Carry the One by Carol Anshaw Page A

woman. Alice could see that Jean was getting antsy. Her presence at these actions was in part due to her social concerns, in part a way of letting off steam. She was basically a hooligan with a conscience. If she didn’t have a cause, she’d be out robbing banks.
    “What I’d like to see right about now is some police presence.” Alice looked around for uniforms. “This goon squad is a little too fired up.” The pro-life women, as always, had distant gazes and wore pale-print dresses like farm wives. They chanted “Baby-killers. Baby-killers.” And “God loves the little children.”
    “He might not be all that crazy about you, though,” Jean clipped the woman. “Just last night, Jesus came to me in a dream and he said, ‘Like I want to spend all eternity with these morons.’”
    Lenore got in the way of a brawl starting up. “Ladies? Let’s move now .”
    The volunteers—they were ten in number this morning, a good-size crew—locked arms in a scrum around the skittish woman and made a slow, rolling charge toward the clinic door. They’d done this dozens of times. By now they were very efficient. Jean led the way as they approached the door of the clinic.
    Alice said to Carmen, “Actually—”
    The flare came in from the right, whistling and then, when it was just grazing Carmen’s right ear, it blossomed with a crackling report into a cloud of liquid, orange-red smoke. Carmen slapped a hand against the side of her head, and bent forward, then folded to the ground. What came out of her was not a human cry, just purewounded animal. And it kept on going. Alice went down next to her and pried Carmen’s hand off the ear, which was blackened and in great part missing; what was left was smoking like a piece of bacon, also releasing a fast stream of blood.
    “Oh God. Oh Jesus, come on,” Alice said as she lifted her up and started pushing their way back out of the crowd. Using a counterintuitive circuit of logic, she got Carmen as fast as possible away from the medical clinic and toward the first police car she saw. What was going through her head as she ran with Carmen’s arm over her shoulder, her own hand now holding in place what was left of Carmen’s ear, was fear for her of course, but also shock that her sister had turned out to be vulnerable after all.

teardrop
    Nick pulled Olivia’s arm over his shoulder as she stood. She had stubbed her toe on an unambitious hike they took that morning. He set her into the side opening of the Teardrop.
    “I know it’s a little early to hit the hay, but the outdoors wears me out.” She took the mug of cowboy coffee he handed her. Her nightcap. Caffeine was nothing to her. After learning to sleep through prison nights, nothing could keep her awake. She gave him a pinch under his ribs. Olivia dispensed affection in athletic gestures—arm punches, noogies, little flicks of a damp towel in the bathroom—as though they were teammates rather than husband and wife.
    “I’m just going to hang out up here,” he said as he hoisted himself past her, up onto the roof of the trailer. “Like Snoopy.” He loved this—lying on top of the camper, looking through his very old Nikon binoculars, the ridges on the focus wheel nearly worn away from a million rubs of his forefinger. He could watch the lazy way he did when he first noticed stars, before he saw them up close through a Newtonian reflector, or read them by their radio waves, before he knew their chemical composition, the weight and age of their gases, the rate at which they were burning themselves up—back when they still held a blinky mystery.
    He read the heavens like a worn page of a favorite book. He picked out constellations of the summer northern sky—Scorpius, Hercules with its brilliant star Vega, the harder-to-find Corona Borealis. Arcturus, a showman star, burning its heart out. And even though he knew better, knew that what he saw was still roiling and burning and exploding and being born, also