After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones Page B

port hole in the windshield to see from but realizes at the last moment that that would mean looking at his right hand. So he uses his left, and, instead of a rubbed-clean hole—the defroster sucks—he writes his name backwards, so it’ll be readable from the front: D R A H C I R.
    No idea why he never thought of that till just this moment.
    Or, like he’s been saving it for now, yeah.
    Like clockwork, then, Sammy ambles out into the night, leaning back to stretch his back, both his hands on his hips.
    When he comes down from that stretch, he sees it, what Dick’s left: the turquoise and silver lighter.
    Just standing there erect on the shiny blacktop.
    Sammy cocks his head, takes a careful step forward, then another step, and Dick lowers his—not his hand, but the sleeve, he watches as the long sleeve of the hoodie swallows that five-speed little shifter, deep throating it.
    And—more clockwork—the front tires chirp their warning just as Sammy’s leaning down for this impossible thing, this lighter, and, because he’s old, instead of standing all the way to take the Corolla’s impact, he only turns his face to the bright, bright headlights, his shadow thrown so far behind him. Almost as far as he’s about to fly.
    Dick smiles, but it’s so deep in the darkness of his hood that Sammy never sees it.
     

 

But of course one day our father needed something flat and disposable to mix some JB Weld putty on, so he cut down into it with his pocket knife, just hacking a rough square from the side, and I admit that, one bored afternoon, I probably decorated one of the cut-out handles with the kitchen scissors. Nothing regular or patterned, just uneven little triangles snipped here and there. I was imagining if the cardboard were steel, then those points I was leaving would be sharp, would de-finger whoever reached down for a grip, would make the side of the box into a shark mouth.
    Any day it was taking its fatal trip to the curb, I mean, and it would have that week if Mom hadn’t ditched a load of socks in it then not got around to folding them until after trash day. But the world, it always keeps turning, doesn’t it? She got around to the socks, and of course at some point in there we tried to trap the cat under the box (fail), tried to capture a bird in the backyard (partial success), then finally, perhaps overestimating its reliability, we tried using it as a stool (crunch). So we stapled it back together as well as we could, with the staple gun we’d been trying to reach in the first place.
    That was what did it, too, we think.
    We didn’t get the inner flaps lined up with the sides of the box like they had been, so the box’s dimensions were off a hair, and it wasn’t quite square anymore.
    Big deal, right?
    It was just a box, and we got the stapler back up in its cabinet, and nobody knew anything.
    The next morning, though, our dad’s cereal bowl woke us, by breaking on the kitchen floor.
    By the time we got there, we understood why he’d let his cereal go like that: the inside of the box was crawling with spiders. It was writhing with them, hissing with them, boiling with them.
    My mom caught our father’s eye and our father just shrugged.
    I smiled.
    With a shovel, we guided the box across the floor, out the nervous bump the sliding door was, and tipped it off the back porch. The spiders didn’t explode away from the box, but they didn’t cling, either. They just ambled off on their own time, back to their dark places.
    “The wax,” my mom decided. It had aged to some state of tastiness the spiders couldn’t resist.
    Maybe.
    The next morning, it was just a box. Our father stood at the sliding door and ate his cereal and watched it lay there on its side, harmless at the edge of the porch, the sun breaking over the back fence.
    Later that day, Mom not watching, we crawled out to the box on fingertips and toes, smelled it. It was just cardboard, a bit damp, its top side sagging in a touch now. We