Amelia Gray - Threats

In the reception area, the child was cleaning the floor with a miniature push sweeper. The device whirred forward and back. The child was singing a song about friendship, which he had heard on the radio.

Chico considered what he had learned about the woman Frances. She was tall and quiet, stubborn with coworkers, and distant with her husband. She kept secrets. It seemed equally possible that she was capable of doing harm to herself. A woman with the right personal motivation could walk into the cold and die. Stranger things had happened before and since.

He walked into the reception area, where the child was emptying the reservoir of the sweeper into a garbage can. “I’ll walk you to the laundromat,” Chico said.

“I believe I’ll stay here tonight,” the boy said.

“Come on, someone will see you. CPS is down the hall.”

“I have a change of clothes. I was looking forward to this all day.” The child moved his chair to reveal the sleeping bag under the desk. “You can’t force me to go with you. I have the paperwork around here somewhere.”

“Your aunt will be worried.”

“She knows all about it. She praises me for my dedication to my career.”

“You should be going home and playing video games and eating popcorn, or whatever kids do.”

“My aunt makes the point that next to a laundry room, there’s no safer place than a police station.” The child snapped the reservoir shut on the sweeping device and tucked it behind the desk. “Good night, Detective,” he said.

Chico remembered a story about children who slept in a museum, and the bitter jealousy he had once felt toward those children. He shook his head at the child but put on his coat. “There’s sugar cereal in the break room,” he said.

The child was already tucking himself in. “I know where the sugar cereal is,” he said from under the desk.

MARIE BARELY FLINCHED when she felt a wasp sting the palm of her hand. “Bastard,” she said, waving it away.

It was unfair to bees that stinging anything caused them to remove a portion of their own abdomen. Marie couldn’t imagine being so angry that she would be willing to give up part of herself like that. The wasps had it easy. They could punish without consequence.

The wasp stings swelled less each time. The initial pain was the same, but the aftereffects were more manageable. She speculated that her natural allergy to the venom was slowly decreasing. She examined her palm.

She rubbed her temples with her unstung fingertips as she read from a set of texts. She always got to the garage before sunrise, finding that the act of setting aside proper hours helped her focus her mind and streamline her efforts. That morning, she had watched David carrying plywood boards into the yard. He leaned them against individual windows and stepped back, seeming to estimate their scale against the frames. Marie raised her hand to him, and he returned the gesture in silence. She felt calm watching him, which surely meant that he was also feeling calm, even as he spent the rest of the morning driving nails into the frame of his home.

She saw David’s action as the good sign that he still needed to feel some security in his world. When the loss of privacy was still felt, the self was still known to exist. She thought that was a good thing to think and had gotten as far as writing “privacy” in her notebook, plus three of its synonyms, when another wasp stung her. “Sweet bastard,” she said.

DAVID NAILED THE LAST BOARD in place over the last window. His home was ready for any storm. On the four boards across the front of the house he sprayed I AM STILL HERE, as he had on the rear window, in text large enough to be seen from the street. Those who saw the boarded-up house thought of a number of things.

A neighbor walked her dog in front of the house. She could see a man descending a stepladder in a robe and slippers, holding nails in his mouth, steadying himself on the ladder. It was the house she had seen on television, which meant this was the man police wanted to question, though she couldn’t remember why.

The mailman parked his truck outside the house hours later and loaded up his saddlebag to walk the street. He saw the house and was reminded of a trip he had taken to the beach. He was just a child then and with his family. They had planned the trip for months, but when the winds and rain picked up, they had to leave early. He had watched the boys from the ice cream shop layering boards over the windows.

A child walking home from the bus stop saw the boarded windows and stopped to stare. She had seen plenty of windows in her time but never any covered with long sheets of wood like the kind her father kept in the garage. This was a strange house, she knew, having once seen a woman in its backyard pulling up her robe to step over a fence and getting stuck and dropping the snowballs she was carrying and crying the way the girl never cried anymore, because she was a big girl. The girl thought about how good it felt on an early morning when the first peach-colored lines of the sun said good morning through the curtains and how that meant it was time for milk that her mother mixed a powder into so it turned chocolate-flavored. The girl wondered why anyone would want to miss such an event.

The man who resembled David walked by, holding papers advertising the sale of nearby homes. David had already gone back inside, but the man saw the boarded-up windows and thought about how they might affect property values. The house looked like a dead face to him with the boards, and the man thought of the time he had nearly drowned.

A pair of older ladies in matching tracksuits paused on their speed-walking route to observe the house. They were sisters, and each saw the house and remembered simultaneously when their own childhood home had burned to the ground. Neither could remember how the fire had started — they had been too little, it had been in another city, another state perhaps. They had returned months later with their father and had seen how strange the charred white clapboard looked, boards nailed over the window frames. The new wood had been nailed to old wood, and the distinction was clear to everyone.

The ladies looked at this different boarded-up house in the neighborhood where they had lived together ever since. In silence, they individually considered the span of their lives. One of the ladies thought about the word “still,” and the other thought about the word “here.”

THE DARKENED WINDOWS shifted the home inside further. Even the heavy curtains had let in some light, but the boards allowed total darkness and safety. David thought about how his life would be different if he had boarded up the windows ten years earlier. Perhaps the outside world would have vanished for Franny and himself and they could have lived their days in the confines of the property in his name. He figured that if Franny came back, she would be surprised to see the windows boarded up, but she would eventually understand. The dark outlines of the furniture in the rooms gave the couches and chairs the look of sleeping animals.

The sounds outside were quieter. David could hear a snow sweeper’s muted progress along the residential road. It seemed as if he had covered his own ears and eyes with a piece of fabric. The silence of the old grandfather clock was a negative energy. David pushed an ottoman over to cover up the fireplace.

He turned on the kitchen light and pulled the threats out of their drawer, spreading them out on the countertop. He couldn’t remember the order in which he found them and switched the papers around trying to figure it out. The threats were on different types of paper. There was the craft store receipt, the fortune cookie scrap, the computer paper, the thin ticker-tape strip, the index card, the pages torn from a notebook. The words were typed in the same style, as if they came from the same machine. He let his eyes unfocus until the words became symbols.