Amelia Gray: Threats

The older cop was back at the car, writing the report. He watched to see the new recruit holding his arms in the air.

“Hey bud, are you inquiring as to how we do our job?” said the other paramedic, who also had been writing a report. “You idiots were knocking on doors. Clearly you missed something on the way in here, but that call came in when we were on the other side of town. This kid is about as dead as a dead kid can be.”

“Neither of you really checked, then. Did you know this is a reportable offense?” Chico had a vision of a news report he had once seen, an old woman rising up in the morgue.

The bigger paramedic was still squatting by the body. He crossed his arms over his legs. “You can check the pulse,” he said.

Chico knelt down. “I guess I am showing you how to do your job,” he said before his hand touched the child’s neck.

The object that had once been a living child was taut like a balloon and soft, chilled even under the sun. It had not been apparent from where Chico was standing, but the spaces that the girl’s eyes had once occupied were hollow and dark with rot. Chico’s fingers pressed searchingly into the flesh of the neck, which offered no resistance. The skin was already weakening to the point where a slight push would send his hand through the front of the trachea and onto the girl’s knobbed spine. The child was aspic.

The bigger paramedic said something and stood. His partner responded to him and looked at Chico, waiting. Across the parking lot, a figure emerged from a room, got into a car, and drove away. Chico removed his hand from the dead child’s neck. “I’m sorry,” he said. The man waved him off.

The older officer was there then, talking into his two-way. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll drive.” He leaned over and thumped Chico on the back with an open palm. The older officer clearly saw Chico as a novice, which he was, fresh from the academy and from high school before that.

They headed for the next call, a noise complaint that seemed to have been resolved prior to their arrival. On the way, Chico saw that both of his hands were slick with algae. He nearly wiped them on his pressed uniform pants, then stopped, instead resting his hands palms up on his knees. His hands dried, and he washed them hours later, nearly six hours later, when he was alone.

A few days passed before they paid a visit to David’s family home.

NO DOMESTIC DISPUTE between Franny and David had inspired the removal of their wedding rings. She would take hers off at work when she was giving scalp massages. Once, she thought she had lost the ring, but she found it in the treatment room on a candleholder David had made for her during a personal failure of a pottery class he had taken the year he lost his job. After she found her ring, she started leaving it at home.

David didn’t take any specific satisfaction from seeing a ring on his wife’s finger. He thought about the day they first met, outside the grocery store during a similarly long winter. Her boot had slipped and she skidded down the sidewalk, kicking forward and losing her balance, pulling the long side of the rolling cart down onto her legs. David had been walking behind her and was startled at the movement. He stepped back in surprise, which gave her a clear path to the ground.

She went down hard, bouncing on the landing. He ran forward to pull the cart off her legs while she rubbed her thigh. “Jesus,” she said. She watched David lower his own bags and pilot one of the cart’s wheels into a groove in the pavement. He wore khaki pants that stretched across his rear end. Their grocery bags were mixed together in the confusion, and he loaded his items with hers into the cart. She saw a saint’s medal glinting from a chain around his neck and felt poorly about taking the Lord’s name in front of a religious man. “Thank you,” she said.

“Your milk split,” he said, lifting the dripping gallon.

She braced herself against the ground and stood. “Thank you for helping me,” she said.

“You’ll need another gallon.” He watched her lift a foot and rotate her ankle in a slow circle, testing it. “I can get you one if you want to stay here.”

“I’ve never had a man buy me milk.”

“I’d like to be the first,” he said. He realized that they were flirting, which was something he had seen and possibly experienced but had never understood in the moment as he did right then. Once, in college, he had told a woman that he enjoyed her scent, but he had seen it as an honest compliment, the kind one adult delivers to another, and not a statement given to promote a favorable reaction, a flirtatious statement, potentially garnering affection. “I would be honored to be the first,” he said.

Whenever anyone heard the story of Franny and David’s first meeting, they would ask why he hadn’t caught her there in the grocery store parking lot. He would claim he hadn’t been close enough. Years later he would stand next to a kiln and hope the objects inside would drastically change shape. They emerged as they had entered, amateur and uneven, too small, colored like wet sand.

David’s wedding ring came off before Franny’s, in their fifth year of marriage, a time of great stress in his life. He had lost his dental license the year before, and they had just moved in with his father. He found he had been fussing with the ring, turning it round and round on his finger until his skin flamed, the distressed red band suggesting allergy.

Then they both left their rings together at home and forgot where they ended up. Franny hoped they weren’t in the basement. David forgot about them.

DAVID SAT on the front stoop. The dead bolt was not electrified, he was sure. He was fairly sure. There was no evidence to suggest that the dead bolt was electrified, and it was more reasonable to assume that in fact it was not.

It was a bright day for winter, unusual too because of a drizzling rain that fell without cloud cover. David’s eyes were spangled by sunlight. It seemed that the ground was moving, but then he looked closer and saw that the motion was created by black ants crawling from a crack in the walk, up the stairs, across the porch, and into a gap in the foundation, into the house. The ants were small enough and the drizzle light enough that a connection between the two would be rare indeed, though the ants moved sluggishly out of their hibernation. He wondered how an ant would celebrate the event of a raindrop, if it would survive the impact. David’s body felt wrapped in a thin layer of cellophane.

He put his face close to the ground and found one ant. The creature walked unevenly, hefting a crumb larger than its body. It bumped into a pebble, the kind that might wedge in the tread of a boot, and began the slow journey around it. David pitied the ant and understood it. He took a tissue from his pocket and laid it down before the ant. After some coaxing, the ant stepped onto the tissue, pausing, pressing on. David slid his hand underneath and, moving low to the ground, stepped, crouching, up the stairs to the point where the line of ants vanished into the house. He shook the tissue close to the line, and the ant landed near. It touched the other ants with the tips of its mandibles, and they paused and touched the first ant before continuing on their way. David noticed that the crumb had fallen loose during transport. He examined the tissue and the porch at the point where he had released the ant. When he looked back at the line, he couldn’t tell which ant he had moved. It was too late.

The dead bolt did not spark his hand on the way back inside, but he still did not feel safe. He considered the ways in which a wire could be secured to the bolt’s knob, improving the safety of the door should the bolt at any point become electrified and a grounding element be unavailable.