The Shop Window

Their shop window. All washed like that, every damn day. With the ladder. It made me sick. It wasn't good enough to hire the kid to come by on Fridays with his bucket. No, they had to wash that window every single damn day. God forbid someone should come to stare at all that crap and find a smudge on the window.

I hated him and his little round glasses so much. I'd go out there after closing—I mean, after I closed, late, nine o'clock, not after he closed—and smudge his damn window up myself. Drag my hand across it. Once, after I watched him drive his little sedan away, I reached up and patted the window with a banana peel I found in the gutter. Oh, he must have wondered about that the next day, up on his ladder, making everything just-so and perfect. Every day. He should thank me. Giving him something to do up there.

I thought the kid was fine. What's the big deal. Spread it around, that's what I say. Ten bucks a month doesn't sound like too much to me. Kid's got initiative, but Mr. Morton's Fine Jewelry wouldn't know anything about that. All he knows is wash-the-window, wash-the-window. I can see him from behind the counter, every day, noon.

I'm ready to grab a bite at noon. That's what people do at noon, or hadn't you noticed, Mr. Up-on-a-ladder? I have to wait 'til he's done. His window's right between me and Oscar's, where I go, so I have to wait. I'm not walking past him when he's up there. Him and his little lift-his-cap-up when you pass by. The kid always did right by me. And my window's bigger. But every night, I showed him. He wants to climb that ladder every day, and look down on all of us, that's fine by me. I'll give him something to clean up.

Hummingbird

She didn't move. She didn't talk. She didn't do anything. Just sat there. All the parents said things about psychiatric malfunctions, or something. They said Don't tease her, and Leave her alone, and If I ever catch you... But they did tease her.

She never knew it, even though they did it right in front of her face, but they did it just in case. Just in case she really could hear them saying Retard and Crazy Girl and Lump. She didn't go to school anymore, of course. She hadn't gone since the second grade, and that was eight years ago. She just sat on the porch, or on her bed, or at the table, wearing whatever her mother dressed her in that day. Whenever the neighborhood boys would walk by, they were sure to say something mean. If it wasn't about her clothes, it was her hair. Or her eyes, which they always found something wrong with.

They knew someone was inside. They didn't think of her as, say, furniture, like the porch swing she sat on when the weather was fair. She never moved on it, though the temptation to swing back and forth should be a natural and unavoidable thing, but they still knew someone was inside. Maybe they just hoped, because it gave their words a sting. Otherwise, it was just them and the whole big world they didn't understand, the world they were told every day they weren't ready for. More ready than the Lump, they could say. More ready than her. She doesn't even move.

But that's the thing. On the outside she didn't move, but inside, where no one saw, she was a hummingbird. She was flying rings around the world. Not ready for the world—she had already seen every secret the world held dear, and she was ready for more.

The Well

We found it when we were digging a well for the Briers. We weren't more than three feet down when my shovel hit something hard and brittle. We heard a snap. JP dropped to his knees and reached in like he was hauling up crab pots. He opened his hand and there was a human rib in it. He held it like you’d hold a robin’s egg. We looked at each other with eyes like cups. Down in the hole was a man. He'd been in there a long time, by the looks.

He was all bones. I said something about the police, and JP said this wasn’t exactly what you'd call an emergency situation. Man must have been dead twenty years. Mouth open to the world. All his spaces filled up with dirt. I could see all the bones of his wrist. Everything was still there. Except a couple ribs, courtesy of us.

We didn't know what to do. The Briers would be furious. Anything that slowed down work made them furious. A three-day rain last year had Mr. Brier yelling and cursing and calling us cowards. You can't explain that painting fences in the rain is a poor idea. So we made a big show, loading up cans of paint and brushes. We ended up sleeping in the truck, under the trees.

So this. This would send Brier over the edge. But how could we keep quiet about it? I thought maybe we could phone it in anonymously, but JP pointed out that no one but us would have been up there to find him. He was right. Brier be damned, we had to tell someone. He could still have his people waiting on him, watching windows and trying to hold back the clock.