Fiction

While I wait for him to pull the trigger, I drive to the grocery store. Pick up milk, chewing gum, sponges. Drop off the dry cleaning: the dress I splattered with a spaghetti stain at Shana and Calvin’s wedding last month. Ignore the stench of the rotting plant in the backseat and keep the AC rippling.

He stands before the class, the lectern his wheelhouse, the teen- or twenty-
something-aged students his sea, the sky in the back windows his horizon. The worn paperback before him lays open to a page. If he were to brush it to
the floor, the spine would strike first and the leaves would fall three-quarters right, a quarter left. The book would lay open on page 63, just as it does on the podium.

I saw the man before he died, under the front tire of my father’s truck. He was pinned and the truck stalled and then settled in the mud and three grown men were not enough to push the truck forward or backward to stop the man’s pain. I was not a grown man. I was a girl, fourteen, puny, under a hundred pounds, not useful to their efforts, so I crouched by the man under the tire and tried to distract him from his fate.