He returned after ten minutes, walking quickly, the bag over his shoulder bouncing against his leg with new weight. I wondered what he’d taken, and from whom. When he got in the car, the smell returned with him, stronger. He reached forward again, passing me another handful of money.
GO.
And that was how the next few hours went. I drove; I waited; I bagged damp and crumpled bills. I didn’t ask questions. His bag grew bigger, distended. Every time he reached forward from the backseat his hands were dirtier, the grime thicker.
And the smell—god, the smell. When I was a kid, my brother and I found a run-down shed in the woods behind our grandfather’s house, on someone else’s rural Florida land. My brother, two years older, dared me to go inside. I pushed the door, then gagged, stumbling backward. Light cut through the doorway across the still form of a dead dog, its eyes open and covered in flies.
By the last stop, an apartment complex outside town adjacent to the river, I was living, fully, in that memory.
He heaved the bag into the footwell when he returned. It bulged like the stomach of an engorged animal.
DONE.
I kept my hands on the steering wheel, my eyes forward.
LOOK.
His voice was like an arena of voices. He opened the bag, and I turned around.
At first I couldn’t tell what was inside. The contents, nearly colorless in the weak light, glistened. But then I recognized in the amorphous red the metal wiring of braces around a full set of teeth, and the picture pieced together, the parts filled out into wholes. I vomited onto the floor.
YOU SEE.
He closed the bag and dragged it out of the car. He tapped at my window, leaving a smear on the glass, until I rolled it down. My legs had cramped with fear. He held out more money. I could see his face for the first time: the haggard, pockmarked face of a young man like me. The bright ball of the streetlight reflected like white suns in his eyes. I took the cash.
He lifted the bag and swept his hair back in a single motion. When he looked at me again he was someone else, the face, impossibly, a reflection of my own. I was looking at myself. When he smiled, it was my smile, replaced with blackened teeth.
He walked down the street toward the river, dragging the bag behind him. He paused, once, to wave at me. His face had changed again.
The next day, the apartment murders were all over the news: six sleeping students pulled apart in different ways, their missing fingers, missing eyes, missing teeth. Most of a week went by with nothing but rampant speculation, stories running wild, before the police got two tips. Each said they saw a man carrying a bag through an apartment building’s long hallway, and when he looked at them they said he changed his face, like he was taking off a mask.
It’s been two months, and the summer is quiet. I needed to keep driving, but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t even get in the car. I sold it a few weeks ago. The bag of cash sits untouched in a box in my closet. I try not to think about it, but I have to spend it soon. I’m broke. I don’t leave my apartment much, and when I do, I avoid looking at people. I don’t want anyone to see me. I don’t want my face to be remembered, or recognized.
My brother called today, just to say hello. He asked how the driving life has been treating me, what with the slowdown of summer, the college town emptied of students who might never move back. Great, I said. Just great. It’s a good way, I told him, to fake a living.
Cedar Grove Rose
CANISIA LUBRIN
They say Rose was born in invisible space. And because of this Rose could bend anything to her will. If you come upon the thick blockades of unbothered bush that surround Here, her neighborhood formed by the momentary rage of a volcano that no one remembers, nowadays you would have a bitch of a time convincing anyone of Rose’s storied animalities. Here’s one field with its pickets on the boundary still drawing apart sunlight and moonlight like matchsticks in the dirt. The sinewed edge of Here was once the British Empire’s communications headquarters and its stronghold of slave catchers. And army whores during the Second World War. All the bays on the Atlantic side of Here are deep, just wide enough to keep ships unseen by enemy vessels. There has always been more here, of course. Rose knew this. But what nobody knows is that Rose made this invisible space of hers with all of its merciless things, that Rose turned a fugitive from There, a helloid by nearly any standard, into a Rose simply because she could.
Part of Rose’s magic was how she ran. She ran often, faster than she really could, churning the earth-lain dirt into wings, or some dragonfly nebula. Almost made me wish I never gave up that job at the butterfly conservatory of There. In Rose’s presence all of a pre-life leaped from its latency. She could bend time and man just the same. In a more just world, her unmarked grave would read: Here lies Haggard Rose, her life was the best and strangest alchemy.
Rose’s mama would tap a metal spoon on the tar drum outside her kitchen when she needed her to do something, like chase down a chicken for dinner. Rose heard this tapping from miles out and would take to beating her feet along the roadside, making it home in record time, each time. But I want to tell
