AMBER

Outside Speedy’s, just right of the packaged ice and snuggled to the side of the building, there was a cage with a hand-painted sign that read, “BEHOLD THE DEVILS DOG.” The paint was red, and the squiggly letters dripped bloody hell-snot. The cage was about six feet tall, eight wide, and five deep; its bars were crossed with rungs, which were rusty at the intersections, and across its top lay a plastic, amber sunscreen. Sal “Speedy Sal” Nolan liked to keep roadside attractions in there. This was back when people weren’t as ill-disposed to seeing animals in cages, when I was still young and vindictive and rode motorcycles, and when children were just as impossible to find once lost but much more likely to go missing.

It was September 15^th in 1994. I’m always the one to remember the date because it was my twenty-third birthday. I hadn’t even wanted to confront Speedy Sal that day because we had been at each other’s throats since my sister’d been gone, but a mail truck ran me off the road while I was on the way to my mother’s house. The truck swerved into the left lane as if to pass, then swerved back and sped up like it was going to rear-end me. There was no shoulder, so I cut it into Speedy’s and skidded down the short decline to the gravel lot. The mail truck came to a stop and I saw there were two mailmen inside, not in uniform but wearing black tank tops. They drove off.

This was the third time I’d been harassed by the same truck—I remember that, too. I had brought it up the night before to my mother on the phone. “Hey, before you go, what’s up with these jackass mailmen lately?” She tsk’d and told me it was in my head, that I was always reckless on my bikes, and that I should respect letter carriers because without them we could not send away for catalogs of books from faraway stores.

In any event, I was at Speedy’s whether I liked it or not. I saw a mother and a son walking near the cage as I hung my helmet on my handlebars. The boy slipped something into the cage while his mother wasn’t looking. His mother dragged him by his wrist (I thought they had been holding hands) and, as soon as they entered Speedy’s, said, “Restroom, please? It’s apparently urgent.” I could hear her because the front door was propped open by a cinder block. Speedy Sal did this from time to time when the AC was out.

I don’t remember when I learned their names, but I know them now: Sadie and Gus. Sadie was nineteen, and Gus was five. In different ways, both of them were too young. I remember watching Sadie look at Speedy Sal. Her lip curled upward at one end, her left eyebrow hooked high like an expectant actress.

My name is Christina, but back then I went by Chris.

I tuned out Sadie when she began to yell and walked up to the cage. There was a raccoon inside. He wrapped the eyelash fingers of his little paws around the bars and looked up at me. He wore a metal collar with a chain leash. The chain was fastened to a ring that poked out from a mound of cement. The kid had slipped him a powdered brownie. Half of it was on the ground, crumbled into a tan powder, and the other half was gone, its remnants stuck to the devil’s dog: a spot of white on his nose. The raccoon looked at me and pulled at his collar to see if he were still a prisoner. He had two bumps on his head that looked like pitiful horns.

None of this was anything new to me. I’d seen everything in the cage. A duck with one wing that stretched across its back like a neck-knotted tennis sweater. ONE WINGED PREHISTORIC DUCK. A cat with three eyes—its third sitting on the top of its shaved head. ALIEN CAT?! SEE FOR YOURSELF. Which isn’t to say Speedy Sal only had a fixation on animals with the incorrect number of somethings. He had once presented a package of cubic eggs. SQUARE EGGS—WHAT WILL HATCH. A brown bear cub that paced under the sun and refused to grow. BEAR.

I walked past the cage (the raccoon skittering alongside me like a beggar until he met the cage’s end) and entered Speedy’s. Sadie leaned over the counter and pointed at Speedy Sal, her other hand busy lighting a cigarette and her lips moving with an awkward chewing motion as she both averted her head down to the lighter and gave Speedy Sal a piece of her mind. “Where do you get off asking me about my period?” she said. Gus scurried to the unisex bathroom, which was also a janitor’s closet that had both a ladder to the top of Speedy’s and a door to the back. Alongside the back of Speedy’s there was a dumpster, a mailbox in the shape of a swan, and a cigarette tower that around its pregnant bottom said: empty when full.

Speedy Sal, it was not hard to imagine how the conversation had gone downhill in record-time: a young woman walked in, agitated, needing something. Sal could never keep his mouth shut. He, like his stupid little gas station, was crusty and wasteful and had almost nothing to offer. Sadie was demanding that he sell her alcohol, I think she wanted a six-pack of Hamm’s, and Sal said, “Now I don’t think you need that with you being hissy as soon as you get in here,” to which Sadie said, “I’m a paying customer and I don’t want to deal with this bullshit right now.”

The only humor in this story is how I completely missed the escalation of their conversation. They hated each other more quickly than I’d ever seen any two people hate each other. In young Sadie’s defense, Gus had been requesting all day long that they get off at almost every exit because he had to pee, which he always did, but then he would need to pee again and again and again (Sadie would inform me this later, as we sat defeated and exhausted on her bumper). Maybe another piece of humor was me, standing behind Sadie, Speedy Sal not having noticed me yet, and Sadie saying, “It’s not my fault the kid’s bladder is like a standpipe of piss.” Both Speedy Sal and I laughed, and that’s when he saw me.

My original intention, whenever I would have gotten around to it, had been to take him by surprise. I wanted to show up early and demand he close the store for the day. I wanted us to go to his house, and I wanted to collect my sister’s things. He had been holding on to them for almost a year. He had started selling them. They had been married, and at the time I didn’t understand that he was entitled to keep everything she had ever touched, if he wished. My only leverage was that I did not believe he had ever loved my sister, which was something he never commented on. “This conversation is over,” Sal would say.

I hated him. I hated him. I hated him. His thin eyebrows like lazily smeared ash. His pale lips, gleaming like sweaty liver. His spider leg facial hair.

But his perfect teeth. Even I couldn’t hate his perfect teeth.

My sister’s death was gruesome. When people in your family die gruesome deaths, it never becomes normal—to talk about, to think about, to explain. She was killed somewhere on I-44, on her Harley, drunk as a skunk (“drunk and as a skunk” being Sal’s words, likely chosen because at the time he claimed to have a skunk that could spray a scent sweeter than perfume, and she must have called him, at some point, her voice like syrup through the phone). Someone she had run into at a rest stop, who was stopped in the traffic her crash caused, claimed he’d been behind her at a vending machine and had noticed that her nostrils were “lined with cocaine” so heavily that they looked like “salt-rimmed tequila glasses.” She’d slipped under a semi-truck somehow. I’d been just a few miles behind. She was heading to Saint Louis to pick up an antique lamp for Sal. I was coming along for fun. We tried to guess which exits the other would be at. I suppose where I stopped to smoke, she stopped to really cut loose. I never saw her body.

At a certain point I decided I would not talk about it anymore.

+

These days I tend bar at a place called Tell Someone. My boss thinks the name Tell Someone is pretty funny. During my interview, every time she said the name, it sounded like she was suggesting it, nudging it toward me as if to make sure I understood the joke. “So obviously I’d like you here, at Tell Someone, given your experience.” My experience was New Orleans and New York. I live now in New Athens, a small village in Illinois.

I have half-listened to different pieces of Tell Someone’s origin story. It always ends with, “And so, we had to call it Tell Someone.” It usually starts with, “Well, it’s sort of silly…”

There are two college students who drink here every day during the winter. They are as consistent as the drunken Santa statue that watches drinkers from its cold corner; as “Seven Crazy Nights,” our holiday drink that’s really just a shitty Seven & Seven with peppermint simple syrup; as Sadie’s Christmas Eve phone calls that detail things she thinks she’s seen, which I am expecting any day now.

At some point the students became chummy with my boss, so the three of them like to sit at a little table and talk. I once heard my boss complain about me to them. She said, “Look. I’m only going to hire a chick bartender if she meets one of two things. She’s either hot, or she’s talented. And she” (motioning to me subtly, but not enough) “is lucky she’s been around the block.”

One night I heard my boss talking about one of her daughter’s friends. She said this girl, another college student who I think was named Casey, had been coming home to Saint Louis, taking 44 from Tulsa. She’d been nervous because a state trooper tailed her for most of her drive, sometimes fading back and out of sight, then approaching again. More concerned with the state trooper, she had not noticed a white van passing her from time to time and, for just a few seconds, probably, coasting even with her until either speeding ahead or falling back. Eventually the van followed Casey for about ten miles, or so she’d be told later. Casey did not notice anything out of the ordinary, and she figured she would lose the state trooper and pull off at the next exit with a Starbucks, which she did.

In the parking lot of the Starbucks, Casey had not even left her car before the state trooper and two more patrol cars popped on their lights and surrounded the van, which had parked next to her. An officer knocked on Casey’s window and asked if she would exit her vehicle and come with him to a safer distance. She complied.

Eventually the patrolmen coerced two men out of the van. At this point details blur because I had to pour a line of shots for some floor workers, but the gist of the situation is that these guys had been on the radar for a while. They were human traffickers, and they drove around with technology not dissimilar to police cars. They took pictures of young women driving on interstates, uploaded them into their computer, and sold them to interested parties. Not the photographs. They preemptively sold women, sometimes to more than one man, accepting any and all offers. Apparently blurry pictures of Casey had already attracted four enthusiastic buyers. My boss and the students shook their heads and sipped their drinks, all three of them believing and disbelieving the horror. All the men in the van would have needed was Casey in the right spot, and away she would have went. One of the students said, “I could never have a daughter,” and my boss nodded and left the table.

Stories like this are becoming more and more common, and I think most of them ride the thin urban-legend-line. I believe Casey was run off the road by men hoping to kidnap and sell her. I believe they would have forced heroin upon Casey during her first year of slavery, would have nurtured a crooked dependence to keep her thirsty and her bones shriveled-feeling and goose-fleshy, and through this they’d keep her for life, which would be short and dark and confusing. I believe they probably had hundreds of pictures of women in their computer. Maybe four men had wanted her, maybe one, maybe none. I don’t believe my boss, who told the story with enthusiasm. I think she must have read this somewhere on the internet.

I would not be surprised if, one night, I awoke to red and blue lights surrounding my neighbor’s house where, perhaps, in the basement lived some chained up, skinny girl. The more you listen and the more you read, you learn this happens everywhere. Not just in countries that you probably imagine to be mostly covered in orange dirt, and not just at the island stops on cruises where ship-workers encourage you to only spend your time in popular tourist locations. Two blocks from my house, here in New Athens, a tavern called Coyote’s closed down barely a year ago. The owner’s wife, who was thought to be missing, had been found bound and gagged behind a secret door.

You can choose to believe me, but I shit you not: just like in cartoons, the door was a phony bookshelf that spun if pushed just right.

+

Speedy’s was too outwardly bland (sans cage) and much too close to a nicer-looking Shell Station to be considered a worthwhile stop and was for most of its life passed over despite Speedy Sal’s steady flow of new cage inhabitants. There were a solid five years in the late 70s into the early 80s when it was a semi-popular spot for people who found themselves both bored on 44 and in no particular rush. Speedy’s had two gas pumps and sold cigarettes (and occasionally alcohol) to minors. The building was brick, painted white, except for its baby blue top that had lawn chairs lined end-to-end. If you wanted, you could go up there and have a cigarette and take in the view: gravel lot; Shell Station across the road; Speedy Sal’s motorcycle  with a purple heart on the gas tank (a Harley that had been my sister’s—not the one on which she’d disappeared); a brown creek that fed into something, streaked with translucent, elongated gashes that rippled and moved with the robotic elegance of a pinsetter’s confident repetitions, and when the sun touched them shone silver and blinding; the tree-lined interstate with billboards like acne, some of them reminding drivers there was still enough time to TURN BACK and take a detour to wherever.

I liked to stand up on top of Speedy’s and look at the patches of road between cars. When I’d seen enough, I’d get on my bike and join the road and unfocus my eyes. It would start to look like the cars around me didn’t move at all, and the road just pulled us along. The vehicles merging into an exit looked like a pinball going down the wrong chute. I liked the trees that grew bent toward the billboards, and how they stretched south saying quiet goodbyes to Missouri.

Maybe, if I’d wanted to smoke a cigarette on the roof to see the things I liked to see, if I had knocked on the bathroom door to check on little Gus, things would have played out differently. But I didn’t, and Speedy Sal finally surrendered the six-pack to Sadie and she dug into her purse for cash. Words passed between them, then Sadie turned to look at me. Speedy Sal extended his neck upward and looked at me too—his shrunken gopher face positing: why are you here?

“Got a five?” Sadie said. She stamped out her cigarette on the counter.

I shrugged and dug into my pockets. I had a ten.

“Take this and tell Speedy to add a pack of Camels,” I said. Speedy Sal hated being called just Speedy. A small regret I’ll take to my grave is that I never asked my sister more about their sex life.

Sadie picked up my cigarettes and her six-pack. My sister had drunk Hamm’s, too, mostly as a way to spite Speedy Sal who called the brand “sugary piss water.”

“Wanna smoke? Think the kid’s taking a dump,” she said. Speedy Sal looked at me then looked away. I wasn’t sure if I had it in me to talk to him, so I went outside with Sadie. Speedy Sal shuffled around some cigarette packs and muttered something about the mail being late.

She hit my pack against the palm of her hand three times, opened it, and took out two cigarettes. She handed me one, lit it; she stuck one at the corner of her lip, lit it. She was beautiful in the way prom queens are pretty for one night. She was tired.

“Handling that pack like you own it,” I said.

“Sorry. Long day. Nice to—” she trailed off and looked at a pump where a guy was filling his pick-up. The back was loaded with fishing gear. She handed me the pack. “Nice to move at my own pace sometimes.”

“Travelling with a kid’s gotta be nuts.” I watched the fisherman look to the left, to the right, to the left.

“It’s just I had him so young.”

“Sure.”

“No idea why he has to pee so goddam much.”

Kids are crazy.”

“I don’t know who his father is.”

“Huh.”

“He better be going number two in there.”

We smoked and watched the fisherman. I wondered if all mothers, all parents, had to use language like “number two.” I heard the rattle of a chain and saw the raccoon looking at us from his cell. He looked so real and human in there, like he wanted something decent for once.

“It’s weird. All day I’ve felt like he’s been lying to me,” said Sadie. She glanced at Sal in the window.

“Your kid?” I thought back to the secret brownie he’d slipped to the raccoon.

“Yeah. Don’t know why. It’s just I wonder if this stopping at every gas station is some kind of sick prank. Kids pull pranks, you know. I’ve always heard kids who lie become smart.”

“I made up shit all the time as a kid,” I said, which was true. “When I was four, my sister’s dog ran away. Never saw it again—totally disappeared. It was her fault, I’m pretty sure. But I told all my parents it got killed. That someone ran it down in the street. A gruesome kind of thing.”

“Why?”

“Not sure. I think I just thought it was funny. Didn’t really want her getting in any trouble over losing it, either.”

“Did you end up pretty smart?” She was a mother, but she asked questions like a child.

“I never finished high school.”

“How about your sister? Was she smart?”

“She’s gone now.”

I noticed we had smoked quickly and that Sadie wasn’t sure what to say to me. I lit cigarettes for both of us and walked Sadie over to the cage. The sun was beating down on the amber sunscreen, but the raccoon looked fine, shaded in a honey glow.

“He keep animals out here all the time?” Sadie asked.

“Sort of gets his rocks off,” I said, recalling an hourglass-shaped snapping turtle Sal had named Junior.

“What do you think his name is?”

“Sal?”

“No, this little guy.”

“Does the devil have a dog in the bible?”

“My mother would know.”

“So would mine.”

The sad thing about the raccoon was he had figured out the cage. I could tell. Raccoons are smart. This little one, pacing like both a thinker and a hunched, heartbroken insomniac, knew how to escape. He must have identified that Speedy Sal kept his keys on one of his front belt loops; he eyed everyone’s waists as they passed by and practiced reaching out and grabbing. He knew certain cross-sections of bars were larger than others—some almost large enough for him to stick his head through. He knew how to be cute. He knew how to encourage offerings. He reached out to my feet and picked up a cigarette butt and ate it.

“His name’s Houdini,” I decided. The black around Houdini’s eyes was both watchful and weary. His hand gripped the bars again. His tiny, inkblot feet were one step away from tangling themselves in the chain. Something told me that was on purpose.

“No animal’s smart enough to get out of there,” Sadie said. She looked like she could be in middle school. I looked at her legs to make sure they weren’t stilts. She wore a simple, blue sundress. It looked like it was too tight. She had a speck on lipstick on her nose but I didn’t know how to tell her.

“So hey, your son smart enough to get out of that bathroom or what? You should see the view from the roof.”

Sadie looked at me like I’d called her son an invalid, then smiled, shook her head, and blew her smoke out quickly. She smiled at me like a kid sister and said she should check on him by now. Maybe he needed help with, you know.

I didn’t say bye. I was just happy to have gotten through a conversation with a single mom that didn’t involve the phrase, “Girls gotta look out for each other.” Houdini reached out to my shoes. He rubbed his horns. I heard Sadie’s shoes clopping, and Sal saying something. The sound of a mail slot squeaking shut.

I should have noticed, I should have noticed, but now I remember: pieces and sounds—

Sadie, knocking on the door, saying honey are you okay in there? The cigarettes had calmed her down. Houdini grabbed at my belt. And honey are you okay in there? Speedy Sal tapping his finger on the counter, through the window I could see him (but I didn’t notice, and now I remember) tapping while Sadie pulled on the handle and hey do you have a key to do this door or what she said, or what. And Sal saying of course of course and he was so eager and helpful and nice, and even I wanted to kiss his white teeth sometimes, and so helpful and let’s see just which one of these… the keys jingling. And had he not said let’s check on the little man, huh I would have always suspected him, but I looked through the window and not at the reflection, and Sadie Gus? and Sal he mighta crawled up this ladder— and why do you have a ladder in here when there could be kids in here you— I could still hear them because the AC was out and I had not even talked with Sal yet. I watched them through the window and let my cigarette butts fall to Houdini who ate them. I looked through the window not at it, and had I paid attention I might have seen it’s just the backdoor to the building, he might have run— something pulling away run where you asshole run to the fucking interstate are you kidding me you let my son— a truck pulling away and down the side roads that if he falls off the roof or runs into the interstate I’m going to, I’m gonna run alongside the hearse-colored 44 and pulling away fast If he’s on that roof I swear to god and easing on the curves but also slowing, waiting for a place to turn and disappear in a calm, clever hurry If he ran into the road like it had something to deliver.

+

I ended up in New Athens by following a farm road off the interstate and driving until I found a small place away from noise. I don’t think I’ve started my car since. I haven’t owned a motorcycle since 1999. I walk to the grocery store, to Tell Someone, to church. I walk everywhere. There is no difference between side and main roads, really.

Sadie always calls on Christmas Eve. We keep each other updated on our addresses, phone numbers, and emails, in case anything changes. I like to answer the phone with, “So, what do you know?” And I know what this triggers. I stay silent while Sadie tells me what she thinks she’s seen. Our one-sided phone calls aren’t dissimilar to my own interactions with my boss, who always struts into Tell Someone saying, “Well, whaddya know, Chris?” And I usually say, “Nothin’.”

I’m not full of stories.

One thing I know is 19 years after Gus’s disappearance Sadie claimed to have seen him for the first time. She had been shopping for groceries, for wine, and saw a man standing on the other end of the aisle. She said she couldn’t explain how she knew, but she knew, and they walked toward each other. She said he had come to look like his father, and she finally knew who it was, and that he also looked like her, and that he walked like an athlete.

Someone told me once the weird thing about having children is that they know you for their entire lives. Any parent has a life, a past life, where there are no children at all. There are distinct divides.

Sadie, 38 years old at the first sighting, had three: her first childless 14 years; her next 5 years with Gus; her next 19 years, an entire additional half, another whole life, without him. Whether you cut Sadie into halves or thirds, there’s an expanse of parental orphaness.

Sadie revised this story two years later, as I sat next to my little Christmas tree. It was the grocery store again. Sadie said Gus put his hand on the front of her cart and told her to stay up tonight. Watch the late shows. He’d be around, and they could talk. He then told her to take it easy on the boxed food and spend more time on the sides of the grocery store, where real things were. Then he walked away. Sadie wheeled her cart straight out of the store, and when the alarms rang she kept walking, and when the employees chased after her she let go of the handlebar and the cart rolled away, caught the angle of a decline in the parking lot, and toppled over. She sat in her car and locked the door.

Sadie stayed up. She sat with her back against her headboard and waited. She watched energetic comedians on late night shows. Gus knocked on her door at midnight.

She said he refused to come in. Gus told his mother he was doing okay, that she couldn’t or shouldn’t call the police, and he didn’t know why he was there or what he was doing but he needed her to know he was fine. Sadie claimed that a van was parked in the street, and she could not identify any features of the man at the wheel. He was a black outline. She noted Gus’s hair appeared to be bleached.

(Another version of Sadie’s story involves Gus appearing in her kitchen outright—sopping wet from a storm outside. He tells her all the same things, but this time there is a man outside the window, the black-outlined man from the van, perhaps, and he says nothing and does nothing but his presence is a threat. Gus says he is fine, but he is owned, and this is the way of things)

Sadie never related to me anything else that might have been said between them, though just days ago, on an oddly warm Christmas Eve, Sadie called me to report the finding of six photographs. She said she found them in her mailbox. One of them was Gus as a boy, lying in a dirty bed, looking into the camera like a confused model. The next showed an older Gus, a malnourished teenager, wearing athletic shorts with no shirt on and looking tired, wearing eyeliner, maybe, but the photo and room was full of shadows. A third showed Gus as he appeared to her in the grocery store. He was smoking a cigarette. A blanket covered him from the waist down. Sadie said he looked doped up.

She turned all of the pictures into the police and has yet to relate the content of the other three to me.

At this point, I suppose I half-believe her. If you dig around on the internet you can find stories like this. They are a dime a dozen. Children, usually girls, but sometimes boys, go missing, and years later their parents are either emailed or mailed photographs of their children dressed like prostitutes. Often, the senders and takers of these pictures will include the new names their children have adopted. Sometimes, the senders and takers of these pictures will include what their children do, and supposedly enjoy doing.

One exceptionally hideous case is of a girl who went missing on an interstate after she crashed her car. Her father is on record saying something along the lines of, “Some scumbag must have found her,” or something like that. Every year on the anniversary of her disappearance, a YouTube channel with ScumBag in its username uploads a video of a man looking into a webcam, laughing. It’s a croaking laugh. He’s bald and wears glasses, and he’s seated in the sort of cinderblock-walled, evil basement we all imagine guys like this hang out in. The laugh becomes a yell, then a satisfied growl. Then he smiles the type of smile that makes you look behind you, then it’s over.

This is true. You can watch these videos online.

I am sure Sadie saw Gus, or someone she thought was Gus, at some point. I don’t know if he went to her house. I don’t know if there was a van or a man inside. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt as far as recognition goes—she is his mother, and even though she hasn’t seen him since the day he disappeared, I’ll concede that she can recognize him as a twenty-something male. I think she stays awake most nights and sees her son’s face and child limbs in the shadows of her blue-lit bedroom. I won’t blame her for her yearly revisions of Gus sightings—my own stories have changed over time. I’ve just recently remembered that Sal’s teeth have been tobacco-stained since I first met him, and my memory of them being white is false. Like my memory of seeing my sister’s head under an eighteen-wheeler. Like my memory of Gus screaming.

I thought of Gus one night when I heard an animal die inside Tell Someone. Though it wasn’t an animal. Ten folks lined the bar, and ten more were scattered through the tables, and their phones and mine were resting in front of us, and all at once our devices screamed a bloody siren, and for a second all of us panicked. We checked our screens. AMBER ALERT. We read the vehicle. WHITE SEDAN. We looked out to parking lot. We looked back to our drinks.

I think of my sister when my phone does this—screams to me that someone has disappeared. She shares her name with the warning. I think of Gus, too, and Sadie, and how things might have gone differently for them. I think of all of us walking around, yelling Gus’s name. I think of how I had not realized summer was ending until that day, and the sun had begun to set and project upon us its dull fire.

I remember the police showing up and Sal shaking their hands, and Sal reaching for his keys out of habit as they walked to the front door, and Sal realizing his keys were gone. “Luckily I’ve got this here cinderblock, ha,” said Sal, nervous around authority. He and the officers looked around the store, to be sure of something. I’ve never suspected Sal, but I’ve never forgotten us driving to the grocery store one day to get things for my mother, and a mail truck passing by, and Sal saying, “Jesus, I could go my whole life without ever seeing another one of those things.” At the time I had assumed he was referencing another Shell Station that had popped up.

(I didn’t notice, but now I remember)

From the roof of Speedy’s I watched Sadie climb to the top of a chain-link fence that separated Speedy’s from the trees, and she gazed to the highway, and she and I both saw the one that may have had him. She called, Gus! and I looked where she did, and I saw it far away: a white box on wheels full of things that needed to be taken somewhere. Sadie leaned over the fence and the wind caught her dress and we all looked away as the backs of her upper thighs lit up, golden.

I heard a commotion in the store. I ran to the front of the roof and looked down, the amber sunscreen of the cage popped open and upward. Sal and the officers ran outside, and the officers were almost laughing themselves to the ground. Little Houdini soared across the parking lot with Sal’s keys grasped in his smart, mascara paws. Then I saw another: it sped by as Houdini found his freedom on the road—on its side the blue, sonic eagle—and had Houdini not taken a moment to look around and breathe he would have been hit and smeared along the scorching black of the acceleration ramp. The truck picked up speed and left our sight. Was there a boy inside?

(I didn’t notice, but now I remember)

I stood up there for so long as a useless lookout. There was Sadie, sitting in the gravel of the backlot, and the fisherman, caught up in something he hadn’t expected. There was Sal, and the cops, and all of us sometimes yelling Gus! There was the breeze, and summer ending, and cicadas calling to us in drawn, ugly unison as if in some collective and final warning. There was 44 and the people on it and their racket crying east to west. I remember thinking, “You could flip a coin and pick a direction, and either way you’d end up wrong.”

__

Shane Page is a writer from Springfield, Missouri. He likes hanging out with dogs and spending all of his money at the Thai restaurant across the street. His work has appeared in Hobart, The Molotov Cocktail, Occulum, and Bottlecap Press.