Shining Sea by Anne Korkeakivi Page B

going to leave without you,” he says. “I was looking for you.”
    “Yeah,” she says.
    “A lot of people here. More than thirty thousand.”
    “Yeah. A lot more. Ten times more.” She smiles and slugs him. “Pretty far out.”
    He opens the flap of his blanket, and she squeezes under it. They lie there, looking at the stars, listening to the faraway sound of music.
    “Bet your brother Luke wishes he were here,” she says.
    Maybe Luke is here. Who knows? “There’s Sagittarius,” he says.
    She searches the sky. “You’re sure?”
    “Yes.” He uses a finger to trace the archer for her. “See? There’s his centaur body. There’s his shield. There’s his lifted arm.”
    Molly pulls the filthy blanket further up over her, claiming most of it. She tucks her chin in. In the dark, she looks even more like Aunt Jeanne than usual—long-faced, coconut-haired. “You know what I’ve always thought was kind of strange?”
    “What?”
    She giggles. “How can there only be male centaurs? I mean, wouldn’t there have to be female centaurs, too? So there would be, you know, new centaurs?”
    He remembers the girl with sunspot eyes. He thought getting it on with a girl would be the ultimate trap, but it turned out to be the opposite. For a brief minute—he winces; a very brief moment, the first time around—he disappeared entirely. Now he wants to do it again and again. He wants to find that girl. He wants to find all the girls. All the Joans. All the Lisas. He wants to disappear over and over again into them. They won’t own him. They will free him.
    “We’ll have to ask your mom, the classics professor, to explain the reproductive lives of centaurs,” he says.
    Their laughter mixes with the sweet air and fades away. Molly props herself up on one elbow and looks at him. “Are you going to be a hippie now?”
    “I already am a hippie.”
    “Seriously.”
    “Christ, Molly. No. Probably what I’m going to be is a shaved-headed soldier and then a shaved-headed corpse.”
    She sits all the way up. “Don’t say that, Francis. That’s just stupid.”
    “Well.”
    “Well, nothing.” She throws the blanket off. “Hey, this is a downer. Come on, let’s go back and listen to some music.”
    “No. I dunno.”
    “Eugene’s waiting for us.”
    “You know where he is?”
    “Of course I do, silly. You’re the one who got lost. Not us.” She kicks him.
    He breathes in the night air. Hanging low to the west in the sky is the string of stars that make up the constellation Pisces.
    He sits up. “Found.”
    Molly slides off the hood of the car, extending a hand to him in the semidarkness. “You’ll be okay, Francis,” she says. “Eugene and I will hold on to you.”
    He takes her hand. The peace it gives him won’t last. It can’t last. But for now, it will have to be enough.

Flu Season / February 9–11, 1972
Barbara
    S WIRLS OF BLUE AND pink and pale yellow, like a melted Bomb Pop, spread out over Squaw Peak toward the north. Outside the library’s large glass windows, random palms blacken against the sky. Toward the downtown are the dark silhouettes of Phoenix’s three or four tall buildings, and then nothing, the city fading out into endless desert, flat, flat, and more flat.
    “Barbara,” the librarian whispers, beckoning from the front desk. “Would you mind? I have to…”
    She shelves the last book on her rolling cart and slips behind the circulation desk. It’s almost closing time; probably no one will come in. But maybe someone will still come in. Or one of the few people left in the library will have a book to check out. There’s the stamp—for a moment or two, she’ll be the same as a real librarian, not a once-a-week volunteer shelving books, taping book covers, watering plants. Not just a transplanted housewife desperate to find something to do. With the Mexican girl whom Ronnie insisted she hire to clean the house and no one left at home but Sissy, her life is so easy now.