Intro thenewgreen

They had moved a half-dozen times before it occurred to her to question the existence of the dark orb that hung in one corner in the half-dozen bedrooms she’d had. She and the orb were the only constant fixtures of her bedrooms, though if she could have chosen, she’d have preferred that the old canopy bed from the third house had been her constant companion. Waking up under the canopy made the day brighter, safer, and warmer. Instead, she woke to the orb. Not that it scared her: she took comfort from it, especially when waking suddenly from a bad dream, as she often did, she could orient herself by finding its reassuring outline. She couldn't resist. One’s eyes tended to drift to it, as all the light in the room, even the cheery light emitted from her Dumbo nightlight was sucked into it as smoothly as her mother swallowed hot tea.

The orb had always been there -- when her first tooth came free, when she first wrote her name, when her mother read her a bedtime story, and when she ate chocolate under the covers, the orb was always there. It didn’t even sway when breezes came in from open windows. Its presence was immutable and unchanging, a calm eye in the storm that is a little girl’s room, a calm that would last until the night Tony Movano died.

Chapter 1 - humanodon

Everyone said Tony had beautiful hair. And they said it without a jealousy; how could one be jealous of hair like that on a guy like Tony? Together, they were like the snows and Kilimanjaro, the Niagara River and the Niagara Escarpment: Tony and his hair were a natural force to which the town of Blackdom, New Mexico (and its young ladies) graciously and willingly bent. That’s not to say that Tony was a Goody Two-Shoes. It seemed like wherever Tony went, there was trouble and there was fun and since Tony’s brand of trouble had a higher than usual ratio of trouble to fun, well, people let it slide like Tony’s comb through that jet black hair. And whenever there was Trouble, Tony was there too. Usually, he was the one breaking it up and making sure that no one walked away with any wounds more serious than a bruised ego.

The day Tony died had been a happy one. The town of Blackdom was celebrating the anniversary of its resettlement since being abandoned in 1921, due to the severity of the drought that began in 1916. Some of the townspeople said it was a miracle. Some said that the cenotes comprising the Bottomless Lakes had collapsed even further, pumping the old Artesia Aquifer full of life again. Whatever the cause, the change was welcome.

For years, Blackdom had been drier than a three-high stack of white toast, until a family driving to Bottomless Lakes State Park drove through the abandoned town and saw the old crop beds sprouting. That crops were sprouting wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that there were no farms, no farmers and no people of any other kind as far as they could tell. When they pulled off the highway to fill their tank, the father (now forgotten) asked the men hanging around the cigarette machine about the growth. Soon, word spread. By 1947, Blackdom was thriving in a way that Frank and Ella Boyer, the founders of the town, had only dreamed of.

The celebration was centered around the old Boyer homestead. Though no Boyers lived in the reincarnation of Blackdom, plenty of the original families had moved back. Blackdom was home to all kinds of people: black, white, native, Latino, Asian and whatever else the universe had deemed fit to dump into New Mexico. Food and music filled the town for five whole nights and days. Everything had gone off without a hitch, which is to say, the residents of Blackdom hadn’t found out what the hitch was yet.

The morning that Tony died, Tony and his best girl, Shonda, were out for capital-F Fun. Everyone knows that capital-Fs and fun go together about as well as cigarettes and dynamite, or bobbing-apples and the Pacific ocean, but when Shonda climbed on the back of Tony’s motorcycle and put her cool arms around his waist, that was that.

Chapter 2 - Floatbox

Before a person dies, an oddness crawls into the gut. Feels like anything’s possible, and that it’ll happen too. In his ear, Shonda murmured, “This's just about as nice as it ever gets around here.” Tony nodded, taking his hand off the throttle to push his aviators up the bridge of his nose. His engine idled distractedly, the same way that a body gets caught staring at nothing in particular, glazed until the quiet breaks.

On the road, Tony’s hair blew back wildly, leaving Shonda's eyes lashed and watering with only the impression of open sky and open road. Heaven.

“Where we going?” she shouted but Tony was lost to her between the purring engine and the wind.

When they finally stopped, Shonda dug her fingers into his ribs. Tony looked back at her over his sunglasses, his half-smirk and invitation for the kiss he knew she wanted so badly. He pulled her off the back and on to the tank, not caring who saw them necking smack dab in the middle of Tijeras Ave as Blackdom’s wild parade rolled by. Kids scrabbled for candy at the crowd's feet.

"Buy you a coke?"

"Yeah Tony, sure." Tony revved the engine for the crowd before hitting the throttle hard to get ahead of the parade. Confetti and candy came down like snow. As they neared the front of the parade a crowd of kids waved happily from behind the wooden barriers lining the long street. Across from the kids were food stalls. There was cotton candy and funnelcake, tamales and unknowable somethings on sticks. Just the kind of food that jumps up the throat on anything faster than a carousel.

As Tony and Shonda sped to the front of the parade, a kid ducked into the street, hand outstretched to grab some prize. "Tony!" Tony braked hard, fishtailing. The crowd held its breath as Tony twisted the handlebars left, across the path of the parade into the throng of the concessions. Shonda screamed, grabbing Tony's jacket as the bike went down. The hot pavement scoured Shonda's left side, pitching her away from the bike that careened toward the fried dough stand, sparks flying. The first float of the parade came to rest on Tony's sunglasses. BANG! Hot oil and gasoline mixed as Tony desperately tried to unpin his leg and ignore the blisters forming on his face. Sparks caught and bloomed.

Somewhere, far away the sirens of the firetrucks started as the floats tried to pull off to the side, the crowd shuffling back as they strained their necks to see. At the concession stand, the cooks were beating Tony with rags. They all knew that smell. A body couldn't work in a kitchen without knowing it. Two firemen ran up, spraying Tony with fire extinguishers the cooks gathered more rags to beat out the flames.

"Move back! Back!" the firemen yelled as the firetruck muscled its way to the scene. The bike went up. People screamed into the shockwave and covered their faces. The last of the confetti resettled on the road and under the suddenly too-bright sun, Blackdom went quiet.

Chapter 3 - insomniasexx

Shonda didn't remember much of what followed. She was picked up by strangers and let the hands grope and carry her from place to place. She was questioned and consoled, first by the strangers who picked her up and then the paramedics and finally the sweaty police men in their bulky uniforms. She ended up in the old hospital next to a poor woman with kidney stones. The kidney stone lady screamed and cried endlessly but Shonda was silent as they questioned her and stitched up the large gash on her hip and bandaged the road rash that was like a trail fireworks down her side.

No one seemed to notice her silence. They were too busy talking - whispering gossip, eagerly disputing pieces of information or answering for her. Weeks later, the town's gossip would shift from Tony and the accident to Shonda and to new circumstances and they would wonder why no one saw it coming. But towns like Blackdom will always be the same. They will never break the cycle of selfish ignorance. They would never realize what could've been stopped.

It can never be known for certain what could have changed if they had listened to one person who saw more. Unfortunately for everyone involved, life is a narrow one way road and it is human nature to ignore the children.

The girl who could have changed the road's direction was a thirteen year old and an outsider. She had moved from place to place, never truly belonging anywhere. This constant uprooting resulted in an introverted but highly observant young woman. Her orb was the first sign that something was amiss.

First, it grew angry and began to pulse and scream in the night. Second, her nightmares increased dramatically in both quantity and quality. And finally, the orb disappeared completely.

She told all this to her mother, who quickly brushed it off as an overactive imagination. She began obsessively detailing it in her spiral notebook. She wrote about it in English class, doodled it in the margins of her math worksheets, painted it in art class. She told stories about it at lunch to her few acquaintances. She rambled about it mercilessly to anyone who came near her - waitresses, hairdressers, people waiting for the bus, the old man who smoked cigars in a lawn chair outside her house.

But no one listened and so the road continued straight ahead, blindly rolling into a hurricane of events that would make the drought of 1916 look like a tiny, pitiful pebble.

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