In the winter of XXXX’s seventeenth year, bone cancer put her beloved mother to rest under the hospital bed’s white sheets, the same winter her dog chased a rabbit into the woods and never came home, froze to death in the night’s snow, a comforter that only brought more cold, so quick and thick the bark on trees cracked from the sap hardening beneath and branches fell on frosted sidewalks salted the blue of cold itself, the blue of her mother’s broken veins the evening her stillness matched the town’s silence, after the third teenage girl that month disappeared walking home from her low-cut, minimum-wage job at a restaurant whose bright orange big-eyed owl sign glowed and blinked and made a ticking sound that reminded the other girls it was just a matter of time until they walked home alone past the abandoned strip mall in the dark that would swallow them whole, leaving behind their kid brothers and sisters and unfinished journals and pop music posters wallpapering their bedroom their mothers would leave the same way they left it, even though nothing would ever be the same, deepening the town’s anxiety that spread its own cancer and boosted the sales of pepper spray and religious pendants and turned in them a fear with every locked door, every person padlocked, latch locked, deadbolted with fear that someone was still out there, prompting no action from police who said the girls were runaways because they were too busy combing rich white neighborhoods for that missing white girl, XXXX told her boyfriend, who for the entire winter break had been trying to make her come with the clinical groping of an oncologist checking for lumps, and since the results were negative, she broke it off to look for a job to save up for a bus ticket to college, finally being hired by the local cinema to sell tickets and refreshments, learning quickly how to not burn popcorn and to avoid her manager whose hands always seemed to brush up against her body when they were in the dark theater or alone in the storage closet that made her go stiff as a broom, and because she never gave into his advances he reduced her hours and forced to quit and take a low-cut, minimum-wage job at the restaurant that was like serving a hundred of her manager, their eyes entering her top as though it were a screen, and every night against her mother’s warnings she took the shortcut home past the big-eyed owl through the unlit parking lot of the abandoned strip mall where she’d bought her favorite summer dress but now bundled against the wind and cold, wearing headphones over her beanie even though her mother said music would hide an attacker’s approaching footsteps or a car driving slowly behind her with its headlights off, thinking gunshots in the song were happening around her, trembling to her core much in the way XXXX felt when the night her mother passed she tried to forget by going to a party held in a foreclosed motel, beer ponging liquor on a changing table while taking uppers, downers, any direction she could smoke, sniff or swallow, waking the next morning in a bathtub with her pants off, unable to move or remember what happened until the last days of month, when she missed her period and puked in the hamper and took a pregnancy test that her stepfather found in the bathroom waste bin, telling her she was no longer welcome in his home, leaving her to stay at different friends’ houses, talking about the girls who had gone missing, how their parents had forbidden them to work at the restaurant or walk alone at night, which made her friends’ mothers lash out at them for not getting a real job and parading their bodies around for tips they spent at the bar instead of saving up to buy a car to get to and from work, not walking the streets like whores, advice the mothers wished they could have given themselves before getting knocked up by their high school sweethearts who knocked them down and abandoned them to raise three kids in a single trailer mobile home that only moved from fighting and fucking, where winter froze the pipes so they had no running water and bathed in snow they cooked on the stove and lived on food stamps and welfare checks with just enough money left over at the end of the month to turn the cable back on and see XXXX’s stepfather being handcuffed in the foreclosed motel for kidnapping a girl the same age her, the same age and description as the girls he claimed were buried in the woods, which made her friend’s mother lash out at her, throwing birthday cake at her face and yelling to get the hell out of her house, so she had to wheel her bag alone in the dark toward the bus station, a distant light, and right as her phone died and the music cut out she could hear the sound of someone walking behind her, whistling his own tune, and at the drop of a branch she bolted into the woods like a dog let loose, fast at first, then as the snow got deeper her steps got slower all while hearing him whistling patiently behind her, sensing time’s terrible advancement had been stilled for her to feel the graveyard of not just her friends but her entire childhood buried beneath her feet, looking up at the sky hoping to see a cathedral of stars but seeing only darkness, XXXX ran, ducked, leapt, screamed into the age of eighteen.
Dominic Viti has written short stories for Chorus (Simon & Schuster), Harvard Review, The Penn Review, Lifelines, and Beloit Fiction Journal. He was educated at New York University and Savannah College of Art and Design, and he was a guest speaker at Temple University. He works in advertising.
Euphony Journal 