PROLOGUE
He’d brought a spade instead of a shovel. It had been a stupid, panicked mistake. There’d been a gang of dirt-breaking tools, all wood-handled and rusted, leaning against the wall in the garage, and he’d grabbed one without thinking.
Mud made for stubborn digging, and the spade would only stretch the work. As he thrust the square blade into sludge, his back muscles twitched and his pulse thumped in his neck. Rain dripped into his eyes, stinging.
He’d been crazed and incoherent an hour ago, his throat still felt clawed from screaming, but now his mind felt strangely calm. Hollow.
He wanted to pull the blanket away.
Don’t.
The night was cold enough for his breath to cloud the air, and his clothes clung heavy with rain, yet his skin itched with heat. Inside his gardening gloves, his hands sweat.
Don’t look.
Here among the trees, the rotting stench of detritus was thick in the back of his tender throat. And he was hearing too much: the sizzling, frying-oil sputter of rain; chirping crickets; and his own breathing, heavy and animal.
Don’t look under the blanket.
Tilting the spade and pitching mud into a pile, he felt something come loose from the back pocket of his jeans. He reached back, trying to catch it, a muscle memory reaction from always carrying his phone in his pocket, but missed. It hit the forest floor with a subtle thump.
What had he dropped?
Blue moonlight filtered through the leaves of scrappy young trees. He wiped sweat and rain from his eyes with his shirt sleeve and squinted.
A small slip-on shoe, red and sparkly.
1
TEENAGE BOYS DESCEND UPON ME
My mind is a snow globe in the hands of a toddler who’s shitfaced on apple juice. I keep waiting for the white flakes to settle, but they remain a perpetual, furious blizzard.
* * *
Exhausted and wired, I sprint through muggy darkness. Baby monitor in one hand, cell phone in the other. My cheap foam sneakers pound cement sidewalk, and my unsupported arches stretch and twinge. I suck the humid stink of late-summer compost deep into my aging lungs. Why does life smell so bad?
I corner the block, and the white-noise static of the baby monitor zaps to silence.
Out of range.
I run faster. If I push it, I can run an eleven-minute mile. That’s one lap around my block. My heart bangs against its cage, and salty tears slip onto my tongue. Crying is part of my routine too.
My neighborhood, Saint’s Crossing, was built quick and dirty thirty years ago. At least that is what a plumber told me when I hired him to fix the second-floor-bathtub-leaking-onto-my-kitchen-table problem.
Houses on my block are modest and cozy. Or small and ugly. Depends on your perspective and mood. In daylight, their colors are typical midwestern drab: tan, sage green, and pale yellow. Trees dotting small lawns and parkways are too large and too many. Tricycles and coffee tables are occasionally left on curbs, offered for second-hand use. Saint’s Crossing is a neighborhood of families, young and old, but most of all it seems down-to-earth and safe.
Or so I thought when I moved in several months ago.
I reach the furthest point away from my house. This is when fear and guilt sink their nails into the back of my neck because I’ve left my sleeping children home alone.
Well, Hulk is with them. She’s a Boston Terrier. Think tiny dog with pointed, upright ears and bug eyes. Of course she has no thumbs to dial 911, but she would get in a few good barks if an intruder broke a window. Before he offered her food.
This is when I worry my three-year-old has woken up and is wandering the house, rubbing her chubby little thumb along her square-foot blanket, tears streaking her irresistible cheeks.
This is when I agonize most over Leland Ernest, my next-door neighbor.
A mosquito buzzes my ear, and I smack it.
A towering lamppost casts shadows of trees onto the sidewalk. A slight breeze gives the leaves breath and shapes the branches into yawning monsters. My shadow, a twelve-foot giant, tramples these sidewalk beasts.
Leaving the lamp’s glow in my wake, I run toward a long stretch of houses whose owners zealously oppose porch lights.
A low branch whips my chest and spikes my pulse. I didn’t see it coming. These late-night sprints around the block are a rush. I never know what’s going to smack me in the face or if an uneven sidewalk crack will snag my shoe and take me down.
Homestretch—exactly fourteen houses away—I pump my legs harder.
Strides ahead, an obese pine tree overruns the sidewalk.
As I sidestep the pine, a black shadow erupts from high in the tree and, swooping down, claws at my neck.
The impact throws me off balance. I fall onto dewy grass, and I piss my shorts. Sounds of static and clicking scatter into divergent points of noise overhead.
What the hell hit me?
Felt substantial, like a squirrel.
But that makes no sense.
Bees. Had to be bees.
Bees make sense because pin-prick points along my neck and shoulder sting and burn. My fingers search my neck for stingers, but only slide along wetness. Sweat. Maybe blood?
I picture a swarm of bees crashing into me, fleeing their hive because some old guy pesticide-bombed the co-op they’d built near his front door.
But… do bees screech?
As I sit in my piss-shorts in the grass and breathe in an effort to prevent hyperventilation, two teenage boys descend upon me, touching my damp back and shoulders with their nicotine-rubbed fingers.
“Dude, are you alright?” His voice is part hilarity, part grave concern. Oh please, call me anything but “dude”. Have I lost all markers of femininity? My eyes work to make out his face and shape. He is teenage-skinny, has a boy’s crew cut, and strikes me as military-confident. “That was sick. Way sick,” he says.
His friend, wearing a baseball hat over shoulder-length hair which feathers beautifully, shakes his head silently, mind blown.
I run my fingers through cool, wet grass, searching for my belongings. Beyond their cigarette-smoked clothes, fabric softener laces the air. Someone is running their dryer.
“I’m OK. I’m not sure what happened,” I say, embarrassed at the extent of my disorientation and glad for darkness. Even if they catch a faint whiff of urine, they can’t see my wet shorts. “I think I got stung by bees.”
“Dude, those were bats. Like, twenty little fuckers. They came out of nowhere. Swoosh. Went that way.” He points across the street as if it matters, as if we could see anything in this darkness. As if the bats were waiting on cue for an encore.
Bats? Is he kidding?
If there is one thing I can’t stomach at this moment in my life, it is to be fucked with.
I consider the situation. Whatever hit me had bulk. I consider the quality and tone of the screeching. Maybe I heard flapping. I can’t remember, it happened too fast.
I gaze up at him, checking if his lips curl up at their corners.
No curl. His lips are parted. He’s out of breath too.
Not fucking with you. It was a pack of bats. Pack? Roost? Colony?
His quiet friend with feathered hair is still shaking his head, no sign of stopping.
“I didn’t know bats sounded like radio static,” Crew Cut says. “Can we call someone for you?”
“I’m OK. Really. I live a few houses away.”
Getting knocked over by small flying things while pursuing physical fitness is embarrassing. I feel geriatric and uncoordinated and smelly, and desperately want to slither into darkness. I stand and take a few rubbery steps, then shift into a jog.