tried to distinguish features in its face. Thick bubbles rose to the surface, hinting at the placement of an eye or nose, or popping with the sound of faintly parted lips.
Its right arm raised, a finger extended. It pointed at me.
Then the entire shadow burst, its image washing over me in a shower of black oil.
• • •
Heavy liquid poured over me. I tried to shake it off my hands, then pushed my fingers under my glasses to wipe syrupy blackness away from my eyes. An ashen sludge pressed against the corners of my mouth, threatening to force its way inside.
Dear God, what’s happening?
Then it was completely gone.
No thick, smothering liquid. Only a light sheen of nervous sweat on my forehead and at the back of my neck.
I still held the flashlight in my right hand, its beam dim but resilient. My hand was pink from where I’d held it beneath the hot water; the small scratches and needle pricks looked clean.
Perhaps I’d had some weird reaction to the hypodermics. A hallucination.
The shape in the road…I passed the weak light over the shadowy outline. It was still there, but flat against the ground and less definite in shape. Unthreatening. Except I was still too afraid to step next to it in the road. And my right arm trembled so much that I’d gripped it with my left hand to keep the flashlight steady.
My scratched wrist itched beneath the cuff, and I pushed the sleeve further up my arm. Again I saw that pinched sunburnt look to the skin, held too long under hot water.
The wrist was white where I’d gripped it. The impression was smaller than my hand, though, like a child had grabbed and twisted the sensitive skin.
Enough. It’s as if I was trying to work myself into another panic. My breaths came in heavy rasps, and I almost didn’t trust my strength to carry me back inside the house. I sat down on the curb, a safe distance from the shape in the road and a few feet from the row of garbage bags. Rotten odors from the opened bag lingered strongest near the mailbox. The wind hung still, but drifts of the smell still carried to where I sat.
I cupped my left hand over my nose and mouth, and my breaths washed warm over my palm in heavy exhalations. The sound echoed deep and frantic, and I concentrated on slowing the breaths, softening the nervous tremors.
As I tried to calm myself, my breathing grew more irregular. A rattle and gurgle rose in my throat, then a strange flapping rasp added a new, desperate rhythm. To shut out the noise, I pinched my eyes tight and held my breath.
The flapping rasp continued over the expected silence.
A heavy weight shifted in the garbage bag closest to me.
• • •
The bag bulged at the center. I aimed the flashlight, casting a white spotlight with an irregular yellow center, like a firefly. The light transformed slick plastic into a curved mirror that reflected the curb and street and trees behind me, my face distorted and open-mouthed in surprise.
But it wasn’t my face. A head was pressed against the bag from the inside. The fleshy tip of a nose strained against the bag, pushing the plastic outward in a small rounded cone. The flapping rasp scraped out from a taught oval stretched over the open mouth. Plastic whistled with each failed breath.
Someone inside the bag. Suffocating.
My reaction was instinctive. I didn’t think, How did that person get in there? Or devise a vague yet plausible sequence of events: some conflation of my previously-imagined mischievous children and mean-spirited teenagers, with the older boys stuffing a kid from the first group in the bag and sealing it up, that child (yes, the head was small, like a child’s, like—I didn’t dare tell myself—the head of the awful threatening shadow that rose from the road just moments before), that child unconscious and unmoving until a terrified, gasping awakening.
My only thought: I’ve got to get that kid out of there.
Its right arm raised, a finger extended. It pointed at me.
Then the entire shadow burst, its image washing over me in a shower of black oil.
• • •
Heavy liquid poured over me. I tried to shake it off my hands, then pushed my fingers under my glasses to wipe syrupy blackness away from my eyes. An ashen sludge pressed against the corners of my mouth, threatening to force its way inside.
Dear God, what’s happening?
Then it was completely gone.
No thick, smothering liquid. Only a light sheen of nervous sweat on my forehead and at the back of my neck.
I still held the flashlight in my right hand, its beam dim but resilient. My hand was pink from where I’d held it beneath the hot water; the small scratches and needle pricks looked clean.
Perhaps I’d had some weird reaction to the hypodermics. A hallucination.
The shape in the road…I passed the weak light over the shadowy outline. It was still there, but flat against the ground and less definite in shape. Unthreatening. Except I was still too afraid to step next to it in the road. And my right arm trembled so much that I’d gripped it with my left hand to keep the flashlight steady.
My scratched wrist itched beneath the cuff, and I pushed the sleeve further up my arm. Again I saw that pinched sunburnt look to the skin, held too long under hot water.
The wrist was white where I’d gripped it. The impression was smaller than my hand, though, like a child had grabbed and twisted the sensitive skin.
Enough. It’s as if I was trying to work myself into another panic. My breaths came in heavy rasps, and I almost didn’t trust my strength to carry me back inside the house. I sat down on the curb, a safe distance from the shape in the road and a few feet from the row of garbage bags. Rotten odors from the opened bag lingered strongest near the mailbox. The wind hung still, but drifts of the smell still carried to where I sat.
I cupped my left hand over my nose and mouth, and my breaths washed warm over my palm in heavy exhalations. The sound echoed deep and frantic, and I concentrated on slowing the breaths, softening the nervous tremors.
As I tried to calm myself, my breathing grew more irregular. A rattle and gurgle rose in my throat, then a strange flapping rasp added a new, desperate rhythm. To shut out the noise, I pinched my eyes tight and held my breath.
The flapping rasp continued over the expected silence.
A heavy weight shifted in the garbage bag closest to me.
• • •
The bag bulged at the center. I aimed the flashlight, casting a white spotlight with an irregular yellow center, like a firefly. The light transformed slick plastic into a curved mirror that reflected the curb and street and trees behind me, my face distorted and open-mouthed in surprise.
But it wasn’t my face. A head was pressed against the bag from the inside. The fleshy tip of a nose strained against the bag, pushing the plastic outward in a small rounded cone. The flapping rasp scraped out from a taught oval stretched over the open mouth. Plastic whistled with each failed breath.
Someone inside the bag. Suffocating.
My reaction was instinctive. I didn’t think, How did that person get in there? Or devise a vague yet plausible sequence of events: some conflation of my previously-imagined mischievous children and mean-spirited teenagers, with the older boys stuffing a kid from the first group in the bag and sealing it up, that child (yes, the head was small, like a child’s, like—I didn’t dare tell myself—the head of the awful threatening shadow that rose from the road just moments before), that child unconscious and unmoving until a terrified, gasping awakening.
My only thought: I’ve got to get that kid out of there.
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