Bad Glass

I still had Taylor’s flashlight, and I watched with growing concern as she staggered back and forth in its light, swaying from side to side in the dark hallway. Maybe it was just her obscured vision that was throwing her off balance—she refused to move her hand, keeping it steepled across her face—but probably not. It’s all emotion, I thought. The sight of Weasel’s fingers had hit her hard; it had knocked her punch-drunk.

I wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t know how. My fingers itched to pull her close, but I held them back, remembering her fear of contact. I ended up making some bland, soothing sounds at the back of my throat, and then I muttered something, just some stupid comforting words—I’m not sure what—hoping I might stumble across some magical combination that would set her mind at ease. But Taylor didn’t respond. She let out a deep-throated sob and shouldered her way through the stairwell door.

I felt absolutely useless. I felt like a ghost, following along in her wake, unable to make any real impact on the world. Unable to touch her, unable to do anything but watch as she tore herself apart.

She led me up the dark stairwell, across a new bridge on the other side of the building, and then back down to the street. There were no guards at this entrance. It was all the way up at the north end of the block, and the street here was silent and empty.

Taylor collapsed against the nearest wall, just outside the Homestead’s entrance. She pressed her hands flat against its surface and lowered her head, resting her cheek against the dirty brick.

“Taylor—” I said.

“No, Dean,” she whispered, shaking her head slightly. “Don’t say a fucking word. I can’t hear it.”

She put her back against the wall and slid down to the sidewalk. After a couple of moments just sitting there, frozen, she lifted her butt off the ground and reached back, struggling to pull something from the waistband of her pants. With a trembling hand, she produced one of Weasel’s notebooks. The ratty black-and-white notebook had been folded down the middle. The cover was creased and stained, painted brown with dirt and dried liquid. The upper right-hand corner had been torn back like a scraped tag of skin, still attached to the book by a precarious tongue of cardboard.

Taylor flipped back the cover and started to read.

She kept her head down. Her face was buried in the book for nearly ten minutes. Then her shoulders started to shake, and the notebook fell out of her suddenly limp hands.

There were tears trickling down her cheeks, but I only got to see them for a couple of seconds before she once again buried her face in her palms.

I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it once again, remembering her request: Don’t say a fucking word. I can’t hear it. Looking at her, I knew that that instruction still stood.

So I left her alone. I picked up Weasel’s notebook, flipped to the first page, and started to read his story.

The last page was gone. It had been torn from the book, the final entry cut short, severed midsentence. All that remained was a ragged strip of lined paper that still clung to the binding.

But I knew how the story ended. With fingers sticking out of smooth concrete.

As soon as I reached the end, Taylor pulled the book from my hands and got to her feet. “I did this,” she mumbled, her frantic eyes darting back and forth. “I did this to him.” And before I could stop her, she ran away, heading toward Riverfront Park.

Object. A skateboard:

It is an oblong piece of wood, about three feet long and caked in mud. One sloped end has been shattered. The layers of pressed maple have come apart, splintering into jagged, weather-darkened fragments. There’s a crack in the middle of its length; it looks like a jagged rictus, reaching from one edge of the skateboard halfway to the other.

The mud is thick, but there’s an image visible on the board’s bottom side, peeking out through the dried and flaking dirt. Just parts and portions: a beatific face, wings in flight. White lines on a blue and black background, with starbursts of yellow—the Milky Way—glowing in the distance.

The skateboard is turned up on its back. Its wheels are still spinning.

I didn’t find Taylor in the park.

The park had changed in the last couple of days. Maybe it was just the snow and the ensuing melt, but it seemed much more desolate now, quiet and still. Like an animal holding its breath, or, maybe, like an animal that’s no longer got any breath left to hold. The trees had lost their last leaves. Lush branches had transformed into skeletal limbs, with sharp fingers reaching up to scratch a painfully blue sky, and the ground beneath was carpeted in a thick layer of decaying brown mulch. And where there weren’t any trees, there was dead grass, vast stretches of wild straw pressed flat against the ground. There was no longer even a hint of green, just sickly, jaundiced yellow.