“Use it only when you’re alone. Don’t tell anyone. If you want to know more, you know where to find me.” He looked over at the desk clerk hanging out the door, glaring at them. “Although it looks like I might have to move now.”
He turned on his heel, scraping the gravel under his shoe, and marched back to the open hotel room, muttering something. Sandy watched for a moment and when she saw the door open she turned the key in the ignition again, this time the Buick started as it had the first day she owned it.
From out of the hotel a hand shoved a woman dressed in a maid’s uniform into the light of day. The door slammed and something was yelled that she couldn’t make out.
Her hands shook as she drove away, the envelope still clutched tightly against the steering wheel, the eight hundred dollars rustled peacefully on the seat next to her.
Sandy Jenkins Has Trouble Concentrating
Her hands shook all the next day too.
There was an orange splotch on her wall where there hadn’t been one before.
Her nerves felt frayed as she sat, calling up the good people of the tri-county area, asking if they would like to change their long distance carrier. The backspace key on her keyboard was starting to wear out because she couldn’t keep her fingers straight enough to type, and she did not dare look down to correct them. Her eyes were fastened to the word on the envelope.
Her brain was a mess. Part of it, most of it, knew exactly what had caused the orange spot to appear on the wall, because it had appeared the exact moment she had tried, for the third time, to say the mangled excuse for a word on the envelope. She had thrown it across the room where it landed, half under a chair in the corner. Immediately she had scrambled after it, pulling it out and staring at it the way someone might stare at a winning lottery ticket. She thought of trying to say the word again, but found herself unwilling to do so; in case it didn’t work or in case it did she couldn’t say.
The spot had not come off when she tried to clean it up, it had not even lightened.
Now the envelope was sitting on her desk, staring back at her like a rattlesnake, begging to be let out, just to see if it was as deadly as she thought.
She disconnected her last call carefully so as not to draw attention to herself and leaned as far into her bench as her flesh would allow, looking to make sure no one was listening in. Her hands trembled as they grasped the paper, pulling it close to eyes that scanned the word, as if trying to decode it. For a moment she wanted to ball up the paper and throw it into the garbage can beside her bench, but knew she would not be able.
She felt like she was on the edge of a precipice and that, if she wanted to or not, she was going to jump.
The air pulled moisture away from her lips, forcing her tongue across them. They parted and slowly her vocal chords hummed. She tried to remember exactly how she had spoken the word the night before and closed her eyes. The envelope came up next to her mouth as she whispered the word into it. She felt the world move a little as it came out.
After several seconds she opened her eyes.
The bottom half of the envelope had turned orange.
So had her thumb.
She had to bite down on her lip to keep from crying out. It didn’t hurt, but the shock of it was immense. Both the fact that it had worked and seeing what it had done to her hand nearly caused her to pass out. She rose shakily to her feet and walked, as calmly as possible to the women’s lavatory, fingers clenched around the thumb. After checking under the stalls to make sure no one else was in the room she ran the faucet as hot as she could stand it over her hand, heaping on liquid soap by the handful.
After a scrub and a rinse it was still orange.
She looked around in a panic. After nearly five minutes of staring, dazed into the mirror (the longest she had ever stared into one) she shoved the hand into her pocket and marched out of the bathroom back into the call centre. She did not stop at her bench, nor at the water cooler, but just kept right on marching toward the front door, announcing loudly to anyone who cared that she was going home sick.
No one replied.
Jonah McAllister was shaving, something he only did at times his facial hair became long enough to become irritating, when a loud knock on the door caused him to nick the side of his neck.
He winced and pulled a square from the roll of toilet paper he had plucked off the maid’s cart when she wasn’t looking. He finished the little bit that remained under his nose before towelling off his face quickly as the banging continued and answering the door.
The woman looked like she had just been the only one to survive a plane crash. Her eyes were red potholes in her wide face, either from crying or having been awake all night, or both. If he had not known this was coming
