nights she has so far spent beneath porches and in barns, truck beds, old campers.
She can smell the mess in the bathroom before she steps into the dark cave, barely able to make out the dried fecal matter muddying the toilet. Someone has destroyed the mirror, and the thousands of shards glimmer faintly from the floor. She closes the door and wanders around the room again and shrugs off her backpack and decides to call this home for a little while at least.
She smells like herself. That’s what her father used to say after a long day of work, lifting his arm, sniffing: “I smell like myself.” She has washed daily in rivers, in rest-stop and convenience store bathrooms, but her clothes feel as oily as a second skin. And her wrist. The wrappings stink like congealed grease at the bottom of a pan after frying bacon. She continues to wrap more and more tape around it, sealing the tatters, creating a fat silver mitten. She has swallowed her way through a bottle of ibuprofen, and though the pain has ebbed, she gets a fresh jolt now and then when she bangs her arm against something.
She has learned to do everything with one hand—eating, tying her shoes, unbuttoning her pants—her other hand uselessly tucked into her coat pocket. She tries to concentrate on the letter, to break its code, but after all this time without success, her mind wanders easily. She finds herself zoned out and staring at the wall, thinking about how much she misses her phone, how she once made a birdhouse from a dried and hollowed gourd, how one September a cold front blew through northern Wisconsin and dropped the temperature into the single digits, and when she and her parents drove to Loon Lake and clambered out on the ice and augered holes and arranged their tip-ups, the ice was so clear they could see the walleye and smallmouth and sunfish whirling beneath their boots.
She knows the cold is coming. Severe cold that will blacken fingers and make teeth chatter so violently they shatter. The weathermen love to talk about Fargo, a place where you can hurl a glass of water into the air and watch it vanish, leave out a banana overnight and use it to hammer a nail into a plank of wood.
She can’t stay here long. Every day she climbs out the window of the Seahorse Inn and wanders the town—and every day the grass grows browner, the tree branches grow barer, until they appear skinned, their leaves clattering along the streets. She has bought a black knit cap from Walmart to fight the deepening chill. Her mind circles around the letter as her body circles stores and neighborhoods, and more than once her steps slow, nearly stop, as if a hard wind is trying to blow her back the way she came.
But what if she does go home? What waits for her there? She imagines walking through her darkened house, fingering the bullet holes in the walls, stepping around the puddles of blood dried into the linoleum. She imagines opening closets full of clothes no one will ever wear, bringing her parents’ pillows to her face to smell them, finding their hairs curled up in a brush.
Or not. Maybe they aren’t dead. Maybe they were only injured. Maybe the semiautomatics were shot in warning, into the ceiling, chunks of drywall snowing around them. Maybe, if she found a pay phone and dialed 911 and gave herself up, maybe then she would see them, as soon as tomorrow. They would clutch each other in a holding area, tiles white and lit with fluorescent bulbs, the three of them laughing and crying with relief at the mix-up—because they hadn’t done anything. She hadn’t done anything. Right?
Or she could visit her nana. In the Sleepy Hollow Assisted Living Center. The Tall Man wouldn’t have bothered her, with one side of her face appearing melted, her words a mushy slur. And though the two of them had never gotten along, she was family—there was comfort in that—and maybe Nana knew something. Claire imagines the curl of a beckoning finger as the old woman leaned
She can smell the mess in the bathroom before she steps into the dark cave, barely able to make out the dried fecal matter muddying the toilet. Someone has destroyed the mirror, and the thousands of shards glimmer faintly from the floor. She closes the door and wanders around the room again and shrugs off her backpack and decides to call this home for a little while at least.
She smells like herself. That’s what her father used to say after a long day of work, lifting his arm, sniffing: “I smell like myself.” She has washed daily in rivers, in rest-stop and convenience store bathrooms, but her clothes feel as oily as a second skin. And her wrist. The wrappings stink like congealed grease at the bottom of a pan after frying bacon. She continues to wrap more and more tape around it, sealing the tatters, creating a fat silver mitten. She has swallowed her way through a bottle of ibuprofen, and though the pain has ebbed, she gets a fresh jolt now and then when she bangs her arm against something.
She has learned to do everything with one hand—eating, tying her shoes, unbuttoning her pants—her other hand uselessly tucked into her coat pocket. She tries to concentrate on the letter, to break its code, but after all this time without success, her mind wanders easily. She finds herself zoned out and staring at the wall, thinking about how much she misses her phone, how she once made a birdhouse from a dried and hollowed gourd, how one September a cold front blew through northern Wisconsin and dropped the temperature into the single digits, and when she and her parents drove to Loon Lake and clambered out on the ice and augered holes and arranged their tip-ups, the ice was so clear they could see the walleye and smallmouth and sunfish whirling beneath their boots.
She knows the cold is coming. Severe cold that will blacken fingers and make teeth chatter so violently they shatter. The weathermen love to talk about Fargo, a place where you can hurl a glass of water into the air and watch it vanish, leave out a banana overnight and use it to hammer a nail into a plank of wood.
She can’t stay here long. Every day she climbs out the window of the Seahorse Inn and wanders the town—and every day the grass grows browner, the tree branches grow barer, until they appear skinned, their leaves clattering along the streets. She has bought a black knit cap from Walmart to fight the deepening chill. Her mind circles around the letter as her body circles stores and neighborhoods, and more than once her steps slow, nearly stop, as if a hard wind is trying to blow her back the way she came.
But what if she does go home? What waits for her there? She imagines walking through her darkened house, fingering the bullet holes in the walls, stepping around the puddles of blood dried into the linoleum. She imagines opening closets full of clothes no one will ever wear, bringing her parents’ pillows to her face to smell them, finding their hairs curled up in a brush.
Or not. Maybe they aren’t dead. Maybe they were only injured. Maybe the semiautomatics were shot in warning, into the ceiling, chunks of drywall snowing around them. Maybe, if she found a pay phone and dialed 911 and gave herself up, maybe then she would see them, as soon as tomorrow. They would clutch each other in a holding area, tiles white and lit with fluorescent bulbs, the three of them laughing and crying with relief at the mix-up—because they hadn’t done anything. She hadn’t done anything. Right?
Or she could visit her nana. In the Sleepy Hollow Assisted Living Center. The Tall Man wouldn’t have bothered her, with one side of her face appearing melted, her words a mushy slur. And though the two of them had never gotten along, she was family—there was comfort in that—and maybe Nana knew something. Claire imagines the curl of a beckoning finger as the old woman leaned
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