After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones

bloodless, strangled.
    “Honey?” his mom asks through the bathroom door. “Are you crying?”
    Dick doesn’t answer.
    At lunch he cuts school, heads back to the Goodwill. Wanders the racks.
    There’s no more factory seconds. The hoodie was the only one.
    He scopes the vases and cookware aisle, just hiding mostly, then lowers his hand to a fork with a bamboo handle.
    Before he can stop himself, it’s his. Gone.
    This is closing the circle, he tells himself.
    He says it again that afternoon, eating early lasagna in his room with the bamboo fork. That this is it, that it’s over.
    It even sounds like a lie to him.
     
    •
     
    At real dinner later that night Dick’s mom stabs her hand across the table, to flick Dick’s hood back.
    This results in the usual amount of yelling and grounding and spaghetti floating through the air.
    Thoroughly grounded, Dick sits in his room the next two days—school, home; school, home—finally reaches a hand up to the zipper at his throat, tugs down.
    He’s not surprised that the teeth are jammed into each other.
    It’s going to take some speed to pull them apart. Some momentum.
    Reverse screw, captain. We’re rising, coming up for air.
    Dick smiles, jerks the zipper up, and, instead of sticking, it’s like it’s been waiting for him to do just that: it bites him in the neck.
    In the mirror nearly covered with band stickers, Dick can see the slow trickle of blood feeling down along the zipper’s thousand-switchback path. And then he gets involved peeling an oval sticker of a band that’s on the radio too much now.
    When he comes back to his red zipper, it’s not red anymore.
    Surprise, surprise.
     
    •
     
    Because grounding Dick from work would be like punishing Sammy, too—this is actually Dick’s argument, for which he does immediate mental penance, fifty lashes to the cerebellum, thank you, sir—Dick’s mom lets him take the Corolla in through the rain.
    The kitchen smells like vanilla. The alcohol in it real and pungent.
    Gloria watches Dick all the way out the door. Dick watches her back, wishes her well; she’ll be the first taste-tester of the afternoon, will have to gauge what’s in her mouth against their mom’s hopes, will have to either choke down slice after slice to the tune of network gameshows or spend the evening in her room, for being a little liar.
    Dick knows.
    The Corolla’s a stick, and the tires keep chirping on the wet asphalt with first gear, at least the way Dick does it.
     
    •
     
    Because it’s just a Wednesday, Dick’s the only one on duty.
    But there’s a mystery to be solved, too.
    Evidently.
    Sammy strolls through the automatic doors in his old man raincoat, shakes the mist off his umbrella and asks Money-Order Rhonda if he can deposit this with her?
    “Customer’s always right,” she tells him, taking the umbrella by the handle.
    It’s their usual disgusting thing. Dick would call it flirting, except it’s the kind between a grandfather and his step-granddaughter, something creepy like that.
    And then Sammy’s whistling up the aisles, just another shopper.
    And of course—just one register open—soon enough Dick’s standing alongside Tamara as she pop-pops her gum and chats Sammy up.
    What comes down the Black Belt of Doom, too: Dick knows immediately that this is a sting operation.
    It’s cigarettes from Sammy’s own pocket, already documented somehow (receipts, photographs, special marks on the wrappers), it’s little corn-stabbers, it’s turkey thermometers that already look like a joke happening. It’s gum and a USB adapter and every other small, easy-to-miss thing Sammy could find that wouldn’t fall through the bottom of his basket.
    Dick nods about each of them, processes them past, into their separate bags (perishable, non-, household, automotive, office), and the only time—he’s promised himself, after all, knows exactly what Sammy’s doing—he doesn’t feel the item fill its space in the bag,