The Donzerly Light by Ryne Douglas Pearson Page B

Jay wondered in spite of his efforts to not. What exactly was this all about?
    The man emerged finally from his silent consideration of the exchange and asked. “Have you ever suffered a head injury, Grady?”
    “What does that have to do with anything?”
    Mr. Wright’s blue stare flushed instantly hot. “Answer the damn question!”
    “No,” Jay said, then almost immediately he reconsidered his reply and reached up, his cuffed hands in tandem, and touched the fine ridge of scar tissue beneath his hairline just above his left temple.
    “What?” Mr. Wright asked, seeing this.
    “I got cut,” Jay said, thinking ‘just a scratch’. Flying glass. A few stitches. Good as new. Just a band aid over the spot had showed at the funeral. “In an accident.”
    “The car accident? When your parents were killed?”
    Jay nodded. A few stitches had fixed him right up, and he remembered dreaming back then that the doctors had just stitched up his parents, and that his mother had come into his room with her head sewn back on like some Frankenstein monster and her teeth put jaggedly back in place by big, shiny bolts that glinted savagely when she smiled. He’d had that dream for a while, and sometimes one where his father would be walking in from the field, fire licking skyward from him in great ribbons of black and orange flame, the smoke from the inferno rising and coalescing into puffs that became shapes that became coal black birds with orange eyes that fluttered about the foul air above him, screaming as though inside they were ablaze.
    And then the dreams had gone. That fall they had gone. School had come, Carrie had come, and the dreams had gone. Life moved on.
    “Just cut?”
    The answer took a few seconds in coming. “Yes.”
    “No concussion?”
    Jay didn’t answer directly, instead glancing at the file that supposedly held his life in paper form. “I thought you had everything about me in there, such as medical records?”
    “Everything isn’t known at once,” Mr. Wright told him. “That’s partly why you’re still talking.”
    Threat? Reminder? Carrot, maybe? Did it matter which his captor’s words were? Jay was talking, after all, and it hadn’t killed him. A few mental rivets were hissing, threatening to pop, but all was holding for now.
    But, then, he’d hardly told a thing yet. Just a story. A fairy tale, some might say. A tale of bright and sunny times.
    But times changed, Jay knew. How would the rivets do when he got to that part. A part not so far off, now.
    “Concussion, Grady?” Mr. Wright asked once more.
    Jay looked at him. He’d come this far. He could go on. Would go on. And from the odd paths of his captor’s questions, striking this way and that way like the spastic needle of a compass at the north pole, he knew he would have to lead the way. “What do you think, some whack on the head gave this thing to me? Well, it didn’t.”
    “You sound like you know how you got it.”
    “I know exactly how I got it.”
    “How?”
    “I was leaving work on Friday,” Jay began.
    “Day five of your...streak?”
    Streaks end, Jay thought. Nightmares could come back, and back, and back again. “Right. Anyway, it was like any other Friday. I was walking to the subway like I always did, was going to meet the guys at Buffalo Kabuki’s like almost every Friday. Except that night they wanted to drink it up, you know. Celebrate my sudden success. Fine with me. I was starting to get into it. Starting to like my new little gift, and besides, I wanted to see that waitress again because that damn name of hers was still bugging me.”
    “Irrelevant shit?” Mr. Wright prompted.
    “It turned out not to be,” Jay said soberly. “You see, I was thinking about her like crazy the last few hours of work, and when I was walking down the street just outside the office I was racking my brain— What is her name? What iiiiis it? Walking and asking myself that, and then...” Jay drifted back, stepping into