Page 14 - WTP VOl. X #6

Dogs barked crazy at the puddle. They smelled it.
The bike path roped beneath the I-17 overpass, un- coiling against the empty lot where the puddle lay. German shepherds were stupid. I admit it was a hoot to watch. Shepherds dragged their owners off the path to the edge, but the people yanked back. The others—poodles, doodles, pugs, the tiny rat dogs, mutts—they cowered, tails between their chicken legs as if doom itself stuck its greasy fingers up their nostrils.
Janey was dumber than a dog. Janey didn’t realize what the puddle was until it was too late to crawl out. Two and a half purple acrylic fingernails and a linger- ing aura of unforgiving dread was all that remained.
I made a point of laying eighty-nine-cent hydrangeas, the kind dyed artificial colors, at the puddle whenev- er sunbeams cracked open the haze over downtown. Not often. Sometimes I forgot. But it seemed like the thing. Seemed reverent enough. Those days were Sundays to me. Sunny days.
It had been eighteen months since Janey disappeared, and still I found myself standing there, reflected in the puddle. Janey was an atheist, a lapsed Satanist actually. I don’t know why I went back. The water was brackish and specked with silvery flecks of asphalt. Mosquito larva flicked in below the surface. Wind off the puddle mushroomed the stench, fishy and breath warm—made my tongue film over. The rim of the crater was layered in limescale, tortoise, yellowy, like a crusty black eye. I had staring contests with the puddle until the streetlight winked on in reflection.
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Maybe I was waiting for purple nails to fracture the surface. Janey could waterspout up any minute in her Fall-Out-Boy tee and distressed jeans. I didn’t seri- ously believe that. She could claw up too, a zombie regurgitated from the grave. There was no way she was still in there, not the Jane I had known. The streetlight winked. Somewhere in the city a church bell banged.
Maybe I was sentimental. She was a sucky sister. She used to wander the city on her days off from ladling soup at the shelter. She’d get lost and call me crying from a stranger’s cell phone because she could not keep track of her own. She’d hold volunteer jobs for a few months before optimisti- cally moving to the next labor-abusive non-profit. She had wanderlust, if anyone asked. Curiosity killed the cat, if you asked me. I kicked last Sun- day’s dead hydrangeas into the puddle. The bou- quet stood on the surface like I’d tossed it onto the kitchen table. Then the black gulped it down. They were the last flowers I left.
I never told a soul about the puddle. Except Ellis, but did Ellis count? She would have none of it. Who in their right mind would? We had a pact. Our lips were zipped, and we’d swallowed the keys. We were not married. Yet. Soon. Once I stopped moping around puddles in my free time. We are engaged in limbo, I would tell my coworkers, who gave me a nod and a soft chuckle.
When I turned to go, I didn’t see her at first, and then I didn’t recognize her. Three graphited murals shel- tered the empty lot where the puddle made its pool in the patchwork cement and ragweed. The whole place was infested with mosquitoes and dobsonflies. Ellis stood in the shadow of the overpass. She cradled a funnel I’d never seen before, big red-plastic Home- Depot industrial. She had plans.
“What a kicking coinky-dink.” “Funny meeting you here,” she said. “Whatcha got there?”
Ellis shifted the contraption to her hip. A hose con- nected the nozzle of the funnel to a gallon Tide deter- gent jug that hung at her side. The same orange jug I
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Like Ashes
Gray Brokaw