Richmond Noir by Andrew Blossom Read Free Book Online Page A

snapshot goes off, and there you stay. I’m seventy-seven years old now, but inside I’m just fourteen. You, I can tell, you’re still nine. You still hurt.”
    He rose to take a step toward her.
    She stopped him with an open hand. Her thin white fingers looked like pieces of chalk. “I don’t know who you are.”
    “I think you do.”
    “I don’t. Anyway, why would that be a concern? I’m blind. No court is ever going to let me be a witness.”
    He stood rooted, halfway to her in the room.
    “I can’t help you,” she said.
    These words condemned him.
    “I can’t help myself.”
    Mrs. Wilcox’s hands flew from her sides, a familiar flapping gesture from long ago, for a wrong answer.
    “Well, that’s downright ignorant, and disappointing to hear. I clearly did let you down, if that’s where your life has wound up on you. Can’t help yourself. What kind of pitiful fool did you grow into?”
    Mrs. Wilcox pushed forward, collapsing the lounger into a regular chair. She put her bare feet down and rose, steady and spiteful.
    “Let me be plain about this. Smack me around, if it soothes you. But you, young man, have to take care of your problems yourself, instead of dragging them in your third grade teacher’s back door. Aside from the obvious illegality, this is farcical and not worthy of you.”
    He followed her with the flashlight, illuminating her way without considering that she did not need it. She stepped with her gray head high, back to her bedroom. She did not close the door between them. The bed springs creaked when she lay down.
    She announced, “I am going back to bed.”
    Carl cut off the flashlight. His need and his ache swelled.
    He felt his way to the lounger. He sat on the warmed upholstery and leaned back, lifting his legs. In the blackness he sat like this, listening to her breathe in the next room. Little by little, his eyes adjusted to seeing nothing.
    Across the street, children continued to laugh. A ball hit the chain-link backstop behind home plate. A boy called for it to be thrown again. Moments later, a wooden bat struck solidly. Carl used to do this with his buddies, thrilling to the peril of trying to hit and catch a baseball in the dark. He cringed in his memory, unable to see the ball out there in the night, falling somewhere.
    “Tell them,” Mrs. Wilcox called from the bedroom, “to go home. It’s too late for that nonsense. Someone could get injured.”
    He rose from the recliner to do as she instructed. He walked out her door to the field. High above, a jet streaked home to the airport, lights at the extreme of each wing like falling stars. Sandston hummed to window units, cooling behind closed doors and windows. These kids on the ball field broke that pact which Sandston made with itself, to stay quiet, and, in that way, stay.
    “Y’all need to go home,” he announced to five boys.
    The one batting answered: “Who says?”
    “The lady across the street.”
    “Who’s she?”
    “A teacher.”
    This seemed enough, and they quit.
    Carl mounted the bleachers to watch the boys shuffle off. He sat for another ten minutes to guard against their return. Years back, if he’d been one of those kids, he’d go directly home down Union Avenue after being told by an adult. He recalled his mother, who kept brownies in a tin on top of the refrigerator, or German chocolate cake slices in wax paper. His father, shutting the front door with a loud click after struggling all day with high blood pressure and passengers’ bags. His grandfather, Lucky Strike on his lips, gazing like a green-faced gypsy into the sweeping screen. They all fought hard over this land, though not in blue or gray, and without streets named after them. Mrs. Wilcox will depart too, from this town out by the airport. Carl considered staying.
    He climbed down from the stands to cross the street before she locked him out and he had to go in again through the back door.

GAIA
    BY M INA B EVERLY
    Providence Park
    L