Full dark,no stars

And maybe she didn’t need to leave the pipe the way she’d gone in. It was a culvert, it would go all the way under the road, and since she could feel water running under her, it wasn’t blocked. She could crawl the length of it and look out into the deserted store’s parking lot. Make sure his old truck was gone. She still wouldn’t be safe if there was an accomplice, but Tess felt sure, deep down where her rational mind had gone to hide, that there was no accomplice. An accomplice would have insisted on taking his turn at her. Besides, giants worked alone.

And if he is gone? What then?

She didn’t know. She couldn’t imagine her life after her afternoon in the deserted store and her evening in the pipe with rotting leaves smooshed up into the hollow of her back, but maybe she didn’t have to. Maybe she could concentrate on getting home to Fritzy and feeding him a packet of Fancy Feast. She could see the Fancy Feast box very clearly. It was sitting on a shelf in her peaceful pantry.

She turned over on her belly and started to get up on her elbows, meaning to crawl the length of the pipe. Then she saw what was sharing the culvert with her. One of the corpses was not much more than a skeleton (stretching out bony hands as if in supplication), but there was still enough hair left on its head to make Tess all but certain it was the corpse of a woman. The other might have been a badly defaced department store mannequin, except for the bulging eyes and protruding tongue. This body was fresher, but the animals had been at it and even in the dark Tess could see the grin of the dead woman’s teeth.

A beetle came lumbering out of the mannequin’s hair and trundled down the bridge of her nose.

Screaming hoarsely, Tess backed out of the culvert and bolted to her feet, her clothes soaked to her body from the waist up. She was naked from the waist down. And although she did not pass out (at least she didn’t think she did), for a little while her consciousness was a queerly broken thing. Looking back on it, she would think of the next hour as a darkened stage lit by occasional spotlights. Every now and then a battered woman with a broken nose and blood on her thighs would walk into one of these spotlights. Then she would disappear back into darkness again. – 9 -

She was in the store, in the big empty central room that had once been divided into aisles, with a frozen food case (maybe) at the back, and a beer cooler (for sure) running the length of the far wall. She was in the smell of departed coffee and pickles. He had either forgotten her dress slacks or meant to come back for them later-perhaps when he picked up the nail-studded scrapwood. She was fishing them out from under the counter. Beneath them were her shoes and her phone-smashed. Yes, at some point he would be back. Her scrunchie was gone. She remembered (vaguely, the way one remembers certain things from one’s earliest childhood) some woman asking earlier today where she’d gotten it, and the inexplicable applause when she’d said JCPenney. She thought of the giant singing “Brown Sugar”-that squalling monotonous childish voice-and she went away again. – 10 -

She was walking behind the store in the moonlight. She had a carpet remnant wrapped around her shivering shoulders, but couldn’t remember where she had gotten it. It was filthy but it was warm, and she pulled it tighter. It came to her that she was actually circling the store, and this might be her second, third, or even fourth go-round. It came to her that she was looking for her Expedition, but each time she didn’t find it behind the store, she forgot that she had looked and went around again. She forgot because she had been thumped on the head and raped and choked and was in shock. It came to her that her brain might be bleeding-how could you know, unless you woke up with the angels and they told you? The afternoon’s light breeze had gotten a little stronger, and the ticking of the tin sign was a little louder. YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU.

“7Up,” she said. Her voice was hoarse but serviceable. “That’s what it is. You like it and it likes you.” She heard herself raising her own voice in song. She had a good singing voice, and being choked had given it a surprisingly pleasant rasp. It was like listening to Bonnie Tyler sing out here in the moonlight. “7Up tastes good… like a cigarette should!” It came to her that that wasn’t right, and even if it was, she should be singing something better than fucked-up advertising jingles while she had that pleasing rasp in her voice; if you were going to be raped and left for dead in a pipe with two rotting corpses, something good should come out of it.

I’ll sing Bonnie Tyler’s hit record. I’ll sing “It’s a Heartache.” I’m sure I know the words, I’m sure they’re in the junkheap every writer has in the back of her…

But then she went away again. – 11 -