by Неизвестный
And she decided that she probably would never go to another farm. She didn't see why anyone would want to visit one. Why had her parents brought her?
Another chicken shifted. Were the chickens curious about her? A dog or cat would have come over by now, she thought, to check her out.
She sighed and reached out with her left hand on the floor of the coop ... and touched something. Her fingers jerked back, but then she realized the thing wasn't alive. It felt like a stick. She found the stick again and grasped it. Long and white. Not a piece of wood unless all the bark had been peeled off. Very long. Longer than her hand ... as long as the bone in her arm. She dropped the not-stick.
Chickens didn't have bones like this in their bodies. They couldn't. She felt the sting of tears and bit her lip again. Those kids had put the bone in there to scare her. That was it. It had to be.
She wasn't scared. She wasn't. Really really wasn't.
Something floated by--she caught the movement out of the corner of her eye--and she reached out. A feather. In the near darkness she saw it was sort of reddish brown. She tucked it into the pocket of her shorts. And waited.
Maybe they were all up at the farmhouse and having lunch. Or dinner. And they were wondering where she was. And maybe Hank and Robin shrugged and said they didn't know where she was. But wouldn't her parents get worried that she might get chased by a bull or open a bee hive or something? They knew she didn't know anything about farms. She wondered what they were having for lunch. Or dinner. It was probably pretty good, and here she was missing it. Her stomach grumbled in response.
Or maybe they were all up at the farmhouse having a big ol' laugh at the dumb city girl. Locked in a chicken coop for hours. Hahahahahahaha.
She picked up the not-stick and stuck it in the band of her shorts.
She might have dozed for a bit, because when she opened her eyes it was darker now. Was it nighttime? Were they going to leave her in the henhouse all night long? Suddenly, inside, she started to feel a little panicky, a little scared.
Why didn't her parents come and get her? Didn't they miss her at all? If she'd had her cell phone, she could have called her mom. She could have played a game to pass the time while she was locked in this dumb place.
Something made a noise outside, and she scrambled to her feet and brushed the straw from her shorts. The wooden bar on the outside slid upward, and suddenly the door opened, and Hank and Robin stared in at her. Blinking a bit, she stared back.
Clearly disappointed, the boy kicked at a pebble right in front of her. "You didn't scream or nuthin'. How come?"
"I knew you'd be back for me," she said with as much dignity as she could muster. She walked out of there, past him and his sister, and said nothing. She started walking.
She heard them following her, and they were asking her questions, but she ignored them. She was upset with them, and she was angry, and she didn't know why her parents hadn't come out for her. It was dusk now; she'd probably been in that henhouse for an hour or two ... maybe longer. These stupid kids probably did that to every single kid who came to visit.
"What else you got to show me?" she demanded. She wasn't about to run up to the house now; she wouldn't let these stupid kids see how upset she was.
The brother and sister both shrugged. "Come on."
The three kids headed away from the chicken coop, farther away from the house. They walked down an incline, and Tessa realized they couldn't see the house from here ... in fact, they couldn't even see the barn any longer. It was getting darker now, but she could still see her two companions.
"We're not related, you know," the girl said after a while.
"No," Tessa said politely, although by now she didn't care if they were or not. She didn't care if the stork brought them.
"No. Our parents left us here. Different times."
She glanced over at the girl. "Really? Why? Were you bad kids or something?"
"No!" Robin said. "They just didn't want us anymore! So they brought us here, and the farmer and his wife raised us, and we work on the farm, and she teaches us."
"You're a liar," Tessa said. These kids must have so much time on their hands that they had to think up dumb stories like this, she told herself. She scowled.
"No, it's true," the boy said. "And that's why your parents brought you here. They're going to leave you."
She stopped so quickly that Hank slammed into her, and she whirled around, and hit his shoulder with one hand. "That a big lie. My parents would never do that!" she yelled at him. And, yet, she couldn't forget how weird her parents acted on the drive down here and the silences that strung out for so long. She thought something was odd, but ... her parents would never abandon her.
Would they?
The girl laughed, not unkindly. "That's what we thought, too. We thought our parents would come back. And we waited and waited and waited. But they didn't."
"Really," Hank said. He was rubbing the area where Tessa had hit him. She hoped it left a bruise. She hoped it dislocated his shoulder. She didn't care.
"No!" she screamed. "Not my parents! They love me!"
The girl shook her head. "Not anymore."
Tessa just stared at her. "They still love me." But she thought about her last birthday, and how she'd come into the kitchen, expecting to see a pile of packages because there had always been a bunch of gifts at her place on the table for every birthday. And this time there had been only three tiny presents, and she had smiled and thanked her folks, and tried to mask her disappointment because she didn't want to be a brat like so many kids she knew. And she had opened each gift, and Mom and Dad had grinned at her, and even then she had thought their smiles seemed a little stiff. She'd taken the presents up to her bedroom then ... and her fingers had turned the last one--a ceramic elf--over and over. And it looked just like the one in her mom's sewing room. She had paused at the bedroom door and listened to her parents down in the kitchen making blueberry pancakes because they always made blueberry pancakes on her birthday for breakfast, and she'd gone into her mom's sewing room and searched for the elf. Only it wasn't there, of course. Because it was in her room now.
Her mom had given her something she already had. And it wasn't like this was something that had been in the family for years, passed on from her grandmother to Mom to her. No. She remembered when her mom had found the figurine at a thrift store and said it would be fun to have.
And now Tessa had it.
She told herself then she wouldn't cry, and she didn't, not even when she went downstairs to the kitchen for her birthday pancakes and found oatmeal on the table.
"Oh, pancakes, yeah," her dad said cheerfully as she slowly sat down in her chair. "We forgot! We'll have them tomorrow or maybe this weekend."
But they didn't.
And now Tessa looked at the boy and the girl, and she began to think that maybe they were telling the truth.
But wasn't that against the law or something to just give your kids away to some farmer? Or maybe her dad and mom had money problems, and maybe her parents sold her to the farmer and his wife. That she knew was very much against the law.
It didn't make sense. She went to school; she played with kids in the neighborhood; people would miss her, wouldn't they? They would ask her parents where she was. Unless her folks had a story ready. Maybe they would say she was visiting relatives or moved in with a friend elsewhere. Or maybe they would say we gave her back because she was adopted and we never felt like she was our daughter ever, not in all these years that we raised her.
Tessa took a deep breath. She closed her eyes, and she knew the boy had nudged the other girl. They were getting to her; she knew that; they knew it.
"Watch it!" Hank said, and her eyes flew open, and she saw she'd been about to step onto more boards on the ground. He grabbed at her arm.
She let out a half-snarl and whirled around and pushed him away from her. He stumbled back, and his foot hit the boards, half rotted from rains, and the wood cracked.
His foot slid through the hole, then the board shifted, and the hole grew larger, and suddenly, both his legs were dangling.
"Help me!" he cried.
Robin, stunned at first, ran to him and reached out. That was when Tessa pushed Robin toward her brother. More rips appeared in the boards as the added weight shattered the boards. Tessa watched as the two kids slid downward, then disappeared from sight. They screamed, and so did she.
She lunged forward and tried to grab Robin's hair but all she got was a handful of blonde hair, which she dropped onto the ground. She heard a loud thump below ... a long echoey way down.
"Robin? Hank?" She bent over the opening. She couldn't even see the kids. Were they knocked out? Dead? She dropped a few pebbles down there to see if they would respond to that. Nothing. Not a moan, not crying, not a sound.
She should run back to the house, she knew. She should tell the adults there'd been a terrible accident. They would come out here with flashlights and ropes and ladders, and they would call 9-1-1--did they even have that out in the country? One part of her calmly wondered--and they would know what to do because they were adults and adults always knew what to do. They always had a plan, right?
For a long time she stood there and listened. Nothing. Then she pulled the long, white stick that wasn't a stick out of her waistband and dropped it down the well. It made a hollow thump when it reached the bottom.
She retraced her steps back to the chicken coop, and then stood there for a few minutes and studied the door latch. Finally, after a few attempts, she got it positioned just right so that when she pulled the door shut from inside, then hit it slightly, the bar jiggled a bit and fell snugly into the slot. She blinked in the darkness, then started yelling and screaming and pounding the door with her fists. She felt the rough wood splinter into the soft flesh of her hands, but she didn't care.
She yelled until her throat was raw, and she didn't think the sound carried for more than a few yards. They'd never hear her up at the house, she knew ... not unless the adults came outside. The chickens squawked as she yelled, and she hit out once, feeling the softness of a feathered body as the bird half-flew toward her.
She cried, the tears streaming down her cheeks, and she rubbed her eyes with her fists, leaving blood and dirt and straw on her face and in her hair. And when she could no longer cry, she slid down onto the boards and fell into an exhausted asleep.
Sometime later, yelling and loud noises outside woke her up, and she put an eye up to a chink in the wall and saw lights bobbing in the distance. She heard various kinds of machinery and maybe a helicopter, and she called out, but no one heard her because of all the noise. After a while, she closed her eyes again, and then suddenly a white light blasted out there, and she felt the warmth on her cheek through the hole in the wall. The bolt slid upward and the door swung open, and she fell to the ground.
She couldn't see anything ... just dark blobs beyond circles of white, but she raised a hand to her eyes, and someone called out, "This one's alive!"
Suddenly, Mom and Dad were there and crushing her against them, and Mom was crying, and Dad was shaking. Was he angry at her? She wondered. She was so tired, and she was hungry, and she wanted to go home.
Words tumbled out of Mom and Dad, and the farmer was there, too, and he looked very sad, and someone said that the kids must have locked her in the chicken coop--they did that all the time to city kids, he said--then wandered off in the dusk and fallen into the boarded-over well. And the farmer's wife was crying and saying they had always meant to put stones over them.
Her dad said something to the farmer, and she knew the helicopter was there to take the kids to the hospital, only one of the medics said it was too late, and the farmer's wife began to wail.
They took her inside, and Mom washed her hands and face, and plucked the straw from her hair, and Dad asked what had happened. She told them: the kids locked her in the coop, and she tried to call out and she pounded on the door, but no one came.
"You didn't come," she said, staring at her parents.
Tears, welling in her mom's eyes, slid down her cheeks, but she said nothing.
Later, her father wrapped a blanket around her and carried her to the car, even though she was a big girl and could walk there on her own. He tucked her into the back seat, and her parents got into the car, and they drove off.
She turned around and stared out the back window at the farm, where the farmer and his wife stood watching the ambulances and the firemen and the cops that remained, and she wondered if they would get other children left at the farm now.
"We'll stop and get blueberry pancakes," her dad announced as he glanced at her in the rearview mirror.
"I just want to go home," she said. As if having blueberry pancakes now would make up for all that had happened.
She just wanted to get home and take a shower and go to bed and think. She put her hand in her pocket and felt the feather she had found in the coop. She touched it over and over.
She had a lot to think about. She had a lot of planning to do, and she wondered just briefly what it would be like to be an orphan.
Not everything scary comes from the country, she knew.
WHAT STORMS BRING
by
KC GRIFANT
Rosie had a venerable collection of talismans for emergency readiness, the most impressive of which was her waterproof to-go knapsack. In the straining nylon, objects of survival interlocked like a box puzzle: a water bottle, batteries, socks, bar soap, toothpaste, two cans of navy beans with the easy lift-off top, candles and a lighter.
On her coffee table, a flashlight rose singular and stark, a miniature testament to her readiness, a silo of technological fortitude. She had been lucky to get it. Yesterday, under a sky bloated with the weight of the impending storm, she had fled from store to store ravished by panicked consumers, finally spotting a corner of a flashlight’s plastic casing that had slipped behind a rack of sympathy cards at the pharmacy.
Schools, subways and offices across the region had already shut down for the day, as the hurricane was predicted to turn inland and merge with a growing nor’easter into a superstorm. Headlines on news pages grew in monstrous red print:
“LANDFALL OF PERFECT STORM IMINENT IN TWO HOURS”
“COASTAL AREAS SLAMMED WITH RECORD WAVES”
***
Rosie was about to click a link to “HEAVY WINDS TOPPLING TREES. 2 DEATHS ALREADY” when she heard a bang outside.
She hurried to her first-floor bedroom window. There wasn’t anyone at the door, just a small Halloween decoration of a homemade cloth ghost flapping on a string. The upstairs tenants were out of town and had texted asking if she could please bring in their yard decorations before the storm. Rosie had gathered everything else, but when she got to the dirty fabric and cavernous eyes of the makeshift ghost, she decided she would say it blew away.
Back inside she picked up her flashlight. She ran her finger over the button in the back, pressing it in and out to make sure it still worked. Another bang and she jumped.
Someone was knocking.
Neighbors or the police for evacuation?
She went to the building foyer and pushed the front door open against the wind that felt like it wanted to rip the door right off its hinges.
A man squinted at her. Next to him rested a laundry cart of garbage bags flecked with raindrops.
Rosie blinked at him. The wind whipped her hair to one side and she tried to hold it down with one hand as the other braced the door.
The wind snatched the words off her tongue. She tried again.
“Can I help you?” she shouted.
His eyes, caught between folds of skin, cast blankly behind her. Ends of gray hair moved beneath a winter cap. His whole face was the mealy texture of unbaked clay.
“Español?” Rosie asked.
She might have passed him before but not realized it, outside by the bus stop, where she always kept her eyes averted and clutched her purse as
folks shuffled around, asking for change or muttering to themselves.
“Shouldn’t you be in a shelter?” she said, and thought HEAVY WINDS. “I don’t know where one is but I can look online—”
A gust of wind roared and his cap blew off, sending the gray strands dancing manically. His cart squeaked in protest and they both watched it clatter down the sloped street and out of slight. He turned unfocused eyes to her, opened his mouth, and closed it again.
She’d have to invite him in, she thought with a sinking feeling. After all, she was a Good Samaritan. She couldn’t let him stay out here in the worst storm in recent history. She looked down the street at the rows of faceless townhouses and felt for a moment that they were the only two people for blocks. A few drops of rain fell on her bare arms.
He could stay in the basement, she thought suddenly. She wouldn't have to invite him into her apartment, and she wouldn't feel guilty either for abandoning him to the storm.
"You can wait it out downstairs,” she shouted, gesturing with her free hand and stepping back.
Once the door was closed, she smoothed back her hair and looked at him again. He was so pale, as if his skin had never seen the light of day, except for mottled marks across his cheeks that reminded her of fruit beginning to overripe. His hands gripped a tired gray knapsack.
He didn’t seem dangerous—though she knew better than to let her guard down around a stranger. A smell emanated off of him, pungent and unwashed, and she tried to hold her breath.
He followed her down the unfinished, paint-splattered wood staircase to the basement.
“There’s a small bathroom there if you need it.” She breathed shallowly through her mouth to avoid smelling anything and used her no-nonsense work voice. “I don’t think we’ll get flooding since we’re on a hill but if so let me know, OK? OK.”