Hades by Candice Fox Page A

Hades had been forced to reprimand English for shutting Eric out of the staff parking shed and clipping him over the ear. Nobody told his boy where he could and couldn’t go. Nobody touched his son. Eric had no reason for wanting to hang around the parking shed, had never taken an interest in the place before. English had some kind of meat-head muscle car and was probably worried about it being scratched. Hades suspected Eric’s behavior was an attempt to piss English off. Eric seemed to have a special talent for understanding what people didn’t want him to do.
    When Greg Abbott knocked on his door two months in, Hades was falling asleep watching the news, his bare feet on the cluttered coffee table. It was after working hours. He let the book he had been reading to Eden before she went to bed slide off his belly and onto the couch.
    Hades put the hall lamp on and opened the door, throwing light on his guest and leaving his own face in shadow. Abbott was standing on the bottom step with a plastic shopping bag in his hand. He said nothing when Hades looked down at him.
    “It’s seven,” Hades said. Abbott, freckled and sun-bronzed about his muscled torso, nodded and chewed his lip in apprehension.
    “Have a chat?” the man asked.
    “It’s seven,” Hades repeated.
    “It’s important. It’s about Richard.”
    Hades let Abbott stand there squinting in the light a little longer, right to the edge of an uncomfortable silence. Then he turned and trudged back down the hall.
    Abbott closed the door. He took the chair nearest to it at the kitchen table, watching carefully as Hades went to the television and muted it. The old man sat in his customary chair and shifted the newspapers aside, clearing a space on the table. Abbott rifled in the shopping bag.
    Two weeks earlier, English had fallen ill suddenly, an asthma attack or something. It had happened in the shed while he was in his car. English had gunned the engine and slammed into the car in front of him, pushing it into the staff lockers, buckling them in two. The young man’s windscreen shattered. Hades hadn’t checked what had happened exactly. He didn’t care and had been too irritated about the ruined lockers to bother. They were new. He never bought anything new. Hades had assumed he’d hear about English from Abbott at some point, probably seeking a loan to cover the damages to the car—or, if he was cheeky enough, workers’ compensation. He hadn’t expected it to come at night.
    “What is this?” Hades asked, flicking his chin at the bag. “Late-night shopping?”
    Abbott took a shimmering handful and spread it on the table. Hades looked at the thin fragments of glass. He could see the bends and warps of molding in some of the pieces. A sharp bulge and a tiny nib on a flat surface, like the nipple of a glass doll, a little blackened by heat.
    “You know what this is?” Abbott asked.
    “A broken lightbulb.”
    “Two broken lightbulbs,” Abbott corrected. Hades felt the corner of his mouth tighten. Abbott was sitting there, across from him, motionless, expressionless, waiting for a reaction. Hades refused to give it. He folded his arms and began planning in his mind the violence he would enact if this stupid game continued. Abbott was a university type, he could see this now. They were always questioning and being open-minded and “thinking critically,” looking for ways to do things better. Letting people come to their own conclusions. Hades hated university types.
    “One of these lightbulbs, I reckon, was your average-sized household bulb.” Abbott sifted through the glass carefully with a finger, isolating what was obviously the rim of the larger bulb. “The other was a smaller one—tiny, in fact, the kind you might find in an oven. It was small enough to fit inside the larger one. When I found these fragments, the rims of the larger and the smaller bulbs were sealed off with masking tape.”
    “Fascinating.”
    Hades kept his eyes locked