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By Root 450 0

maybe someday she would say now, but every time she dared, she felt that briary sensation on her lips and tongue, and she knew that it would soon be getting worse. She had never found love, or if she had, she had rejected it, and she was nearly certain she would die young—or at least younger than she otherwise would have—because no one had ever come along and saved her. She leaned back, distending her arms behind the bench. Overhead a pair of gray squirrels were sparring around the trunk of a beech tree. She watched as they dashed in and out of sight, their tense little brushes flickering a half step behind them. If only she could have been one of them, she thought—could have been anyone, or anything, else for a while, a bird, a kite, a cloud. What sense did it make that such a thing wasn’t possible? It would take so little. Who had created this world, anyway? All her life she had avoided bar fights, contact sports, political protests—anywhere there was the slightest chance she might get hurt. She had been so careful, so excruciatingly careful. Not once had she ever been punched in the mouth, and yet that was how she felt now, all the time: as if she had just been punched in the mouth. But it’s not my fault. I didn’t do anything.

The train platform was only a few blocks away. Morse guided the smaller one through the turnstile and onto the northbound express. On the other side of the river, in the gas station by the used car lot, he borrowed forty dollars to buy a carton of cigarettes and packed them into the smaller one’s jacket. The smaller one’s stomach shone and guttered through his shirt, its lancinations casting their light over Morse’s hands. As he closed his zipper, he felt like a doctor stitching an incision. The two of them shuffled past the pumps and the repair bays, the pawn shop and the nail salon, the warehouse with the giant American flag painted on its side. Then it was through the chain-link fence, under the freeway, up the bluff, and into the trees. The last thing the smaller one said as Morse banked him away in an empty tent was “What we did to you that day—I had no clue, man, you gotta believe me.”

It was nine days later, and Morse had stopped hearing footfalls in the alley at night, stopped feeling the wind on his neck, stopped, in short, expecting trouble to find him, when it did. He was sitting on his milk crate by New Fun Ree, reading one of the diary’s late pages by the light of the sun, the pigeons strutting past his blanket like mindless little kings.

I love feeling your hands reach behind me to adjust my collar when I’m wearing a shirt and tie. I love the way, when we haven’t seen each other for a while, you’ll run to me with one of your patented spring-loaded hugs, your arms outstretched and then BAM! I love the hard time you have with fractions. I love the soft blue veins on your wrist. I love the beautiful pink cushions of your lips. I love hearing you sing old R&B songs when you don’t know I’m listening, love your bright little meadowlark of a voice. I love it when we finish having sex, and we don’t have anything to do, and I can just lie there twitching inside you for a while. I love the way you’ll put a few spoonfuls of palak paneer on your plate, eat it, then put another few spoonfuls on your plate, eat it, and so on. I would love to have a baby with you.

He had just turned the page when the book was plucked from his hand, taken almost delicately, as if someone were twisting a blueberry from a vine. He looked up, and there they were, the one with the shaved head and the one with the paring knife and the big red beefy one with the metal hoops in his ear. He recognized them right away, though he had not seen them since the day they put him in the hospital.

The big one, who had loosened his necktie and rolled up his shirtsleeves, fanned through the pages of the diary. “What’s this we got here?”

Morse tried to ask him a question. “Doing some? Some some?”

“I’m gonna do me some reading.”

“Doing some reading?”

“That’s just what I said now, isn’t it?”

He handed the book to the one whose