arm’s reach of the jilted woman. No one had better say Janey didn’t earn her money. And no one had better say if you took better care of him at home. If anyone on either side of Tim said either one of those two things he knew it would start the whole bar on fire, with him sitting right there in the middle.
Stacy’s anger was reserved for her husband. “You know, it’s bad enough that you’re nothing but a low-life drug dealer, but on top of that you’re not even a faithful low-life drug dealer.” She pulled Two-Cents away, over to the dark end of the Corner Bar, leaving Janey and Tim alone on their stools.
When Tim said, “Love is so complicated” to himself, Janey overheard him.
“Love?” she demanded from her stool. “What’s that? I just need someone to help me get back my motorcycle.”
Tim perked up. The cocaine buzzed around in his brain. Tim liked motorcycles. “What kind of bike?” he said. “Where is it? I’ll get it for you.”
Janey appraised him with slitted eyes. “You ever been to the Broken Pony?”
“Nope,” Tim said, not sure if he should be embarrassed about the admission. It was one thing to talk about the whorehouses with guys like Two-Cents. It was another to talk about them with someone who worked there.
“Hmm,” Janey mused. “That’s good. Tai knows everyone who’s ever been to the Broken Pony, and he’s got cameras everywhere. If he recognized you there’d be no way. But if you’ve never been there . . .” she trailed off, thinking.
“I’ve never been there,” Tim repeated. “And who’s Tai?”
“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Janey said, and explained it to him.
“Are you sure he’ll come back out?” Tim Whiting asked.
They both looked to the dark end of the bar, where Stacy continued to berate her husband.
“Oh, he’ll come back out,” Janey said. “He always comes when I call. They all come when I call.”
Photo by Josu00e9 Martin Segura Benites on Pexels.com
This story is part of the project A Writer’s Shindig. Ted Wallenius’s story is the fifth of 6 short stories written for the project. You can read more about our collaboration and read all the stories posted thus far at A Writer’s Shindig.
“I feel free,” Two-Cents thought.
A moment later he remembered the double white lines of delicious Bolivian marching powder he and Janey Jones had just hoovered up in the bathroom. The bathroom was neither men’s nor women’s; it was just a bathroom, with clean towels, artwork including a small statue of a wild horse, and matching color potpourri.
Two-Cents thought, “That’s usually when they shoot you.”
He took a look around the front room. There wasn’t a gun or a uniform in sight. Just the girls and the bartender, a big kid with a crew cut and a barrel chest who probably hadn’t poured a drink all night. People didn’t go to the Broken Pony to drink, and if they were there under false pretenses they were quickly made to feel they needed to go somewhere else, across Highway 50 to the Corner Bar, for instance. The bartender at the Broken Pony was an expert at making people feel they needed to move on. It was a business, after all; there was competition right across the street, in those pink cottages with their lace curtains and silk sheets on the beds that was on Home Box Office back around the turn of the millennium.
Nevada was the only state in the Union that admitted the world’s oldest profession existed, making it legal in any county with less than 700,000 residents and no contradicting ordinance. Brothels paid an estimated half a million tax dollars per year in Lyon County, where the Broken Pony was located, and where girls as young as eighteen could do it legally. The Covid-19 epidemic and resulting regulations were devastating to the business, but now Lyon County was growing. Elon Musk had come, searching for a new mineral fortune in the form of lithium for his batteries, and bringing with him thousands of workers, many of whom were away from their families and church groups and lonely for the sorts of company the brothels could provide.
There were many requirements for the operation of a brothel. All workers had to be licensed, documented, and were required to pay taxes on their proceeds. The sex workers underwent required weekly checks for gonorrhea and chlamydia with a licensed physician, and once a month for HIV and syphilis. In 2009, Heidi Fleiss applied to start a male brothel, and urethral inspections were added to the list so boys could participate as well. Before any act with a customer began, a physical inspection of the client’s genitalia was conducted. Condoms were required for oral, vaginal, and anal intercourse.
As a result of all the rules there were only nineteen licensed brothels in Nevada. They were regulated and safe. In partnership with state and federal authorities, they defended against human trafficking and child pornography. There were rumors of girls who retired young and lived comfortable second lives on the proceeds of their labors. The nineteen licensed brothels accounted for less than one percent of the prostitution which occurred in Nevada. The rest happened on Las Vegas street corners, in motel rooms in Reno, and everywhere else in between, from Elko to Ely, from Tehachapi to Tonopah.
Tai Botman, the owner of the Broken Pony, tried to keep all this in mind at the holidays, when he dressed his girls up and drove them fifty miles over Spooner Summit to Lake Tahoe, where they enjoyed appetizers at Wolf by Vanderpump, Beef Wellington at Gordon Ramsey’s Hell’s Kitchen, and finally a bottle table at PEEK Nightclub in Harrah’s, dancing and swilling Cristal until the wee hours of the morning.
Now it was the end of August, the dog days, heat, dust and ennui, and one of the girls in the Broken Pony’s parlor began tinkering on the piano. It was the sort of piano that has a folding lid over old ivory keys. The girl began by lifting the lid. She had dark hair that went all the way down to her waist and she wore rose-colored underwear. The girl wasn’t playing any sort of melody but she tinkled the piano keys with two fingers while she stared at Two-Cents. She was so skinny that her teddy sagged on her chest.
Two-Cents dropped his gaze first and turned back to the bar. When he did, the girl in the teddy slammed the lid back down over the keys on the piano with a loud bang, snorted like a truck driver, and walked dismissively over to the other side of the room, where she stood under a large smoky, sepia tinted portrait of William Bonney, adopting the outlaw’s exact same posture except that she didn’t have a rifle under her arm to use as a crutch.
Another of the girls, this one with purple hair, sat on the red velvet barstool next to Two-Cents, showing the bartender professional photos she’d had done. By looking over her shoulder TwoCents could see that she had 1) no hangups about her body, 2) fascinating skills as a contortionist, and 3) the ability to blow fire. This second girl looked slyly back at Two-Cents, making Two-Cents drop his gaze again, pretending he hadn’t been sneaking a look at her photos on the bar top. At that point the purple-haired girl also huffed, dismounted from her stool, and went to stand beside the skinny girl in the rose-colored underwear, both of them imitating the blank stare on Billy the Kid’s face. Two-Cents tried not to take it personally. He wondered how much longer it was going to be before Janey returned from the back of the house to save him.
He was almost ready to wander back there to look for her. That would get the house muscle involved, and not in a good way. The house muscle was the same fellow Two-Cents didn’t want to know about the four 8-balls of cocaine he had in vials in the pockets of his jeans. Drugs were strictly off limits inside the Broken Pony. The discovery of illicit substances in the Broken Pony would cause Tai Botman, the brothel owner, to lose his brothel owners’ license. Brothel owners’ licenses were very expensive, argued over, bribed over, graves dug over, and Tai Botman had absolutely no interest in that sort of trouble.
Two-Cents was a cocaine dealer. Elon Musk’s operation went on twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and when his workers were off shift they wanted to party. In Lyon County, non-violent crime was up thirty percent. The police department and the clerk of courts were both hiring. Two-Cents had a good reputation and good suppliers, and because of the fentanyl danger and the proliferation of meth in northern Nevada those two things were important. Two-Cents did a profitable business that kept him up and away from home at all hours, day and night.
At last Janey came hustling back into the front room of the Broken Pony, heading straight for Two-Cents, her filmy black nightgown billowing businesslike behind her. Breathless, she thanked him for waiting. “Sorry,” she said, “housekeeping’s behind today.” The black nightgown accented her red hair. Two–Cents breathed a sigh of relief and mentally checked the state of his package.
Janey was still thinking how the last guy had insisted she squat overtop his chest and pee on him. He was a good customer and she couldn’t afford to disappoint him. For the housekeeper Rosa, who had to strip the sheets and muttered to herself while she was doing so, louder when Janey was in earshot, he was a catastrophe. If this kept up Rosa was considering purchasing some rubber sheets, although on the face of it she knew lack of absorbency was not going to improve the situation.
• • •
Stacy Worth loved her husband. Or at least she thought she did. She didn’t feel very loving when she caught him going to the Broken Pony. She caught him because of his phone.
“Who’s this message from?” she demanded, showing him the text: Meet up? Half an hour?
Two-Cents shrugged. He wasn’t a man of many words. He held out his hand for the phone but she refused to return it.
She worked on the phone, wanting to throw it at him. A few keystrokes and she pinned the message on Google Maps. “This is from Mound House,” she said. “What were you doing in Mound House?”
“Work friend,” Two-Cents mumbled, wondering how he could’ve forgotten to turn off location services again. He’d needed directions for a delivery was how.
“You don’t know anyone in Mound House,” Stacy chided him. “This is from the Broken Pony.”
“He’s doing some electrical work there,” Two–Cents lied.
Then Stacy did throw the phone at him. She started to cry. “Now I have to get tested for VD.
And now she knew what all those charges were on the credit card.
It wasn’t entirely Two-Cents’ fault. Stacy wasn’t interested in sex. When she was nineteen years old, she went into labor at thirty weeks. Before the doctors could perform a C-section the dead thing inside her came out, sideways, ripping her open from the top of her vagina all the way back to her anus. Stacy needed four blood transfusions and almost died. When it was all over her body had changed. The nerves were all torn up. Stacy was left with no baby, no man, and bladder incontinence.
For a long time Stacy wallowed in self-pity. Then she met Two-Cents, who was the most passive, least judgmental man she’d ever encountered. He accepted her as she was. When he asked her to she married him. And she loved her husband. She loved it when he held her, with his arms around her and her cheek pressed against his chest. Still, she didn’t want him to put that thing inside her. It didn’t feel good, and she couldn’t understand her friends when they said they liked it.
“You need to see some girl’s hatchet wound that bad?” she sobbed to Two-Cents.
Stacy had image problems. She was a bigger girl, shaped more like a weeble-wobble than an hour glass. She had curly blond hair that she hated even though the shining tresses inspired jealousy in all her friends. Because she thought she had to overdo it to make herself attractive she used a color of lipstick that was too pink for her complexion. Somehow it ended up going real well with her hair and the green eyeshadow she used on her eyes.
When Stacy looked at herself in the mirror she often thought of Bette Midler, Barbara Streisand, or, on bad days, Dee Snider.
It didn’t help that she was now forty-two and childless.
It didn’t help that she still worked the check out line at the local grocery store, that she saw the same people over and over again, day after day, and that she made the same small talk. There was Mrs. Merkle on Tuesdays, collecting her butter, milk, and eggs. There was Mr. Dinetta on Fridays, in line with his slipper moccasins, his driving cap, his Burberry scarf, and his frozen lasagna. Stacy wanted to tell Mr. Dinetta to take a cooking class; the lasagna would be better and he might meet someone.
It didn’t help that her husband’s name was Two-Cents, or that he was a good for nothing smalltime cocaine dealer who liked seeing prostitutes more than he liked her.
• • •
Tim Whiting crouched amongst the dead sunflowers at the edge of his property. He’d been meaning to take them out for at least a week. On Oprah’s twenty-year-old advice Tim was reading The Corrections. In summertime the heads were just like Jonathan Franzen described them, “meaty and splendid, heavy as brownies . . . Nature could hardly have devised a more inviting bed”, but now there weren’t any more bright yellow flowers, there weren’t any more goldfinches bouncing the stalks up and down as they pulled out the seeds, making the patch of sunflowers look like it was infested with a convention of partying garden gnomes. It was just grayish-brown sticks and spiky deadheads, sharp enough to draw blood. Not that those deadheads didn’t still conceal life. Tim would find them there in spring, the green shoots coming up one, two, and then in swaths. He didn’t mind. He admired anything that could thrive in that clay, in the heat, wind, and drought of Great Basin summers.
Tim had been a motocross racer. The day it all ended he wore the red and black livery of Ameropump Racing Injectors. He’d taken the hole shot with ease, kneed his nearest competitor off his line and out of balance as he passed, then roared around the track once, gaining the whole way, until he was four lengths out in front. At the end of the second lap, on the second to last jump, the big one, the one they called the Wu-Tang, he decided to really let it loose. He hit the lip hard, flying higher than he ever had, riding the wind, skying so high, engine purring. A photographer at the bottom of the Wu-Tang took a photo at the pinnacle of Tim’s flight, capturing the slogan on his jersey. It read “Big Air by A.R.I.” Tim still had the photo hanging over his bed.
Thirty feet up in mid-air, his throttle cable snapped. Without the revolutions of the motor to stabilize it, the bike nosed over and dove straight at the ground. Tim, surprised, paralyzed, watched in disbelief as the brown dirt, chewed up by a hundred knobby wheels, came closer, closer, drifting up to meet him and the handlebars of his motorcycle. Wham. The impact broke out five of his front teeth and shattered his knuckles, all four on his right hand and three on his left, sparing both his thumbs and left pinky, but that was it. Just like that his racing career was over. ARI took their colors and their sponsorship and their Big Air elsewhere.
Rehabilitation sucked. Tim had dentures and casts on both hands. When the casts came off the physical therapy was endless, painful at first, then so boring he couldn’t stand it. When he was ready the doctor suggested he try something physical to loosen up the joints. Tim, who’d grown up in cowboy boots, settled on roping. He got a bale of hay and put it out in his front yard, in front of the bright yellow sunflowers. He tacked a set of steer horns to the hay bale, and then he sat on his front porch with a cold can of beer and spun a lasso at his makeshift bull, over and over, all day long, right hand, left hand, until he could make and release normal fists again.
Now, twenty years after Oprah and Jonathan Franzen dueled over his selection to her book club, there were crushed cans of beer scattered all around the bale of hay. There was a can of Red Bull balanced between the steer horns, and the sunflowers were all dead and scratchy.
Tim Whiting looked across the street, to the house where Stacy Worth lived. Tim liked Stacy. A lot. He knew she had a husband, but it didn’t keep him from liking her. There was just something about her. She wasn’t beautiful in a skinny flighty vapid made-up influencer super-model cartoon sort of way. She was beautiful because she was real, and because she smiled at Tim and waved at him whenever she saw him from across the street.
Crouching to snip the dead sunflowers, Tim hoped Stacy wouldn’t come outside. As men grow older their bodies change, and that change is most apparent when they’re wearing pants. Pants that used to stay buttoned around slim, youthful waists now insisted on pulling down, down, and down over pear-shaped, beer-reinforced middles. Tim could feel the autumn air directly on his lower back. And in the crack of his ass. If his neighbor Stacy took an innocent glance out her window right now she’d get a full look at what clothes were supposed to hide on people.
To keep his pants in place, Tim drove to Kohl’s and picked himself out a pair of suspenders. They were red suspenders, and when he chose them he had an almost pleasant moment picturing himself chopping firewood and looking like Paul Bunyan, possibly even with his shirt unbuttoned all the way down his chest and the suspenders accentuating his bulging pectorals and six-pack abs and the sweat on his brow in a way that would make Stacy unable to resist a sideways glance.
The problem was, when the time came to raze the sunflowers, Tim didn’t put on the suspenders. Instead he hoped against hope that those push-ups and sit-ups he did, all summer long, some days anyway, would make the jeans work the way they were supposed to, the way they used to.
Now he needed to turn in a direction that would directly expose his butt crack to Stacy, who was no doubt watching from her living room window. Sure, he could stand up and shake his knees out and walk around to the other side and maybe get the bastard from there, but that was so much more work than just turning that way and making the cut.
He turned, feeling the air caress the portion of his anatomy he’d rather not expose. With two squeezes of the lopper he almost got through the sunflower stalk. The damn thing was as big around as his wrist. Just to be sure he was alone in the neighborhood he glanced across the street to the front door of the Worths’. As he did, Stacy walked out on her porch and waved at him.
“Hi, Tim!” Stacy called.
“Good morning, Stacy!” Tim felt blood rush to his face as he straightened and yanked his pants up over his hips.
“That’s quite a view,” she laughed. “Just like when the plumber came last week.”
Somewhere, high up in the hills, there is a bush that burns but is never consumed. They say a man named Moses first encountered God there, but I think maybe Moses had always known who God was, he just didn’t know what to call God until he saw that bush. Of course, the bush I’m talking about can’t possibly be the same one that Moses saw. Afterall, I don’t think Moses lived anywhere near here, and even if he did, he’s long dead by now. The bush I’m talking about isn’t a literal bush, and it’s not literally on fire either. Maybe I’m not explaining it well at all. I probably shouldn’t have tried to start off with that story of Moses; just trying to tie my story to something bigger that actually matters. What I really mean to say is, somewhere far away from everything else you know, in some remote place, there’s a chance you’ll find a miracle. For Moses, it was a bush that burned but was never consumed. For you, it’ll probably be something different. It sure was for me.
Let me see if I can explain it a bit better.
My name is Annie, and up until a year ago, I had one of those friends who was more like a sister. Her name is Jessica, but really I think her name should be Judas. It if was, perhaps she’d feel an ounce of remorse for what she did to me. She’d have to have a heart to feel remorse though. I thought she had a heart, and more specifically, I thought she had a heart for me. Turns out, she was just another fair weather friend who had never been asked to stick around in a storm.
And what a storm that blew between us. We had never had a fight before last summer. First time for everything right? Well, the storm was so big and damaging that there was nothing left after it blew itself out. Not a spec of love between us. It was like we had never known each other, and you know, come to think of it, maybe we never had.
I’m getting a bit ahead of the story, though. So me and Jessica. Best of friends. She’s one of those errand running friends- you know, the kind of friend you can call when you just want someone to go with you to do your shopping, to make it fun. But she was also a party friend. We were always going out. And we always talked about the guys we liked, and the ones we didn’t like, and the ones we dated. She got into a real steady thing with a guy once and then it fell apart almost overnight when she found out he had another girl too. And I was there for her. We were thick as thieves, as I’ve heard my grandpa say. In hindsight, I think I can admit that she wasn’t as there for me as I was for her. Grandpa used to say something about that too. Trying to be friends with some people is like riding a bike on the highway. Or something like that. I think he just meant you were unmatched. If I was gonna do another Bible reference like the good girl my mom still thinks I am, I’d say we were unequally yoked.
Do you see where I’m going with this story? You know the kind of friend Jessica was, right? And I didn’t notice it until it was too late. By then, the hurricane winds had already blown the shutters off the house. I’d like to say it was something stupid that came between us, like a man, but it really wasn’t stupid at all. At the heart of it, it was the most serious thing in the world.
It was honesty. Honesty got between us.
If your friendship can’t survive honesty, then honey, let me tell you, you never were friends in the first place. You were just two people who were good at pretending.
The interview posted below was conducted by Jeremy Miller, a writer, blogger, and contributor to A Writer’s Shindig. Authors from the collaboration were all interviewed about their work as part of the initial project. This interview is about the short story Loss. An author interview will be posted after the conclusion of each story in the collection.
Jeremy: Your title “Loss” is powerfully simple. Was there a loss that was most present for you while writing?
Emily: Ha, nothing that complex. I’m actually just bad at titles and tend to go with the simplest thing. In this case, it’s about loss, of a child, of a life that was supposed to be.
Jeremy: To me the main themes of this piece are invisible labor and the burden of care, is that what you expect the reader to take away?
Emily: I don’t want there to be a particular thing people take away. People will all take away something different from each story, and I think that’s what’s valuable about them.
Jeremy: To me the repeated undercurrent is Elle thinking that if it ends badly, it will be her fault no matter what, I think that’s something we can all identify with, is that a feeling that’s been a big presence in your life?
Emily: This is a good question. I do tend to blame myself when anything goes wrong, and that does seem to have appeared here. I also think when you care about anyone and something terrible happens, there’s going to be some self-blame there, especially when it’s someone vulnerable, someone you’re responsible for.
Jeremy: To me this story is powered less by external action than by Elle’s internal catastrophizing, the tension escalates through thought loops, self-interrogation, and moral replay, mirroring how guilt actually functions in real time rather than how thrillers usually depict missing-child narratives – was there a particular frame of mind you had in making the reader feel this way?
Emily: Yes, it very much was. It’s not about the question of what happened to the child as much as it is about the people living through the nightmare. It’s about the loss, the grief of that, and how that plays out in real life.
Jeremy: One of the most striking themes to me is how normal everything is right up until it isn’t, can you talk about that choice?
Emily: That’s how it happens in real life. Everything is normal, and then suddenly, unpredictably, it isn’t. Elle is going through another day, knowing everything that’s supposed to happen in her very boring life. Then it changes in a way she never expected. A lot of the horror is from that.
Jeremy: Elle is constantly monitoring herself, her body language, her tone, even her breathing. Was that hyper-self-awareness something you consciously put in from the beginning or did it emerge naturally as you wrote?
Emily: It came out as I wrote, as I tried to imagine what Elle would be thinking and feeling. She feels scrutinized and judged harshly, and also like she deserves it. It manifests in her not wanting to be seen as guilty and trying to monitor everything she does.
Jeremy: Kara is antagonistic but she’s also clearly in unbearable pain. How did you approach writing her without turning her into a villain?
Emily: I made sure that not every interaction with her is negative and that she has more to her than just being an angry mom. She’s blinded by anger at first, but once she can see more clearly, she’s more reasonable. She’s struggling and snappish, but also hurt and showing it.
Jeremy: Everyday objects take on enormous emotional weight. Do you deliberately assign symbolic value to mundane details, or does that meaning accumulate through repetition?
Emily: I tend to write things more like the latter than the former. In real life, things have whatever value you assign to them, and that’s usually from them appearing more than once.
Jeremy: The story raises questions about blame, who is responsible, who is forgiven, and who is presumed guilty. Were you interested in culpability, or the performance of blame in moments of crisis?
Emily: Somewhat. I think I was more leaning towards sometimes you can make a mistake or there’s an accident through carelessness, but it’s not really anyone’s fault. When what happened is very serious, guilt may be assigned, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.
Jeremy: This story sits adjacent to crime and missing child stories but resists their conventions. Were you consciously pushing back against those genres, or writing toward a truth?
Emily: Both, I would say. I didn’t want it to be as much about the missing child as the feelings of the people around him, which in the end, I feel is the truth I was getting at. Horrible things happen, and you have to find some way to deal with them.
Jeremy: What’s the first thing you remember writing?
Emily: Ever? An attempt at a book when I was about twelve. I’d been sharing my idea with a friend. I think I managed a page. I didn’t quite know what I was doing.
Jeremy: How did you land on WordPress and where if anywhere did you post your writing before?
Emily: I’ve been on other platforms, particularly Blogger, which is where I had my first blog. I’ve posted some writing there before, but nothing I was serious about. I’ve also tried a few other forums, though nothing very substantial.
Jeremy: What do you feel you learned from Ted’s Writer’s Shindig?
Emily: Mostly that I write too long and really need to get to the point in a short story. Also how differently people can read the same story.
Jeremy: What are you excited to work on next?
Emily: I’m currently working on a new novel and am about halfway done with the first draft. It’s an idea I’ve had for a while and the third book in a series I’ve been working on, so I’m really enjoying it.
Jeremy: What question do you wish I asked but didn’t?
Emily: Do you agree with your character’s ultimate choice? The answer to that would be: No, it’s something I would never be able to do. It just seemed like what Elle would do after all that she’d been through.
This story is part of the project A Writer’s Shindig. Emily Amsel’s story is the fourth of 6 short stories written for the project. You can read more about our collaboration and read all the stories posted thus far at A Writer’s Shindig.
When she woke, her muscles twanged and a headache greeted her, and lifting her head produced another bolt of pain. Someone had filled her mouth with paste, an interesting feat considering how she’d slept. She staggered into the bathroom and a ghoul looked back at her from the mirror.
At the center of the vanity was the clock-slash-radio-slash-wireless charging station where she put her phone in the mornings to listen to music while she fixed her hair and did her makeup and Hugh complained good-naturedly about her taste in music. The neon blue numbers switched to a new minute, but it must have been broken, because it informed her it was not only afternoon, it had been twenty four hours since Hugh had gone out back and announced he couldn’t see his son.
The first twenty four hours were crucial, that was repeated in every crime show she had ever come across, and she almost never watched them. She trotted downstairs in hopes that they had forgotten to wake her after some big development, but Hugh and Kara were in the living room, her husband on the couch, his ex seated in the chair Elle hated like it was some sort of throne. When Kara saw her, his upper lip curled like she was something she scraped off her shoe, but it quickly melted back into indifference.
“Nothing?” Elle said, and Hugh looked up at her as if surprised to see her there.
“They brought out dogs,” he said. “I gave them some old laundry to use for scent. They haven’t found anything. Maybe the fire is interfering with them—”
An electric shock jolted her. “Fire?”
“Your stupid neighbors next door left something on the stove when they went out looking for Justin,” Kara said.
The light around her was now too bright, bleaching the world of color. Elle rested a hand on the wall before she fell, feeling her way over to the kitchen counter stool. Clearly unimpressed with the performance, Kara stood, something bitter making her face twitch.
“I need to head home,” she said. “I need to talk to my mother.”
Her steps resonated with sharp clicks on the floor, now scuffed and caked in mud. When she threw the door open, the bang of it hitting the wall made Elle yelp and jump back to her feet. Hugh grabbed her hand and squeezed for dear life, and a stranger appeared in the door. This man had a badge on his belt, and he wore scuffed jeans, like he’d been out with the search party. He wiped his boots on the welcome mat before he came inside.
“Everything all right in here?” the man asked.
“My ex wife is careless in her stress,” Hugh said, and Elle had to shake free of his hands before her fingers snapped.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” the stranger said, holding his hand out towards Elle. “I’m Phillip Michelakis. Detective with the state police.”
She took his hand. His grip was firmer than hers.
I’m sorry, I practically fell unconscious when I went to bed,” she told him, because she needed to justify her absence. He shook his head like it didn’t matter to him. But that did not mean it was so.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” he said. “In private?”
His eyes remained fixed on her, and she wanted so badly to squirm. He’d be registering every movement, another clue to hang her with.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Hugh said in a low rasp. Then he lumbered up the stairs with heavy footfalls, leaving her with this man who put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels while his eyes continued to bore holes into her. A hint of smoke bit into her eyes, and the haze masking the outside light made her walk to the still open door. The windows of the Holloway house were open with a fan had been stuck in one to suck out the remaining smoke.
“The kid left soup on the stove for hours,” Michelakis said. “Water boiled away, then the stuff inside turned to char. There’s a couple of firefighters here and they ran over when the smoke alarm went off. No serious damage.”
“That’s a relief,” Elle said, and she shut the door.
“This is starting to look serious,” he said. “The dogs haven’t been able to pick up a scent, but it’s starting to look like it isn’t a case where he wandered off.”
Elle sucked in air. “You think someone took him?”
“It’s a possibility. We have an emergency alert out, and everyone in your neighborhood is being interviewed. Was there anything at all out of place yesterday? Did you see a person or a vehicle that didn’t belong?”
She leaned against the door, not caring about the knob jabbing into her back. The day had been sunny, the sky full of puffy white clouds that did not threaten rain. It was cool enough that she regretted not bringing a jacket, but only for about ten minutes. The entire time she was outside, nothing felt wrong, she didn’t feel like she was being watched—unlike now, where the eyes crawling over her made her skin prickle.
“No,” she said. “God, I wish there were. No, wait, no, definitely not. But the only cars in driveways were ones I knew, no one had parked on the street, and everyone outside had belonged.”
“Walk me through what you remember about yesterday,” he said, and she did, and once she finished, he asked her to go through it all once more. After finishing again, her throat hurt and she went to the kitchen for a glass of water, and she could not ignore the clok-clok of his boots against the laminate floor as he followed.
“But you hadn’t seen or heard him since your husband left.”
Tears blurred her vision. She put down the glass before she dropped it.
“I meant to look,” she said, voice now a rasp. “I really did. He’s never wandered off before. The farthest he’s gone without telling us is into the neighbor’s yard, and he was still within sight.
Michelakis nodded, once up and down, his eyes never moving. Everyone was thinking the same thing, she left a five year old unsupervised, she deserved what was coming to her.
“It could happen to anyone,” he said. “I’ve done the same thing with my girls. You live in a safe place, you think they’ll be safe if you look away. Most of the time they are.”
God, he couldn’t sound more phony if he had a script in front of him.
“Now this is a little personal,” he said in that same, cozening tone. “How are things at home? Between you and your husband, you and Justin, Hugh and his son?”
No wonder he wanted her buttered up. All the better to grease out the details.
“Nothing notable,” she said. “Justin’s five, and when Hugh uses a firm tone, he always goes along with it.”
“Never does the old ‘you’re not my mom’ thing?”
Elle shook her head. “I don’t make the rules, just enforce them, and he knows if I say something, it’s because Mom and Dad say so. And Hugh’s always patient with him. I can get tired of Justin’s bouncing off the walls and shrieking every other syllable, but Hugh rolls with everything. He’s always been an easy going guy. It’s one of the reasons I like him.”
“So the marriage is good.”
“Yes, I’d say so. I never wanted to have screaming matches like my parents did, and he’s the same.”
He looked down at her feet, the pale pink nail polish getting chipped. Usually she redid them on Sunday. The detective licked his lips. Elle’s jaw clenched, not sure if it was predatory or thoughtful.
“But that isn’t how it was with Kara,” he said.
“I didn’t know them then, so I could only tell you what he told me. They were heading towards divorce before she got pregnant, and after just broke them apart completely.”
“Yes, that’s what he said. Her too, for the most part.” His eyes, threaded with red, focused on her. “How do they coparent together?” “
In my experience, fine. There’s hiccups, like when Justin got his first bike, Hugh was upset he wasn’t there in person and just had the video. Kara apologized. Same if he screws up.”
“Hm. Okay, thank you. I have more people to talk to, so I’ll—”
“Do you think someone took Justin?”
The question burst out before she could stop it. His eyebrows twitched up in what may have been surprised. Elle was certainly no poker player.
“Honestly, we have no evidence of that. None of your neighbors reported anything out of the ordinary, except one car that belongs to the boyfriend of a girl on the next street. They didn’t want her parents to find out they were still dating. We’re doing background checks on people, but the worst so far is a guy who peed outside across from a school last winter, and a guy who slept with a fifteen year old when he was nineteen.” He shut his eyes and sighed. “I don’t suppose anyone around here’s made you feel uneasy, have they?”
Her shoulders slumped. She moved from in front of the door so he could make his escape.
“Nothing. It’s why I love this place. Such a good neighborhood.”
“We’re still looking for him,” he said, hurriedly, as if to reassure. “No one has any intentions of giving up.”
He opened the door and in came a waft of bitter air. Some haze still, but it was starting to clear. Maybe the dogs would find something soon.
No, they had to find something soon.
She sat on the couch to wait. Her phone went off, and when Elle heard her sister’s voice, the dam finally burst. It was such a relief to get it out, opening an infected wound in an attempt to flush out the disease. If the low battery indicator didn’t start flashing, she might never have stopped.
“I’ll call Dad, tell him what’s going on,” Amy said. He’d express concern, maybe even leave a voicemail, and never follow up.
“Thanks,” Elle said dully. Tried to come up with something else. Failed.
“Call me tomorrow,” Amy said. “I’m off work.”
Work!
The call disconnected, and Elle plugged her phone in. There was no way she could sit at a desk and stare at marketing reports like they actually mattered. Her manager was going to be pissed, badmouthing her to others, sending passive aggressive messages that were a hair below being actionable. Elle sent a message to Veronika, she’d be out next week, family emergency, take it from her vacation time. She left her phone on the kitchen counter where she wouldn’t have to look at it for a while.
She went to find Hugh and he was upstairs lying on their bed, curled up on his side and hugging his pillow. She climbed in beside him and draped her arm over him, murmuring apologies for leaving him alone for so long. He squeezed her hand in acknowledgement.
“What if they don’t bring him home today?” he said.
“They will,” she said, and it should have been the truth.
The sun set on the second day. Kara returned with her mother in tow, and after five minutes of screaming and crying, Elle excused herself. One of them spat something at her, she nodded though she did not know if that was the appropriate response, and she headed to the master bathroom and shut the door. At the bottom of her makeup drawer was a zippered bag of old brushes and tools. Amongst the dust and dulled eyebrow pencils was a pill bottle leftover from her dental surgery. They had to be expired at this point, but Elle popped a couple anyway, then flushed the toilet and went back downstairs to stand next to Hugh.
More screaming, and Elle floated over all of it, even when it was turned her way. She took out her phone, not sure who she was going to call, and Faith slapped it out of her hand, and Elle snatched the item up a second before Faith’s foot slammed onto the spot where it had fallen.
“You need to leave,” Hugh said, his voice bigger than the crying woman. Elle pressed her face into his arm. Warm. Safe.
“I’ll be back later,” Kara said, almost a threat.
“I’ll leave the lights on for you.”
The other woman gave Elle a puzzled look, but then Kara was distracted by her wailing mother. “You said you’d hold it together,” Kara muttered.
Finally, they were gone, and Elle and Hugh sat together on the couch as the light faded. The doorbell rang and Hugh’s hand squeezed hers before he went to answer it.
The man was vaguely familiar, in rugged jeans and flannel and smelling faintly of mud and wet grass. The search was done. The volunteers had to go back to work, to their own children.
“We haven’t seen any sign of him,” he said. “I don’t think he’s anywhere around here.”
“What about the dogs?” Hugh asked.
The man shook his head. More conversation. Hugh started crying and the man squirmed and excused himself.
Hugh grabbed Elle and shook her, fingers pinching into her shoulders. “This isn’t happening, this can’t be happening.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, prying his fingers from her shoulders. “If I looked. If I just looked!”
He shook his head, and she did not know what it meant, absolution or condemnation.
It grew dark. Elle kept her promise and flipped on the outside lights, and returned to her husband to wait for Kara. By the time the woman returned, Elle’s head wasn’t drifting away from her body as much, but she wished it was. When Kara cried, it wasn’t the banshee wails of her mother. It was a soft, painful sob that made her heart hurt.
“We have to go out there ourselves,” Kara said through the tears. She started to rise from the hassock she’d been sitting on. “We can’t give up. We can still find him!”
“He’s not out there,” Hugh said. “They would have seen something. The police will track him down. They’ll bring him home before he’s hurt.”
Kara dropped back down. The gut-twisting sobs started again and Hugh moved next to her, arm around his shoulders, and Elle reached over to take her hands.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Once again, her words received no response.
The crying tapered into sniffles, then into empty silence. “What are we supposed to do now?” Kara said.
Elle sat back on the couch, staring at the black television screen. She could have turned it on, drowned out some of her thoughts with a bad show, but she didn’t deserve it. Hugh moved next to her, pressed against her, staring out the sliding glass doors that led to the patio. For a few minutes, Kara sat with them, but she started tapping her fingers, then her feet, then got up to pace through the house. It was funny how much her restlessness was reminiscent of Justin, who never sat in one place for more than five minutes.
The question Kara posed had an answer, Elle began to think, and it was not one anyone would want to hear. They could do nothing.
“I’m going to go lie down,” she said. “Because otherwise I’m going to throw up.”
“Did you have dinner?” Hugh asked, and Elle couldn’t remember. Perhaps that was why her stomach was contemplating suicide.
The night was quiet, but at dawn, Hugh’s mother arrived, and Leslie did not yell, she did not accuse, but her grief was as overpowering as her perfume. Throughout the week, when they were still trying to hope, people kept coming by and they said it was for support, sometimes they even brought food, but they were prying for details. That’s all it ever was.
Any news? Have you thought of anything? What were you doing when you first noticed he was gone? Have you looked here? There? Where? Who? When?
Elle received them all, even Hugh’s friend from college who they hadn’t seen since their engagement party. The next time Kara showed up, she brought her father, and while he kept his mouth shut, his eyes were full of black fire. He would blame his former son in law for every woe for the rest of his life.
The first week passed, then the second. Elle’s manager called to ask her when she was coming back because she was out of vacation and sick time.
“Do you want to take family leave?” Veronika asked, and without the exasperation normally present in the woman’s words, and voice, and general existence of time off work. Elle took the phone from her ear to make sure she had dialed the right number.
“I’m going to have to,” Elle said. “I could try to work, but I…”
Her throat pinched. A noise came out, but she wasn’t sure the phone picked it up.
“I’m going to send you the names of some therapists,” Veronika said. “Um, they’re on our insurance plan, so please, call, make an appointment.”
Who the hell even are you? Elle did not say, because speaking was beyond her. She did manage to squeak out a thanks before she hung up, and somehow Veronika had actually meant it and sent a bunch of names and numbers.
She had turned into a figure of pity, which was probably better than being a figure of suspicion. The cops came back a few times, and while their questions were always personal, Elle never got the impression that she was being interrogated. Maybe that was the point, that she shouldn’t know she was under suspicion. Then came the day Michelakis arrived, hang dog expression on his face, like she caught him sending racist memes and he wasn’t really sorry but he had to act like he was.
“We’ve exhausted every lead,” he said, mostly to Hugh. “The tip line hasn’t brought anything substantive. We’ve talked to everyone. We’re not giving up, but until we have something more to go on…”
He sighed and for a moment, Elle believed he was as miserable as he seemed.
“We’re putting the case to the side. I promise, I’ll keep looking over it, and anything that comes up, I will leap on with both feet.”
Hugh stared, mouth slightly open. He hadn’t shaved in three days and his whiskers were uneven, and a lot grayer than she expected.
“Have you told Kara yet?” Elle asked.
“I’m on my way there after I finish with you.” He stood. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Hugh gasped, eyes wide and twitching. Elle put her hand on his leg and squeezed before he screamed.
It was the first time anyone ever said it. Justin was gone. He was not coming back.
Days. Weeks. Months. Candlelight vigils. Interviews to get the word out. Therapy. Crying. Screaming. Silence.
Hugh came home while Elle was in the kitchen. Her night to cook dinner. Stew from a can. She’d had a long day and didn’t feel like using knives.
He sat down at the kitchen table. “They let me go today.”
It was only then she turned and noticed the backpack he kept his laptop in was crammed full, and next to it rested a plastic container full of the fidget toys he kept on his desk, photos (their wedding, Justin), and his speaker, among other odds and ends.
“How could they—”
“They showed a lot of patience,” he said, his tone one of despair muffled by forced enthusiasm. “I should have been fired months ago. I show up and barely do anything. I can’t…” His forehead wrinkled and he blinked several times. “Concentrate.”
She moved next to him, rested her head on his shoulder, rubbed his hand.
“What do you want to do now?” she asked.
“I can pick up some freelance stuff until I find something else,” he said, eagerly, earnestly. He meant it, but that didn’t mean he was always capable of doing so. Some months it wasn’t even a thousand, others it was closer to four. It depended on whether he was able to do more than stare at the screen.
Sometimes, he called different agencies. He even got a phone call with an FBI agent once, but it never yielded anything. On the one year anniversary, they were interviewed by two different news stations, and it was around that time Elle noticed she’d been blocked by Kara on social media. After the interview on the second anniversary, she’d realized she only talked to her husband’s ex once in the past year, to hand over some toys Kara wanted as keepsakes.
Year three brought even less attention. It was probably for the best. Hugh had taken to pulling out strands of his hair. Intensive therapy helped, at least a little.
Before the third anniversary, the Boudreaus moved away. Laine came to say goodbye, because Deion still asked about Justin at times. Elle texted her a picture in case she wanted to print it out for him.
“I’m sorry about what happened,” Laine said. They hugged. A week later, the moving van in front of their house was fully packed. When the doorbell rang, Elle expected Laine or Michelle had brought Deion for one final farewell, but it was Kara standing on the other side.
She must have lost thirty pounds over the past few years, and she’d never been a large woman. Her frame was skeletal, and her skin was rough, pores dilated, a lot of wrinkles that hadn’t been there before. It had been some time since they’d seen each other, but that long?
Elle tried to cover her shock at the other woman’s appearance. The blank expression on Kara’s face made it hard to tell if it worked.
“I didn’t expect you to come by,” Elle said. “It’s been so long since we’ve talked. How’ve you been?”
“Is Hugh here,” Kara said. “I’m afraid not. He’ll be home in an hour. You can wait if you—”
“I’m moving,” she said. “Near to my sister. I need some distance.”
Elle nodded. “I can understand that. If we ever hear anything, I’ll let you know right away.”
“Let the police do it,” Kara said. Then she turned and went back to her car, which she left idling at the curb.
I’m never going to see her again, Elle thought. That thought brought neither sadness nor relief. It didn’t really bring anything.
Hugh reacted more strongly than she expected, perhaps because there was no clearer sign that the mother of his child was giving up. Therapy was upped to twice a week for a while.
Kara left. The two of them stayed, five years, then ten. Hugh’s father died, a stroke, right around the time Elle had a lump in her breast removed. After the surgery, when Hugh brought her home, mounting dread engulfed her as she entered the house. She let it sit for a while, but her job had turned to garbage the past few years and there were better prospects in other states.
“It’s time for us to move,” she said to Hugh.
He blinked, then left the room. They didn’t talk much for the next three days, and Elle didn’t want to admit she was looking up divorce lawyers on her laptop. Then he sat her down and asked where she’d want to settle.
“You’re okay with this?” she asked.
“I know you’re right,” he said. “I’ve known this for a while. Sometimes when you get stuck, that first step takes some preparation.”
“We’re never going to forget,” she promised.
A real estate agent was contacted, a bright woman with too-white teeth and roots at the top of her bleached hair. She walked through their home pointing out things that would need to be moved or repaired in order to present the house at its best.
“That dishwasher’s got to go,” she said, heading out the sliding glass doors. Then there was a crack in the patio that needed fixing, and she suggested a fence would make parents with young kids feel safer. “You don’t want them thinking their babies might wander off.”
Tears filled Elle’s eyes and she would have excused herself if Hugh hadn’t darted in the house first. She told the agent they’d get on the fence tomorrow.
The fence guy came a week later, followed by the property evaluator who put down wooden stakes with pink plastic flags tied to them. While he was hammering one down, he moved around and fell forward, avoiding the stake but hitting the ground. Elle ran out to check on him but he was young and already getting to his feet.
“Is that an animal burrow?” he asked.
“There are some limestone caverns in the area,” she said. “There are openings everywhere, though I didn’t know one that big was on our property.”
“Man, I could’ve broken an ankle in there.” He glanced back at it. “Better have the contractor fill it in.”
The boundary stakes were done, and the fence would be started next Monday. He headed back towards the front and she checked the hole, the only opening that was actually on their property. They never mowed this far back and most of it was obscured by long grass and vines twisting out of the woods, and she swept these aside for a better look. Maybe two feet across, an almost vertical shaft. In the shadows was a glimmer that shouldn’t have been there.
Wincing preemptively for her knees, Elle knelt and took out her phone, hoping this wouldn’t be the exact moment her phone slipped from her grip. She hit the flashlight app and the light came on, and the glimmer, which may have been neon green before years of dirt settled on it, had a familiar pattern. A soccer ball pattern, in fact.
She stretched her arm farther and a scream stuck in her throat. Her arm trembled and she pulled it back before she really did lose her phone. She’d never be able to reach in there to retrieve it, and she could never allow anyone else to. The hole wasn’t that wide, but damn, it was deep, and the evaluator was lucky he hadn’t slid in deeper. If he’d been any smaller and at a worse angle, he might have fallen, and he’d never be able to wriggle out of that shaft. Well, maybe it was possible. He was an adult, after all.
The fence guys would fill in the hole, and she and Hugh could move away and they could finally live again. Even if not knowing hurt, the truth would be worse. It would kill him faster than a stroke. A single, barking laugh escaped her, but if she gave into it, it would never stop, and she’d be bashing her head against the rocky soil in an attempt to contain the avalanche.
The night it happened. She’d been dreaming. Dreaming of Justin crying out for his father.
“Ma’am!” the evaluator yelled. “Can you sign this?”
Elle straightened. “Right with you!”
She walked quickly to catch up with him. The past was buried. Let it stay that way.
This story is part of the project A Writer’s Shindig. Emily Amsel’s story is the fourth of 6 short stories written for the project. You can read more about our collaboration and read all the stories posted thus far at A Writer’s Shindig.
She stood in the middle of the street talking to a shame-faced Tommy when a car took the corner too hard and Elle jerked around, then backed across the street, no, not attempting to hide. The vehicle was a silvery white sedan, and while she had seen it many times before, it never evoked such dread. Usually it was only annoyance, as Kara always had some dig to make about the state of house. During the last pick up, she sneezed and informed Elle it was all the dust, better get to the spring cleaning.
The tires gave a millisecond of screech when she stopped, and the whole vehicle rocked when she got out. Her eyes locked with Elle’s and she spat, “Get over here!” as if to a recalcitrant teenager. Elle bit back her reply and walked to the other woman, shoulders square, eyes downcast. She did not allow her hands to tighten into fists.
“Why the fuck weren’t you watching him?” Kara barked, and her volume had to be for the benefit for everyone on the street so they would know who to blame.
“I’m sorry,” Elle said.
“Fuck your sorry! You should have been watching my kid!”
Elle took a long inhale. “Can we please not do this outside?”
“Why not? They’re all going to be watching when the cops take you away in cuffs!”
Now Elle’s breathing came in sharper gasps, and she had to work to steady herself in hopes that Hugh would come to her rescue. She recalled their fourth date, when she asked him about the reasons for his divorce in case it was something like infidelity. Instead, Hugh’s expression became that of someone who just realized he swallowed a piece of plastic.
“Things were already fragile and the postpartum time was tough,” he had said. “The depression was ugly and she said things that just can’t be taken back.”
He wasn’t coming to save her from this beast.
“Are you finished?” was all she said to Kara, who stalked into the house and shrieked for Hugh before the door was closed.
Elle kept her shoulders square and her face neutral as she walked in after her. Hugh was coming in from the back, a hangdog expression on his face. He knew what was coming and thought he deserved it.
“Did you call the cops yet or are you too fucking stupid to do that too?”
“Stop, please,” Hugh said, so quietly Elle almost couldn’t hear. Miraculously, Kara’s body seemed to unclench.
“Why wasn’t she watching him?” Kara said, her tone now at a reasonable level, though she did not hold back on the venom dripping from her words.
“He was right out back,” Hugh said.
“He’s five.”
“I thought he was still playing soccer,” Elle said. “He’s never left the back yard on his own before.”
Kara threw a glare over her shoulder. “When was the last time you saw him?”
Elle swallowed, her mouth so dry. No, he hadn’t been there when she looked out the window, but she couldn’t see the patio from there. If Justin was playing with that spinny toy he liked or his trike—he was too big for it now, but liked to pretend he was working on it—she wouldn’t have been able to see him.
“I saw him before I left,” Hugh said, and Elle was able to breathe again. “I called out I was running to the hardware store and he waved at me. He was running around the grass.”
Something nagged at Elle, but was drowned out by Kara berating Hugh for not calling the police yet. He took out his phone and Elle stepped into the back yard, staring out while she tried to let the thought come to her.
“Where’s his soccer ball?” she muttered.
She crossed the lawn, still yellowed from a wet winter with little sun. Not great for soccer, even with the light plastic ball, but Justin’s boundless energy more than made up for it. Considering its purple and blinding green color scheme, it should have been easy to spot. Nope, not in the bushes, not among the tree roots, not in the leaves mulching on the ground. Then he took it with him . . . to the park? No, someone would have spotted him by now. Damn it, where was it?
Since it was better than dealing with Kara, she kept looking for the ball until the quality of light faded. Dusk already, Hugh should be preparing dinner, she should be showering and using the vitamin enriched leave-in conditioner on her hair. Justin was supposed to be packing his bag with the toys he wanted to take over to his mother’s for the next week.
She made her way back to the house, her pace slowing the closer she got. Zeno’s arrow said you could divide a task unto infinity, but in real life, each step brought you closer to the finish line.
They were in the living room and the kitchen, but the open concept meant there were no walls to impede Kara’s death stare. There wasn’t enough strength in her to face them, and Elle hid away in the bathroom and sat down on the toilet lid. Her heart hurt, an ache that pierced it deep inside.
I should have checked. It would have taken five seconds. I should have checked. I should have checked!
The doorbell rang. That would be the police.
She plastered a smile on her face before she went out, then remembered how inappropriate that would be for the occasion. She didn’t have to hide what was inside of her—she couldn’t. People always thought the stepmom did it, and Elle read the stories. Sometimes they were right.
It wasn’t just one cop but a duo, and the first thing the older one said was that the neighborhood was being organized into search teams ready way to comb every nook and cranny with emergency lights. The older one pulled Hugh and Kara aside while the younger one asked for a quiet place to talk, and Elle took him into the office. Younger was relative, as he was still older than Elle, wearing for a uniform with the name Lacome on his breast, and it dimly occurred how close that was to the face lotion her mother liked.
“When was the last time you saw the child?” he asked.
“Not since one o’clock,” she said.
Elle went through it all, working on the flowerbeds while Hugh was busy with the dishwasher. She had watched him all morning. It was his father’s turn to keep an eye on him.
“Do you often leave him by himself for extended periods of time?” he asked with an icy coolness.
“His father was ten feet away,” she said. “He’s always obeyed the rule about staying in the back yard. There was no reason to think he’d go off on his own.”
“How about neighbors? Is there anyone he might go off to see?”
“He’s friends with Deion Boudreau, but their family is out of town this weekend. The Golds have a girl Justin’s age, but I talked to them earlier. They haven’t seen him.”
He nodded, his eyes never leaving her face. They were hard and dark and dripped with contempt. Perhaps it was her own guilt projecting, but she didn’t think so.
Tears dripped down her cheeks and she roughly wiped them away. She was shaking, and she sat down on the nearest surface, an end table, and knocked off the box of tissues. Her old anxiety habit was picking at her fingernails, but she tucked them under her legs. It would be too easily mistaken for guilt.
Officer Face Cream asked more questions and Elle did answer, but she didn’t process what was said by either of them. By the time he was done, a white van had pulled up outside, and the people coming out wore hi-vis vests. Who organized this sort of thing?
“The soccer ball he was playing with is gone too,” Elle offered, and Lacome said “Really?” and walked off to the older officer.
“He could be hurt,” Kara said. “He must be or he’d be home by now!” She whirled towards Hugh. “You both should be charged for this.”
“Stop,” Hugh said, and it was about fucking time. “A month ago, I went to pick him up and he was out front with his bike while you were napping on the couch.”
She threw her hands in the air, fingers hooked as if trying to tear something. “I had a migraine!”
With that, she marched outside. Elle swallowed her own scream—there was something about anger, it was an acceptable emotion, it made you feel justified in what you’ve done even if it was wrong—but she couldn’t muster it. This woman was going through the worst pain a person could experience, and at least some of the blame belonged to Elle.
Elle walked until she hit a chair, the recliner she hated because it didn’t flow with the rest of the décor. She sat in it and squeezed the fake-leather wrapped cushioning until she felt something tear. The piece of crap finally made itself useful.
Why haven’t they found him yet?
It was a long time she sat there, staring at the television hung over the mantle that reflected a glossy black room back at her. A warm hand closed over hers and it was like being jerked from a sound sleep, and she saw Hugh next to her, sitting on the arm rest, his eyes as vacant as she felt. She leaned against him and squeezed his leg, perhaps too hard, his eyebrows faintly pinched together.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have checked on him.”
“Maybe.”
Not quite the response she’d been looking for, but he shook his head.
“It should have been all right,” he said. “It was twenty minutes. I’ve left him watching something on TV while I showered, or playing inside while I went to mow the lawn. It should have been all right!”
He said this last quietly, but with emphasis on the first and last pair of words in the sentence, as if arguing with reality that this wasn’t fair. Hugh always promised he wouldn’t be a helicopter parent, he’d let his kid grow up without fearing the world. Since she wasn’t a parent herself, Elle couldn’t quite understand what that meant. Presumably that a five year old could be left alone for twenty minutes.
“You should go lie down for a little while,” he said. “I’ll get you if anything happens.”
She opened her mouth to protest, it seemed the proper thing to do, and the tacky taste in her mouth made her grimace. Perhaps it wasn’t a bad idea, but first she went to the kitchen for a drink of water, and through the bay window she spotted the lights bobbing through the woods. What were they supposed to see in the dark that she missed in the daytime?
It couldn’t have been six hours. They should have been pausing the movie so Justin could get in his pajamas. No bath tonight, so it would take five minutes.
She trudged up the stairs to her room and the second she saw her bed, her knees threatened to buckle, and she threw herself down on it and buried her face in the bedspread. Her mouth puckered and throat clenched as she released the agony burrowed in her chest. Muffled as it was, her crying sounded like screams.
When they got Justin back, she would grip him by the shoulders and apologize for the terror he must have felt. It’s my fault, she’d tell him. I’m supposed to help protect you and I let myself get distracted. I screwed up. You’re a good kid. I love you.
He’d been wary of her when they first met, but only for about twenty minutes. Then the floodgates opened and he chattered about trucks and basketball and the scary Halloween song he’d been watching—it was March and she saw the video later, the scariest thing in it was a cartoon spider. At least, that was what Hugh said he was talking about. Justin was a toddler and every word was a guess.
Elle crawled up to the pillow and curled on her side, face hot. Sleep was out of the question, but she lay with a headache forming in her temples and listened to the voices downstairs, the opening and closing of the door. No excitement, no exclamations of relief, so nothing she cared to respond to.
The throbbing of her head grew to the point where the pain flashed across her vision. She dragged herself to the bathroom, and the clock on the wall indicated it was after nine o’clock. Nine! Justin didn’t even get to stay up that late on New Year’s Eve.
She took some aspirin and crawled downstairs to find Hugh, outside in his heavy coat, sitting on the bench on the patio.
“It’s your turn,” she said. “Go rest for a couple of hours. I’ll wait here.”
He continued to sit, staring out at the back yard. He blinked, head moving back and forth, blinked again, and she began to think he hadn’t heard her.
“All right,” he said, voice slow. “Kara’s still out there. She’s more scared than angry now. If she comes back, tell her to take five on the couch or something.”
He got to his feet, swayed. He seemed smaller than he used to.
“Leave your coat,” Elle said, and he took it off and handed it over.
He went in, she sat down. It had been hours since she checked her phone, and she distantly remembered plugging it in one of the kitchen outlets. Had Hugh told his parents yet? Should she do it in his place? No, they’d want to talk to him and he needed to rest. Leslie was going to be pissed he didn’t call her straight away so she could hop on a plane from Florida. Gary she didn’t know as well, since in spite of living forty miles away, he’d only been to visit once since Elle and Hugh married.
A shape appeared in the darkness, flashlight pointed at the ground, and it solidified into Kara, whose expression somehow appeared more vacant than Hugh’s. Her hair draped over her face like a mourning veil, and with her pale skin she appeared to be a wraith haunting the night. When her eyes met Elle’s, they did not burn, only glistening. She walked straight up to Elle and blinded her with the flashlight, but it seemed to be carelessness rather than malice as she clicked it off before she went to sit down beside her.
“Where’s Hugh?” Kara mumbled.
“I told him to rest for a little while.”
“Oh.”
Elle’s heart started beating audibly—to herself, at any rate. She was awkward around her husband’s ex at the best of times, and she could hear the silence between them. It sounded like a high pitched whine.
“Should I call Hugh’s parents?” she asked, her voice the same frequency as the ringing in her ears.
Kara seemed to choke on her own spit. “I can’t deal with my own parents. I sure as hell don’t want to deal with them right now.”
“No, neither do I.”
“Are they still living completely separate lives but refusing to divorce?”
“They certainly are. They won’t do holidays together and complain because we have to choose one or the other. They’re not Catholic. I don’t understand why they don’t bite the bullet.”
It would have been easy for Kara to keep the conversation going, sharing her own stories and criticisms of the in-laws, but she did not. Perhaps could not. Being friendly (if critical) during pickups was one thing, but actual kindness towards the woman who lost her son?
“You should go get some rest,” Elle said once again. “I’ll stay out here to wait for news.”
Kara’s eyes shut just a fraction too long to be a blink. “I suppose I will.”
It took several more seconds before she actually got to her feet and shuffled inside, the sliding glass door whispering shut, as if she was afraid to make noise.
Elle pulled up the hood of the coat and slid her knees underneath the puffy lining. A pair of light beams flashed in the treetops, bouncing out of sight. Once, she heard the distant shout of a two syllable name, and she let out a shuddery breath. No crying. She swallowed a painful lump in her throat.
It was cold, in the high forties, a little boy shouldn’t be out in this. Elle wasn’t a touchy-feely person with anyone, but when she saw Justin again, she would fold him into her arms until he was warm again. She could see him shivering, wearing only a long-sleeved shirt because he peeled his jacket off by midmorning. She embraced him and he stared up at her with big, wet eyes.
“Daddy,” he wept in a minuscule voice.
Elle jerked, on her feet before she realized she was dozing. Just a dream, but she stretched to listen in case they were finally bringing him home. The wind rustled the still mostly-naked tree branches. No more flashlight beams in sight. Midnight was approaching.
Inside, Kara was awake and on her phone, and the conversation indicated she was talking to her mother. Elle went upstairs to find Hugh and he was sitting on the bed, his phone in his hand on speaker. The deep bellow could only belong to Gary.
“—told me the second it happened! What is wrong with you? I’m coming down there!”
“Dad, you can’t drive at night.”
“Well if you told me earlier, this wouldn’t be a problem. I’m getting my keys—”
Hugh stood, his free hand a fist. “I swear to fucking god, if you show up at my door, I’m not letting you in.”
Elle shut herself into the bathroom and turned on the shower to drown out the rest of the conversation. She cleaned herself fast and stepped out to find some clean clothes, and Hugh was sitting on the bed again, his phone abandoned at his side.
“Is he coming?” she asked through her clenched teeth. Gary refused to have his cataracts treated because he didn’t want the doctors lasering into his brain, as he put it.
“He finally agreed not to,” Hugh said in a rough voice. “He won’t tell Mom. I’ll have to call Mom in the morning. Fuck.”
“They must have mentioned Justin’s name on the news,” Elle said.
“I suppose. I didn’t think my dad would turn off his alternative news long enough to catch something actually happening.”
He put his head in his hands and began to weep, softly, like nothing she’d ever heard from him. Funny how things could physically hurt when a person had received no actual damage.
More tears came to her eyes, but she could not give in, it wasn’t her child, she had no right to fall apart. She put her arms around him and held him until the tears stopped, and then for a long while after. Maybe they would have stayed forever if raised voices hadn’t thundered downstairs, Kara’s most prominent among them. A cell phone rested face down on the floor, and she was white, frantic, the tendons in her neck sticking out. Hugh put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her from the man in front of her dressed in an orange hi-vis vest and a heavy coat and gloves. His lips were pursed, as if he was holding back what he really wanted to say to her because no one would be that cruel at such a moment.
“Some of the volunteers are still out,” he said to Hugh, a reminder that these were people from the area who came to help, not paid professionals. “Most of us are stopping for the night, but we will resume in the morning—early, right after sunrise.”
“They can’t!” Kara choked out.
“There are still people out there,” Hugh said. He pushed her into the chair, and she gave no resistance. Kara checked the walls, the ceiling, the chairs, the carpet underneath her feet. She’d been in their home before, but never such unfamiliar territory.
“I’m sorry about this,” Hugh said to the hi-vis man. “She’s terrified. We all are.”
“I can appreciate that,” the man said evenly. “We’d still appreciate respect when we’re trying to help you.” “
Of course, thank you for everything.” Hugh looked down at Kara, but while she had stopped her bewildered glances, she seemed to have become unplugged.
“Thank you,” Elle added. “Everyone must need a cup of coffee. I’ll make a pot and anyone who wants one can come in to get it.”
“I’m sure you’ll have a few takers,” hi-vis man said, his tone noticeably thawed. He went outside to spread the word and Elle pulled out the coffee machine. They had plenty of the cheap brand they kept for when party guests overstayed their welcome, but the good stuff was down to some flakes in the bag. It was on the shopping list for next week. Surely they wouldn’t be . . .
Elle shut her eyes and took a deep breath, then got to work on the coffee. When she got back to the living room with the first two cups, Kara was crying against Hugh’s shoulder, him with on arm gingerly patting her back. Elle’s nose twitched at the embrace, but she only put the mugs on the table and sat next to them.
“You only like cream in your coffee, right?” she asked Kara.
She peeled herself away from Hugh. “Yes. I actually haven’t been drinking it lately. It’s giving me anxiety.”
Kara took the proffered mug and sucked down half of the liquid, likely under the assumption that it couldn’t make her feel worse.
Some of the men—and the one woman who was still out there—came in and drained the carafe, and Elle made another. The night crawled on. Every time the door opened, they all looked towards it, but they never had anything to report.
“What was her name?” Kara asked in a hoarse whisper. “The girl you went out with on the ‘marathon bad date’? The one that led to us meeting at the bar?”
“Oh,” Hugh said. “Shane.”
“That’s it. I knew it was a guy’s name. She made you get her tickets for a play, and go to dinner beforehand, and—”
“She hated the restaurant’s ‘vibes’ and made me take her somewhere else, and the wait was so long we missed that stupid play.”
“How have I not heard about this?” Elle asked. The name was familiar from the time she and Hugh laid out all their exes, but all he said was she was too high-maintenance, and how after dumping her and drowning his sorrows, he met the woman who would become the mother of his child.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell her,” Kara said, and for the first time during that unending night, she looked Elle in the eye. “Shane wasn’t even her real name. Just what she called herself. She was a self-proclaimed astral forecaster.”
Elle’s mouth dropped open. “Why was this held back from me? I told you about my ex who lied about being in the army, and you don’t tell me you dated a psychic?”
“First of all, she insisted she was not a psychic,” Hugh said. “Secondly, I honestly forgot about that part. I only went out with her for three weeks. We were never exclusive.”
“Why’d she choose Shane?”
“She said it was the name she divined for herself.”
“Who the fuck would divine Shane for anyone?” Kara said. It wasn’t quite a smile on her face, but likely the best she could muster. “I don’t know why I’m thinking of her now.”
Maybe she could astral forecast where Justin is. But Elle did not say it out loud. It was less palatable than the coffee.
Another man came in looking for something to drink. Elle got up to make another pot.
At ever long last, the morning came, and the promised reinforcements did arrive, dozens of them being organized by what she assumed were plainclothes police. They had pictures of Justin on their phone and most were being sent to the woods and the park, but others were being sent into neighborhoods to knock on doors and hand out flyers. It was all so terribly well organized, and Elle wished she could thank who had done it.
Her phone gave off a screaming buzz, the Amber Alert that had all the last known details. Blue tshirt, jeans, brown hair and eyes, the birthmark that disappeared under his tan. Everyone in the county would know Justin’s face before the end of the day.
Each step came heavier than the last, and the stairs were nearly impossible, at one point requiring her to pull herself along the railing. She fixed her eyes forward as she passed by Justin’s room and made it into her own to collapse on the bed. Though normally she did not sleep on her stomach with her face pressed into the pillow, the second her eyes were closed, she was out, blissful nothingness enveloping her. To think, she used to be scared about dying and the cessation of existence.
This story is part of the project A Writer’s Shindig. Emily Amsel’s story is the fourth of 6 short stories written for the project. You can read more about our collaboration and read all the stories posted thus far at A Writer’s Shindig.
Elle woke to the sounds of her stepson leaping across the downstairs furniture, and shoved her head under the pillow, wishing for a few more minutes as the wooden feet scraped across the floor. And this was him being quiet. She sighed, testing the air outside the covers with one foot. Before she thought about it too much, she threw the covers off and sat up, swaying a bit, eyes still closed. She shivered as she walked across the room, and when the floor creaked, the sounds from below immediately ceased. Yet it never occurred to Justin that his own commotions were just as audible upstairs. Oh well, he wasn’t six yet.
She made the bed, Hugh’s side too, of course, because apparently he woke up having lost the capacity to pull up the sheets, then grabbed her hair brush and ran it through her hair. It made a thick crunching and she winced at the fine blond hairs sticking out of its bristles. Her mother’s hair was thin enough to see the scalp peeking through. Elle would be the same before she was forty.
Downstairs, Justin sat on the hassock wrapped in a blanket, his giraffe in his lap watching cartoons with him. He had a smudge on his face, high up on his cheek, near the café-au-lait birthmark below his temple.
“Breakfast?” she said.
“I already had cereal. I didn’t pour milk,” he added with a touch of a pout. A point of contention between him and Hugh. The first time he insisted he was big enough to handle the milk jug, he dropped it. It would be a while before Hugh let him try it again.
She went to fix her own breakfast and rolled her eyes at the sight of Justin’s bowl on top of the dishwasher next to his dad’s. He was a little kid, he forgot sometimes, but his dad . . . Frustratingly, it wasn’t fair to be mad since Hugh had to be out of the house at five this morning —this Saturday had been dedicated to the biannual security updates at his job, and most of the IT team would be getting overtime for it. Elle put both the plastic, kid-colored bowl and the gargantuan trough that held Hugh’s breakfast in the bottom rack. Her face scrunched up at the smell wafting from the dishwasher. Hugh could deal with that when he got home, which was another reason she wouldn’t complain about the bowls left two feet from the place where they needed to be.
She settled down in front of the television with her phone and her own bowl of cereal and by the time she was done, Justin had grown restless and started pulling out his cars to play his favorite game: demolition derby. Elle shut the television off and told him to go dress before turning the living room into a disaster site.
At noon, with pajamas discarded and the morning vacuuming and dusting complete, Elle went to Justin’s room and watched for a few minutes while he built a corral with his blocks. Hugh would be home soon and they would go into their typical weekend afternoon routine, housework, family activity, dinner, movie and popcorn.
“Time to go pick up the living room,” she said. “What do you want for lunch, tuna or grilled cheese?”
“Ummm.” He clicked a piece in, fashioning what she thought was a rather decent looking birdcreature to go in the corral, especially considering he was doing it without instructions. “Cheese. Can I have soda?”
“If you don’t want it for movie time, then okay.”
“Um. I’ll have it now, Elle.” He went back to his blocks.
“Living room,” she prompted, and he jumped up and ran downstairs to pick up his toys. It was five minutes before he made it to the kitchen, not even enough time for one side of the bread to get browned in the pan. He asked if he could pour out his own soda, the bottle was almost empty, please? And she gave the go ahead. He was still beaming about it after the sandwich was placed in front of him, and then Hugh came in and rested his computer case on the table. Hugh yelled, “Hey buddy!” and rubbed Justin’s head while the boy scarfed up the last of his sandwich. He tried to dash off but Hugh snagged his collar.
“Dishwasher,” he said, pointing at the plate.
Justin blinked at it. “Oh. Right.”
Elle resisted the urge for a smartass comment. “Want anything?” she asked instead.
“Nah, I’m good. I’ll grab a banana.” They kissed. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw Justin’s pace quicken.
“You have to take a look at that thing,” she said, nodding her chin at the dishwasher.
“Ugh, I can smell it from here. All right. I wonder if there’s a clog in the pipe. Is it possible to plunge a dishwasher?”
He’d be chewing on that problem for the rest of the afternoon. She went out to the back yard and began mulching the flowerbeds, and Justin came out to help in a half-hearted way, enjoying digging through the dirt more than spreading it around.
“Ew, a worm,” he said, showing her the writhing form.
“Leave him in there,” she said. “Worms are good for gardens.”
His eyes went wide, marveling at this piece of information, and he carefully put the worm next to the rose bush. He stood up, eyebrows slightly pinched, shuffling from foot to foot.
“Why don’t you go help your dad?” she said. “Just wash your hands first so you don’t smear dirt in the kitchen.”
He ran inside and she went to get the rest of the mulch bags, tossing them in Justin’s wagon to cart around to the front yard. She settled in, reminding herself to prune tomorrow after Justin went to his mom’s.
Justin didn’t resent her for not being his mom, she was fairly sure. He had only been a baby when Hugh and Kara divorced—they had been in the process of separating when she learned she was pregnant and stayed together until the birth trying to decide whether growing up in a twoparent home would outweigh the trauma of having two parents who wanted to murder each other. It was almost two years later that she and Hugh started dating, a year after that they were engaged, and six months later the four year old Justin was the best man at their wedding, looking surprised and more than a little like he had no idea what was going on.
There was . . . a bit of an adjustment period. He never acted with outright you’re-not-my-mom resentment towards her (Elle was sure he was saving that for his teenage years), but he always inserted himself between her and Hugh if they were sitting next to each other on the couch, and more than once she went to bed hoping for some of the earth shattering sex Hugh promised her on their honeymoon and found Justin curled up next to him because he had a nightmare. One night Hugh tried to put him back in his own bed and he threw a tantrum until two in the morning and she was caught between wanting to lock him in the garage and hating herself for wanting to lock him in the garage.
She thought they were friends now, as much as a five year old and a grown woman who never wanted any kids could be, anyway. But she couldn’t guess how much longer that would last. Five years until he reached the cusp of tweenhood. What hell that was going to be.
Distantly, a door slammed. She raked the mulch over the dirt, it should be enough, she should have gotten one more bag to be safe, then a hand fell on her shoulder. Elle yelped, Hugh chuckled.
“I was not trying to be quiet,” he said.
“I’m in the zone!”
He shook his head, still smiling. “I’m going to the hardware store. I’ve got to go get something for that dishwasher.”
“Okay. Where’s Justin?”
“After diligently supervising me, he’s playing soccer in the back yard.”
She gave a dirt encrusted thumbs up, and he headed for his car. This gave her an excuse for a break at least, and she brushed mulch off her pants, went inside, and slipped out of her shoes before she tracked mulch everywhere. Her hands were caked in filth, and off to the half-bath she went to scrub them clean. A glance in the mirror confirmed she was frowning, stupid, no reason for it.
Hands clean, she picked up her shoes and headed into the kitchen to the sliding glass doors. Then her foot came down in a puddle of something liquid but slimy, and a sick shudder rolled up her spine. Of course she decided to carry her shoes. And oh god the smell!
She peeled off her socks and went upstairs to drop them in the hamper, not seeing Justin during her brief glance out the window. The muck was going to take forever to clean, and she’d have to guide the boy around it before tiny scummy footprints dotted her floors. When she got back downstairs, she sighed at the water pooled on the floor beneath the dishwasher and she grabbed the paper towels to dry it up only for more to leak out of the drain pipe in the middle of the appliance. At some point, she must have died, and this was hell.
“I would’ve taken care of it,” Hugh said when he came back in and she was still mopping up the mess. He put a plastic container on the table, bright purple, a curved pipe as the S in the logo.
“Declogger?” she asked.
“We’ll see if it works. Justin still out back?”
Her eyebrows shot up as she realized she hadn’t seen him since she came inside, and Hugh’s lips pressed together, mild annoyance. He stepped around her to check himself. Hopefully Justin hadn’t wandered out into the tall grass behind their property, the boundary of how far he was supposed to go when he was outside alone.
Hugh’s body was rigid, and Elle figured out why in an instant: the back yard was quiet, too quiet. She stepped out, scanning the tall grass for Justin and hoping she could spot what Hugh missed. He’d been playing soccer, probably with the neon spotted ball he liked, and his favorite activity was kicking it with as much force as he could muster. Sometimes they made it into the woods.
“Justin?” she called. Then, a little louder, “Justin!”
She waited for his high-pitched reply, but there was nothing. She took another step out and called again, really putting her diaphragm into it.
Waiting, waiting. Hugh bellowed this time, but the small figure did not come sheepishly pushing through the grass, ready to lose his movie privilege.
“He must be out front,” Hugh said. “I’ve told him time and again . . .”
She tuned out the rest of the rant and walked up to the edge of the grass, high as her chest, a thin barrier that separated the back end of the houses along the street and the thin strip of woods that led to a two-lane road. The trees weren’t much, scrawny, scraggly things sticking out of thin soil, but it would be possible for any child, even a young one, to lose his way in them. She called for him again, three times in increasing volume. The only response was the same startled silence of the birds.
Then he had to be out front. Elle turned and recoiled at Hugh’s sudden reappearance, and worse, the sick, pained expression on his face, same as the time Kara, his ex, saying everything was okay, but Justin cut his finger on a pizza slicer and they had to go to the hospital for stitches.
“He’s not out front?” she said.
He met her gaze, then quickly looked away. “I don’t like this.”
“Go check around the neighborhood. I’ll look in the woods.” “No. I’ll check the woods. Your shoes aren’t sturdy enough. Go to the playground and see if he’s there.”
She looked down at her dingy white sneakers as he brushed past her. Of course they were fine, but in his mind, he would be giving her the easier (as in, less screw-up-able) job. Whatever. It was his kid, he got to call the shots.
Chad Rowan was mowing his lawn across the street, noise protecting headphones on, dark glasses covering his eyes. Some boys—the younger Holloway kid and an unrecognizable face— were skateboarding down the street, attempting to jump, getting only half an inch off the ground. They were fourteen, too old to take interest in Justin, who would have been too shy to do more than stare from a respectable distance.
She headed down the street towards the playground, jogging a little so her heart had a reason to beat fast. Giggles drifted across the air before she caught sight of the towering blue slide, the Big Big Slide, as Justin called it, but disappointment soon swelled in her chest. It was only the trio of girls on the swings, eleven or twelve, one hanging back so both hands and feet were on the ground.
They shook their heads in tandem when she asked about her stepson, and the giggling resumed before she got ten feet away, hushed and badly stifled. Elle jogged back down the street to the teenagers still gliding along the pavement, but they hadn’t seen Justin either. She waved at Chad and he cut his mower. No, he hadn’t seen the boy all day. Her mind went blank and she chewed on her lip before she jerked back to alertness and jogged down to the Golds since Justin liked to play with their daughter Mercy. No luck there either.
For a moment when Elle crossed the sun-bathed street back towards her house, she realized none of this could be happening. She had just been cleaning up the mess and hoping this would finally fix the troublesome appliance that was only four years old. Justin couldn’t be lost. He should be running around in the yard.
Her legs took her back there before she could stop them and she was forced to face the empty yard and the discarded toys in the sand box. He never went farther than the grass on his own, not once. Why would he choose this day? For all the events that would have to line up for an upper middle class white boy to disappear from his own back yard, what was it about today that made her stepson vanish?
She shook her head trying to dispel that ugly word, but it stubbornly clung fast.
Hugh appeared through the grass, eyes wide and hopeful until he saw it was just her. “What are you doing out here?”
“He wasn’t in the park,” she said.
“Go back and keep looking!”
He turned and went back into the trees. Elle’s heart was beating louder than it should have been. Oh, god, this couldn’t be happening. They’d find Justin and never let him out by himself again. He’d be the only seventeen year old whose parents followed him to prom.
Where do I go? Should I call Kara? No. I can’t imagine what she’d think if I was the one to tell her her son wandered off. Hugh will have to call her when he gets back. We can’t wait.
The girls were still hanging around near the swings, strolling towards the northwestern corner, returning home to their parents, of course. Elle crossed to the next street, where she knew even fewer people, and knocked on doors. Each time she asked the person on the other side if they’d seen a young boy with brown hair and eyes, a hard, judgmental flash came into their eyes before they said no.
Back to the house. Hugh hadn’t returned yet. Her stomach seized, and before Elle could lurch to the bathroom, the remains of her lunch splattered on the hall floor, a mash of cheese and bread.
Justin had the same thing, she thought, and her stomach rippled again. She dashed for the kitchen, but all that came up was burning liquid, and she ran her mouth under the faucet until the taste of stomach acid was flushed out. Once this was over, it would be embarrassing how she overreacted.
After she cleaned up the mess, she headed to the back yard, where the light had taken on a golden quality as it eased into twilight. Hugh appeared in between the trees and she kept her hopes tightly under rein, but when she saw he wasn’t holding an exhausted little boy in his arms she still managed to be crushed.
Elle had known fear like this, though only twice before, first the accident her father had been in, seeing him in the hospital, unconscious with stitches in his head, leg in a cast, and her thirteen year old self only able to imagine him never waking up again. Then Mom’s cancer diagnosis, the fear lasting much longer this time, easing up after the remission started, or maybe just buried because “remission” did not mean “cured”. But it was the same as what ate away at Elle now, cold, sapping away her strength.
“We need to call Kara,” she said to Hugh. He recoiled, but nodded, heading inside to do so of course so Elle wouldn’t overhear the ass-reaming his ex was going to give him. Everything would be turn out all right in the end, it always did, but Kara would never let them forget it. She was probably going to refuse to allow Justin to come back until they put a fence up.
Elle stepped through the grass heading for the tree line, nearly breaking her ankle in a hole just big enough for a groundhog to hide in—though the way it crumbled meant this was likely limestone, and a neighbor nearly broke an ankle in a similar hole when she first moved in. Still, it would be a lot easier to live with a broken ankle than… this.
“Justin!”
She chewed on her lip until it hurt, and the wind did not bring a response. Damn it, if he wanted to explore the woods, he had to go with a grownup, that was the rule, and his dad was always happy to oblige. Maybe he chased after an animal, or one of the neighbor kids cutting across. He couldn’t have gotten far. The woods were just big enough that you needed to stand in the exact middle if you didn’t want to see any houses or cars. At the end was nothing but a busy street, the kind that even at midnight would have traffic. Elle bit the swollen spot on her lip as she imagined Justing dashing across it. A metallic taste filled her mouth.
For now, she’d assume Justin stuck to his side of the street and she went back to knocking on doors. One after the other after the other, she’d knock, they’d answer, she’d show a picture on her phone, but they always shook their heads. Most of these people weren’t in her normal bubble, and she didn’t like this being their first impression of her. There was always a flash of judgment in their eyes. It no longer mattered.
She reached the corner that led to her street, the Lin’s house, and Tommy Lin had lived in this neighborhood since he was a child. He still remembered all the nooks the children hid away in, and he grabbed his son to help him look. “
Won’t take long,” he said. “Justin’ll be back by dinner!”
Elle continued, and now that she was with her people, there were offers of sympathy and help. The Rodrigo girls, teenagers, agreed to call their friends in the area. Fran Willet offered to knock on doors. Glenn Holloway said he’d check the park and the convenience store down the road. Elle made her way back home and entered to find Hugh on the stairs, head in his hands.
“Half the neighborhood’s looking for him,” she said.
“Kara’s coming,” he said in answer. “She’s ready to rip my head off. All she could do was scream that we weren’t watching him.”
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have let myself get distracted. I should have been watching him!”
Tears sprung to her eyes and she expected him to react, squeeze her shoulder, reassure her it wasn’t her fault, but he continued to sit there, and it was shitty for her to expect comfort right now anyway. She kissed the top of his head and went back out to check with the neighbors.
The interview posted below was conducted by Emily Amsel, a writer, blogger, and contributor to A Writer’s Shindig. Authors from the collaboration were all interviewed about their work as part of the initial project. This interview is about the short story Corrections. An author interview will be posted after the conclusion of each story in the collection.
Jeremy: The idea came from my girlfriend’s cat. She (the cat not my girlfriend) has a toy mouse that she drops in her water bowl all the time and the internet said one possible reason for that behavior is that she’s trying to drown her prey. I got the notion that she was mad that she kept drowning the same mouse over and over and it wouldn’t die. From there I had the idea of an assassin that keeps killing the same target over and over. Why would that happen? At first I was just going to leave it unexplained but then I decided that wasn’t much of a story. I don’t know if having it be a test for a super-secret society is better but it’s more definitive at least.
Emily: What gave you the idea for the main character?
Jeremy: I can’t really explain why but I almost always write female main characters. Not a ton is revealed about her, but I figure a woman who ends up killing people for a living would probably have a pretty unpleasant history and that’s what I tried to allude to at least.
Emily: Your story is in first person. Is that the tense you prefer to write in? How do you feel about third person?
Jeremy: I almost always write in the first person. I know that it’s something of a crutch for me. I have a hard time writing in the third person. When I’m reading it’s actually what I prefer.
Emily: Is fiction what you prefer to write? How do you feel about non-fiction?
Jeremy: Fiction is the only thing I write, I don’t know enough about anything to write non-fiction. I do enjoy reading non-fiction.
Emily: Where did you get all the background for the story? What research did you do?
Jeremy: I can’t say that I did a ton of research. Another germ of the idea was from my girlfriend. She used to be a public defender and she really does say that the women’s prison here in Mitchelville is really nice compared to men’s facilities. I had previously done some research on women’s prisons for something else I wrote so I had some basics but overall I wouldn’t claim that it’s terrible realistic.
Emily: How long have you been writing? How did you get into it?
Jeremy: Kind of depends what you want to consider writing. I remember writing stories in school all the way back, usually because I got in trouble for them. When I was 10 or 11 my mom got a typewriter and I think part of why I started writing just for myself was because I wanted to play with it. I was really into reading so part of the appeal was to make the stories the way I wanted them to be.
Emily: Some people have a hard time writing description, some dialogue, some basic things like grammar. What difficulties in writing do you have?
Jeremy: Descriptions are my biggest weakness. My grammar probably isn’t great either but that bothers me less. I know some people cringe when they read my stuff because I try to write the way people actually talk, which includes both bad grammar and syntax but I assure you that at least 30% of it is intentional.
Emily: How has your life affected what you write? Does your writing resemble your real life in any way?
Jeremy: Writing is one of my main/favorite hobbies so it’s effected my life in that way, what I like to spend my time on.
Emily: Why do you post on WordPress? What is it you like to post?
Jeremy: There was a wordpress blog that become popular in gaming circles. I had never heard of it before that. The platform I was blogging on was dying so I decided to give it a try.
More About Jeremy: Mostly I post serialized fiction but sometimes I just ramble about whatever. It used to bug me that the latter generally got a lot more attention than the former but I get it. Even if it’s good, which is always questionable, any fiction I write is going to depend on the reader liking whatever weird sci-fi or supernatural thing I’m writing about but if I post something about how I’m losing my mind because a vole got in my house and I can’t catch it that’s something with a broader appeal.
This story is part of the project A Writer’s Shindig. Jolene Rice’s story is the third of 6 short stories written for the project. You can read more about our collaboration and read all the stories posted thus far at A Writer’s Shindig.
15 I made sure I had time. I observed for a while. Got her routine. It wasn’t hard. Everything in prison is based around routine.
When her podmates were in the quilting area and she was in her room masturbating I came in. I’ve killed men jerking off before a few times, those are funny stories. It doesn’t work the other way. Not at all.
After quilting her podmates have a shift making mattresses, so I knew she’d be alone for at least three hours. I gave her a hotshot and settled in to wait.
I got to thinking if they make this story into a movie this is where they’d put in the montage of me killing her in increasingly cruel and usual and hilarious ways and her turning up still being alive. I wish I could do that in real life. Killing the same person multiple times is really boring.
Of course, if this was a movie the woman playing me would be much more attractive than I am. If movies have taught us anything it’s that women with perfect skin and D-cups are the best covert operatives.
My A-cups and I were in her room with her dead body for a while but not long enough to see anything happen. Why? The whole facility went on lockdown. You’re never supposed to be in another prisoner’s room according to the rules but it’s mostly unenforceable except when they do headcount.
When I got back to my pod the podmates were working on a puzzle. It’s the kind of thing I see around here regularly that is just wrong. It’s so mundane.
I’m not a puzzler. Puzzles aren’t my thing. I declined their invitation to join and headed for my room. My assigned buddy shook her head in prison mom disappointment.
“I know you think you’re the queen bitch of the world and nobody can hurt you but if you keep breaking bad with everyone someone’s going to get you eventually.”
“I don’t think I can’t be hurt, I have no illusions about being invincible. I’ve gotten my ass kicked plenty.”
“Then why do you act like this?”
“To thine own self be true.”
16 After just about enough time for five women to finish a puzzle the lockdown was lifted. In short order I saw the target sitting in her pod with her podmates shooting the shit. Very much alive, just like before.
Why the lockdown?
I don’t know if cigarettes are actually currency in men’s prisons, from what I’ve heard it’s evolved to be based on honeybuns and handjobs now, but I know that the main currency here is magazines.
I don’t remember the last time I saw a magazine outside of a doctor’s office before I came to prison but here they’re ubiquitous. Everyone (except me) has a collage on their wall of pictures they’ve cut out of magazines. It seems very juvenile to me which makes sense because the entire experience of being in prison is infantilizing. Everything you do is based on someone else telling you what to do. Everything you have someone gave to you. Everything is provided for you.
The magazines were flying hot and heavy after lockdown was lifted as women tried to buy information about what happened. There were no details to be had. No matter how rich you were in magazines. This has never happened before. No matter how many magazines were spent nobody knew anything.
Prison is like a small town, everybody knows everyone’s business. Even the guards’ business is common knowledge. When you’re in prison there’s not much to do other than snoop.
This time nobody knew anything.
I kill the target and finally I get time to observe what happens after and we go on lockdown? First thing I thought was “this can’t be a coincidence” which is wrong because of course it could be a coincidence.
But and this is a Kim Kardashian sized butt, the timing is very suspicious.
Curiouser and curiouser.
17 I got sent to solitary again. Not for killing the target obviously. They put me in solitary because I’m not good at making mattresses.
I call bullshit. Discipline issues. Fine. Punishment. That makes sense. I’m just not good at sewing. How is solitary confinement going to help me learn to sew better?
Dr. K came to visit me under the guise of a health check. He said he couldn’t get me out this time, which is incorrect, he could, but I knew what he meant.
“I need your help on this one doc,” I told him. “Can you examine the target and figure out what her deal is?”
“What deal do you mean?” he asked warily.
“I’ve killed her several times in different ways and then there she is alive and well. What about Rasputin?” I asked.
“What about him?” he said, still utterly baffled by what I just laid on him.
“Didn’t they poison him and stab him and shoot him and beat him with clubs and run him over with a truck and blow him up with dynamite and he didn’t die?”
“Did they have trucks then?”
“Wasn’t he in World War One?”
We both looked at each other for a moment as we each realized we didn’t know anything about Rasputin.
“Maybe she’s like him. Just check her out.”
“Check her for being Rasputin?”
“You know what I mean,” I said, exasperated.
“I do actually, but I’m trying to point out how meaningless what you mean is. I can give her a physical. You know what shows up on a physical? Like five things. Unless a patient has symptoms to give the doctor an idea of what to look for medicine isn’t good at finding random anomalies. Especially medicine in a prison. You know what equipment I have access to here? A box of Little Mermaid band-aids and some tampons.”
“You’re here to help me man, give me something, speculate, use that big brain of yours, what do you think might be going on?”
“Are you familiar with simulation theory?”
“Sure, like the 13th Floor, it’s bullshit.”
He scowled. “The 13th Floor? You mean the Matrix?”
“I never saw the Matrix, I don’t like Jennifer Lopez.”
“What?”
“A friend of mine worked in a recording studio and he said Jennifer Lopez was a bitch to all the staff there so I don’t watch her movies or listen to her music or buy her line of wigs.”
“Jennifer Lopez wasn’t in the Matrix! She had nothing to do with the Matrix. Keanu Reeves was in the Matrix!”
“You’re thinking of Speed.”
“Keanu Reeves was in Speed but he was also in the Matrix!”
“No, you’re thinking of Ghost Rider.”
“That was Nicholas Cage!”
“Why are you getting so upset?”
“I . . .” he stopped and looked around like he forgot where he was for a second.
“I don’t know actually. Probably because I’m in a women’s prison.”
“You aren’t taking advantage?”
“That is disgusting, immoral, and illegal. I resent the implication.”
“Disgusting, Immoral, and Illegal, that would be a good album name.”
18 One time the girl from the Hunger Games went on Conan and talked about her butt plugs a lot. Which is neither here nor there, but I wanted to remind everyone about that. She was in this movie called Red Sparrow where she was a sexy sex spy who sexed everyone in sexy sex sex times and only sex could save the day.
My team gives me low marks in the Red Sparrow category which is not 100% fair. Am I the best operative to seduce a specific target? Probably not. But the idea that I am not anyone’s type is incorrect. I’m a bunch of dudes’ type. That type is sad flabby balding weirdos for the most part, but that type exists.
Point being that it wasn’t that hard for me to seduce the guard who looks like Miley Cyrus if she was an Asian man.
“So what’s the deal with [NAME REDACTED]?” I asked him as he was struggling to buckle his belt.
“Huh?” he dumbed dumbly. “What do you care?”
“Just tell me bro.”
“Why would I do that?” he laughed, “you weren’t that good.”
“Why? Because you just committed statutory rape. Inmates legally can’t consent to sex, which I’m certain you know. I’ll tattle on you if you don’t do what I say.”
He tried to bow up on me because of course he did, men don’t like getting threatened by women (most of them anyway, see above) and especially men who are used to being the ones doing the abusing don’t like being threatened.
I punched him in the thigh. Which might sound funny but it’s not. Not the way I do it. He fell down with a squawk like a kicked chicken, grabbing at his paralyzed leg.
“Hurts doesn’t it? You’ll be alright in a minute. Probably. Nerve damage is always possible. What was your name? Gorg? Edom? Something short. Here’s what I know about men, Puck, they’re like dogs, they come in three main types. I don’t know what the ratio is but most of them are in these two categories, dogs that are literally all bark and won’t bite even when you smack them around, and the dogs that bark and bark and bark but will bite if you force them to. The third kind is the smallest category, the true predators. The ones who get put down after biting a kid’s face off at a birthday party. And another thing I know is you’re one of the first two kinds. Which means I don’t have to worry about you. You follow me?”
I guess he didn’t because he lunged at me from his one knee position. Which is a pretty bad position to try and lunge at someone from. I stepped back and stomped his head into the floor. I think he understood after that.
We’ll see.
19 I went to solitary again for assaulting a guard. I misjudged Kip or Ned or Saul, whatever his name is. He tattled on me before I could tattle on him. I was hoping Dr. K was going to come visit me again because I really need someone to bounce ideas off at this point.
Instead guards came to take me to see the warden. They call her the prison superintendent but that’s what she is.
She looks like every mousy naggy female character from a male driven comedy. Not the one who’s secretly hot without her glasses and eventually learns to “loosen up” and gives Jason Segel a blowjob under the table in the last scene, the other one, the one who gets shit on by an elephant and everyone laughs. Because she’s not hot. And therefore the object of derision.
She made a big show of waiting until we were alone in her office before she leaned forward and stage whispered.
“I know why you’re here.”
“I should hope so, you’re the warden.”
She shook her head theatrically. “No, I know why you’re really here.”
“I’m sure you do,” I drawled.
She cupped her hands around her mouth. She was acting like she was in an old movie where people worried about lip readers.
“When a person closes up completely, trying to guaranty themselves against their own obliteration, all they do is die a different kind of death. Like a piece of fossilized wood.”
That was weird enough that I started paying attention.
“Are you saying that someone here is already dead in some way?”
She moved her hands to not only cover her mouth but to cover most of her face. “Immortality?
What does that word even mean? There is one universal truth. All that exists will die. Everything has something against which it has no defense, for most of us it’s time, or disease, for others you need to get creative.”
“Sure, the right tool for every job, do you have anything useful to tell me or are you just going to say creepy shit? Is this a Castle Rock situation? Are you playing the role of the guy from Whiplash? Is the person we’re talking about Bill Skarsgård in this situation? Was he the Antichrist? I never watched the last few episodes.”
She tilted her head like my aunt’s stupid parrot used to do when it started mimicking her gross sex noises. “Endings aren’t the punishment, they’re the mercy. It’s the ones who keep circling the drain forever that you need to worry about.”
“Alright, fuck this.”
20 In shows when the head honcho is taken hostage they always yell to their minions, “Take the shot, don’t worry about me!” Superintendent Sally had a different take on hostage situations. She screamed, “Do whatever she wants!” when I drug her out of her office with a knife at her throat.
Do prison guards have access to guns? They must, right? Locked away somewhere? But I’ve never heard of prisoners having guns even when they take control of the prison.
I was trapped in the hallway outside of the main office area but I wasn’t trying to get out.
“Bring me [NAME REDACTED]!” I yelled through the door at the Deputy Superintendent (big dude with a giant head, looked like a cross between Edward James Olmos and Jimmy Smits with just a splash of Jeff Goldblum) and the gaggle of office people and guards with him.
“We can’t do that,” he said over the speaker thing.
Superintendent Sally shrieked back “Yes you can, I give you permission!”
I’m certain she’s wrong about that, their procedure is surely not to give the hostage taker more hostages, but she was trying her cowardly best to convince them. They tried to talk me down and eventually caved in, which I’m sure means they should all be fired. Eventually they brought Her into the hallway.
I chucked Superintendent Sally aside and grabbed the target. She struggled a little but like the other times I killed her it didn’t matter. I would have felt sorry for her if she wasn’t so fucking annoying, not dying and all.
I pushed her up against the glass Edward Jimmy Goldblum and his crew were behind.
“Check this out,” I said as I stabbed the shit out of her. And I mean good.
They rushed in to try and grab me at that point, but I had Sally around the throat again to ward them off.
I pointed with the bloody knife. “Just watch, she’s going to get up in a minute, or there’s going to be a flash of light and she’s going to be alive again, something freaky is going to happen and I want you all to see it.”
“She needs medical attention!”
“She’s fucking dead brother, I stabbed her in the brainstem like a thousand times. Stay where you are or the warden gets it! Just watch her. Something is going to happen. Any minute now. It’s going to be something, trust me. Something with quantum realms or clones or different dimensions or something. Just watch. She’s not really dead.”
“Any minute now,” I said five minutes later.
“I don’t know how long it takes,” I admitted ten minutes later.
“It might take an hour,” I said half an hour later, “but I know it doesn’t take longer than that, this isn’t the first time I’ve killed her.”
I’m not going to say that I’m such an ice-cold piece of work that nothing can shock me, but there’s not a lot that really throws me off guard. Having said that, when the guards and administrative people parted and Dr. K walked up I was thoroughly flabbergasted.
“What the hell?” I asked, because, what the hell?
He glanced at the dead woman and the gallons of blood on and around her.
“Well . . . we’venever had anyone do that before. That was certainly . . . a choice.”
21 We retired to 2 Scoops Ice Cream because while a women’s prison isn’t so bad they don’t have ice cream. Dr. K was giving me looks like when someone is picking out a new puppy, he was looking for something but he didn’t know what it was himself.
“Why didn’t you try talking to her?” he asked.
“You know, that never occurred to me,” I admitted, sucking on 2 Scoops signature Jail Break Shake.
“That’s usually what people try eventually.”
I shrugged. “So how’d you do it? Clones? Did you clone her?”
“That’s need-to-know information. And I don’t mean that in the sense of information that you only get told because you need it to complete an objective, I mean that you only get that information if you need to know it or you’ll go insane because you’ve seen something inexplicable based on all logic and reason.”
I thought about it for a moment. “I don’t need to know.”
Dr. K’s smile was what they call “beauteous” and that’s something because he’s not a beautiful man.
“You have no idea how happy that makes me. That’s the final test. People who need to know, they can’t be trusted. They’re too invested. You can’t count on them. Do you realize what a rare bird you are?”
“Yeah,” I said, eying a kid’s cookie ice cream sandwich and wondering if I should have ordered that instead. Or also. “So what’s the pitch? I passed your Kobayashi Maru hot dog challenge and what? Is this some Men Who Stare At Goats shit? I get to be a man in black? Area 51? The elite of the elite of the elite? Assassinating wizards? Vampires? Something even weirder?”
“Yes,” he said simply. “Fortean events, unexplained human phenomena, cryptozoology, out of place objects, whatever you want to call it, there’s more going on than you’ve been exposed to so far. If you want the job, if you want to join the team, you can learn things that very few people know, that even fewer people should know. And if not, if you decide that it’s not for you, no hard feelings.”
“No hard feelings meaning you’d kill me?”
“No need to make a decision right away, you can have until you’re done with your ice cream to think about it.”
The Quick and the Dead 