9781250816214

BLACK TWIG
Sophia runs until her breath comes only in short, shredding, red flares,
air burning out of her, her chest trying to leave the rest of her behind. She
collapses where her lungs command. She has no single thought except to,
hopefully, annihilate her pain in sleep and never wake.
The grass she lands on feels cool and damp against her hot cheeks. The
night wind pilfers through the trees looking for fruit to steal. It prickles the
skin on her back. She rolls over in the deep blue-dappled grass and opens
her eyes onto the billion stars over Arcadia.
They give up nothing; they only shine as they were told to do.
Sophia’s heartbeat screams through her temples, pulsing in her
fingertips, where she tore all her nails down to scraps pulling her house
apart, and that’s how she knows it all really did happen, she is alive and she
is Sophia, alive and warm and real and in gross violation of her HOA
contract.
As the sweat dries cold on her skin, Sophia realizes she does not know
where she is, not really. She thought she knew every corner of Arcadia
Gardens. But this is not Dilmun Park, despite the well-maintained lawn and
gracefully spaced trees and comfortable sitting bench framed by two
delicate dwarf maples and a great gnarled apple tree, just over there.
She cranes her neck but cannot see a street sign that might enlighten her.
Only flowers, a hedge of flowers, coiling, knotting, roping around each
other, their stems threatening to strangle the blossoms beside them, a mass
of writhing war ringing this patch of manicured parkland Sophia has never
seen on any one of her thousand languid strolls through the paradise of her
safe, contained universe.
In the shadows, beyond the flower hedge, up four white modest marble
steps, the black iron rungs of a gate cut stark shapes out of the sky. It is
locked. It is after hours. Sophia goes to it and lets her hands settle on the
cool bars. She looks out into … what? The world. The world beyond her
life.
And the world is a desert, white and searing, treeless, without shelter,
hot sands stretching away into a burning, lonely nothingness until it
obliterates itself against a wall of sky.
A figure comes toward her, rimmed in moonlight. It seems to step out of
the flower wall, but it couldn’t, there’s no break in the briar to let it pass. It