INTERSECTIONS: Horton @ Delevan

THE WARRIOR

By Luanne diBernardo

There were five of them running and darting, one boy small, the other boys taller, one fat.  Two screamed Antoine, and nobody’s mother was anywhere in sight.  Almost, it was dusk. 

The boy who turned when a voice screamed Antoine was straddled to a bike stripped pipe to peddle, his bony arms stretched to each bend of pitted chrome.  Behind him a house of shattered glass, where a screen door missing its screen floats open then closed, though nobody comes or goes. Behind him a side street, both narrow and short, with cars more permanent than trees.   

On the other side, and separated by ancient gates asked to separate the dead from the living, and separated again by a busy convenience for cars traveling into or out of the city, stood I.  Chains looped and locked through and around the great tall spires, where inside rested Red Jacket’s tribesmen, burials topped by worn cement slabs scratched with names like “Destroyer of Cities”, and where loomed above them: Red Jacket himself.  Could also be seen were the Ogilvys, the Fassbinders, and the Spoonleys; the marbled mauseleums of the close-knit Brunis, Schoelkopfs, and Knoxes; manicured greens and reflecting ponds. cloud-grazing statues, the grand gifted bronzes and granites, families discontinued, some remembered, most forgotten, and a strong columned structure where maps could be borrowed in order to find who laid where. 

Antoine’s name screamed from one of the boys.  I turned and watched the fat one shorten the distance between them, Antoine poised until barely too late before one foot slams the pedal of his barren bike, his wild-pitched cry claiming the air, even my air, victorious as he forcefully pumps the short turn of pedal, a circumference so slight that it barely caused his legs to move as they sailed the bike across the street, the busy street, horns and screams before slamming the concrete curb, then grass, his eyes wet with thrill, his small chest heaving, his head turned back towards the fat and tall boys who flickered between frenzied cars. 

With a force that erupted the budding wings of his delicate shoulders, Antoine jerked up the front of his good-enough bike, his front wheel now skyward and paused mid-air before slamming the street, his body hunched forward, his focus aimed back through the threat of road.  The fat and tall boys called him forward, then not, until Antoine slammed foot to pedal, a movement that blasted him towards them, through them, then past them to where finally he braked, the tail of his bike whipping sideways and causing the boy full circle, back where he started.  

Flanked by vehicles to his left and right, his breath beat against his taut-skinned belly.  Then with nobody moving or laughing or calling, and beneath a sky growing darker than truth, the boy named Antoine slipped from his bike and fearlessly walked to the broken house.

INTERSECTIONS: Orchard @ Division

THE GOOD SAMARITAN

by Luanne diBernardo

I’d never seen the car before, but the girl I’d seen for years; a girl from a couple blocks over who passed our house on her way to school, sometimes in winter the light from our kitchen the only light streaking the early snow where she passed.  Evenings too, like now before dusk, where the curious car slows to the pace of the girl, not in the lane where vehicles belong, but nearer the shoulder where a week’s worth of leaves rustle about the car’s bloated tires. 

She was heading towards school and away from her house, away from the Erie Street Bridge, a drawbridge that rarely drew anymore. Any longer, it was crossed by locals, people who returned here from work, but never the car just outside my window. Twenty-seven years I registered, transferred, and collected surrendered plates at our local DMV. I knew every prefix to every plate; I knew the auto dealers, the city officials, the corporate issues, and the vanities; and this car was a stranger.

Dull and blistered, it barely crawls to the walk of the girl. One of its taillights is busted and bandaged with bright red cellophane that crinkles around the empty duct. Inside, a man hunkers so low across the front seat that I can watch him watch the girl and, for whatever reason, his foot jabs the brakes while he calls something out, and politely she answers. 

Even from here where I watch, the man reads large and lumpy, his large skull misshapen by the swell of his hair, easier to see once his car has paused for whatever he wants of the neighborhood girl, a sincerity to her movements that touches me, the hunched-over man now smiling. It’s difficult to tell who is asking and who is answering anymore, though clearly the girl and the man are people not yet familiar with the other, evident by how she moves nearer, then stops, moves nearer, then stops, when just in time, he says what he says and she reaches the wide metal stretch of door, it’s old chrome handle dangled by a jimmy of twisted wire.  With one hand slung over his steering wheel, the bulky man’s heft leans further across the seat, his free hand releasing the latch of the busted handle, a movement perfected. The dull length of  door gapes open.  His body scootches back behind the wheel.  Without so much as a glance in her direction, he waits.

Her feet flinch towards the opened door, but her body lags; only seconds long and barely noticed, it quakes up my lawn, through my kitchen window, up my spine and across my scalp.  I’ll do it the moment I get to work, check the computers to learn where his plate was registered, his name, what business he’d have with a girl from our town, certain I was making something from nothing, the heavy car door as high as her shoulders, once seated. In a movement that should have been two, his fleshy hand reached over the girl and wrangled the gizmo that locked her safely inside.

The car jerks forward. My hands feel clammy despite the fact they are still immersed in dishwater. Queasiness crawls from my gut while I fight the urge to run from my house, to stop whatever it is that’s happening, a thing so deliberate and yet I can find no words as I imagine myself explaining what I’d seen to the officers who’d arrive to take my statement, or to the girl’s parents, or even to the man when I’d scream for him to stop, except that only I’d seen him pumping the brakes of his own registered car, and only I’d seen the girl enter freely, a whole lot of trouble because I happened to be at my kitchen window where I’d seen her a thousand times before, where, if I minded my own business, this all would have happened anyway, proof in how the mammoth car devours the street, its immense rusted body too long for the three-point turn that rubs streaks of black rubber against the curb. A battered rim escapes and wobbles, the story of a runaway pancake, I think without smiling. 

I crane my head forward, then sharply against my kitchen window in order to sight the round, red taillights.  Cindered smoke chokes from an oily tail pipe and stains the air between where the girl had been and where she was heading, her face turned back as if she’d left something behind her.