Most people would never guess it, but almost all the government slots are empty. People rush to get on waiting lists for them, rush to stake their claim as soon as their children are born, sometimes even before their children are born. But they hardly ever get around to putting anything inside. There are books you can buy, seminars you can attend, a whole industry of advice on what to bring with you. But people just don’t follow through. They die in car crashes and house fires and of sudden failures of the heart and of the blood and they never believe such things are coming and even if they did, it would make no difference. We weren’t built to think this way, to imagine the else-space of our lives. We don’t know how not to know. Here, and I’d bet at every other centre, most of the government slots are taken and most of the government slots are empty.
A memory stick full of movies and songs
A small jar of sand
A resumé
We close early on Christmas Day. The inspectors and the security guards and the other janitors go home, a day’s worth of time-and-a-half pocketed. I stay to do the overnight clean. It’s quiet at night. I like it when it’s quiet.
They make a sound, the boxes. It’s a soft thing, like breathing, and hardly anybody notices it. During the day it hides behind the background noise of the place, the sound of people arguing, the beep of the metal detector and the squeak of soles against the linoleum. But at night you can hear it.
It’s the sound of air rushing in. When a box empties it empties completely, and were it not for a small pneumatic hose attached to the bottom of each one, the slots would crumple in on themselves every time. The hose pumps air in, and the air wards off collapse. It’s a sound like a sharp breath through the nostrils, a whispered leavetaking.
A little after midnight a young woman starts slamming her hands on the front doors. The sound is loud enough that I hear it from one of the hallways. She’s yelling to be let in.
I walk to the lobby to see what’s going on and I make the mistake of letting her see me. They come to the centre after hours sometimes and we’re never supposed to let them in. We’re supposed to ignore them and if they get too violent, we’re supposed to call the overnight guard.
But I make the mistake of letting her see me and once she does she starts begging me to come closer, to just listen. I know it’s a bad idea but I walk toward her, until I’m standing on the other side of the locked door. The evening sleet has made a mess of her. She waves papers at me, waves a key.
He doesn’t have time, she says. Please.
I can’t help you, I reply. I hold my mop up to her, as though it proves something.
Then she screams at me. Not words, just a sound, an emptying. I don’t know what to do. I take my key out; I open the door.
She pushes past me, and as she does she shoves a few sheets of paper at my chest. It’s the usual stuff—photocopies of drivers’ licenses, a power of attorney, the Expedited Processing form any doctor will fill out for a couple hundred bucks. She runs down one of the hallways. I follow, watching.
She stumbles, gets the wrong box at first, then the right one. I can tell it’s pointless before she even turns the key. The light has already changed from green to amber. But I don’t tell her. I watch her open the box, and I watch her look inside. I watch her fall to the floor.
What’s human about us is a burden, I think.
I walk to where she is. The sound of the mop-bucket’s wheels against the ground seems for the first time obscene to me. I lift the bucket slightly, and within the walls the whispered rush of nothings is once again audible. I set the bucket back down. I let the wheels squeak.
She sits there, vacant. She holds a chocolate cupcake, half-mashed in her hand. The inspectors would have never allowed it.
I want to ask her a question, but I think I already know the answer. People die a long time before they’re dead. So instead I tell her the same trite thing I’ve heard a million times, the thing the counsellors say to people who show up too late, people who waited too long, people who just didn’t see it coming.
You know, they have no proof, I say. It could just as easily be these things go nowhere. It could be they just disappear. Nobody really knows.
She looks up at me and I think she’s going to slap me. Instead she laughs. You see that a lot, too, people laughing. She smears the cupcake against the floor, the way a smoker puts a cigarette out. She stands up and walks past me. She doesn’t bother taking back her forms.
Another thing you notice, working here—they don’t walk out the same way they walk in. If they show up confident, purposeful, they walk out looking at the floor. If they show up broken, they walk out with their heads held high. Something about this place does that to people. It inverts them.
I dip the mop. I clean the mess she’s left behind. There’s a window at the end of each hallway, but the sleet has turned heavy and I can’t see much outside.
Daughter of Cups
Kristyn Dunnion
“You know what to do,” he says. “Pretty girl like you.”
It’s like a baby eel in her hand, skin as smooth but hot, dry. Ohio lets go and it bounces against his beer belly. She laughs.
Don takes hold of her wrist. “Like this,” he says, pressing. His Live to Ride belt buckle jingles when her hand pumps. He breathes louder through his nose, a high-pitched whinny on the exhale. Ohio wants to give him a Kleenex but she doesn’t have one. She stares at the tattoos covering his forearms and biceps and peeking out the sleeves of his black T-shirt. Don’s face is tan and wrinkled, his stubble silver. His eyes crinkle shut.
Ohio closes hers, too. The curl and crush of waves smacking the sandy shore lulls her. Now she is Melanie Williams—blonde, popular, stacked—and Don is Kevin Moody, the cutest boy at school.
After, Don drives off and leaves her sitting at the end of the Lake Erie pier. She squints across to Sandusky. She can swim, but how far? She can dive, sink to the weedy muck and disintegrate surrounded by treasure and ballast from long-ago shipwrecks, succumb to the naiads, handmaids to the lake queen, as per campfire lore when she was a kid. Or she can walk back to town, north on the main road. Ohio hoists herself up and walks. She can keep going to the highway and hitch the hell out of here, or she can turn left at the only stoplight. She stands in the heart of town, eying the fingernail sliver of moon in the still-bright summer sky.
Eeny meany miney moe.
Friday night. The bank clock says eight-thirty. A car drives by and Darryl Hicks chucks a crushed beer can out the window.
Ohio turns left, toward home.
At the convenience store she scours magazines until Mr. Cooper yells, “Gotta be eighteen!” She buys Fun Dip. There’s a crisp twenty-dollar bill in her pocket, but she doesn’t break it, not for candy. Across the street the Bingo is packed—cars zigzag on the grass and sidewalk. She jumps on the gas station hose to ring the service bell, so Tommy Knight will have to get off his lazy ass. She keeps walking. The closer she gets, the stronger it smells: dirty chicken grease blowing from the KFC. The Colonel’s secret spice is her homing device. She sits on the KFC stoop. Stares at the empty road, eats Fun Dip. Dips the candy stick into the grape powder and licks. Dips and licks.
Her mom yells out the upstairs apartment window, “Ohio, where you been?”
“Nowhere!”
The window slams shut.
Ohio waits for something to fall from the sky.
Don had said, “What kind of name is that, anyway?”
He’d gotten it wrong, twice.
“That’s me,” she’d said, pointing over the lake.