Eyes the color of a pine forest, hair like wheat.
There came another jerk of the train.
Then his cry as he plunged into the gap, followed by a sound like a wet slap.
Then nothing but the grinding of the wheels.
In the morning, I hopped off that freight and walked across the Denver Millennium Bridge and into Union Station. The place was everything I’d hoped it would be. Beautiful and polished and filled with light and the bustle of people who had places to go, things to see. But for me, all the shiny and new, all the tantalizing smells and the gorgeous things in the gorgeous shops, all of it was just hollow glitter now.
Now I had to keep moving.
Whenever I sat still for too long, I became a bomb ready to explode.
Maybe that was what I’d always been. Maybe that was the definition of a murderer — a person not too much different from everyone else. Until someone finds their detonator.
Like a moth to a light, I went into the Tattered Cover bookstore. The main store was only a few blocks away. But this tiny space still caught the flavor. I searched through a rack of postcards and found the one Russ had sent me.
“May I help you?” a woman asked.
I turned. A woman not much older than me, with gold curls instead of black. Glasses not too different from mine. I could have been her, in a different life.
I wanted to ask her how long she’d worked there. If she’d ever seen a boy who looked like me. Instead I said, “Do you have any postcards that show Union Station before it was renovated?”
“You mean historical ones?”
“Not that long ago. The late 1990s or so. My mom came here back then.”
Her brow furrowed. “There aren’t any on the rack. But if you give me a second, I’ll look in the back room. We keep a lot of stuff related to Union Station there.”
She called out to someone named Josh to watch the register and disappeared through a door. When she returned, she carried a slim stack of cards.
“Like these?” she asked.
I flipped through them. One showed the Great Hall with its immense wooden benches, where my mom would have waited for her train. A different one flaunted the mezzanine; its enormous windows revealed a sky the color of a Colorado pinyon jay. And a third showed the wooden stairs leading from the hall up to the gallery, the stairs where my mother had posed long ago, back when she could still make music.
I bought them all.
I gave myself an hour to take in the rest of the station and to think about what might have been. I found two of the original wooden benches. I studied the white rosettes around the sconces — symbols of the columbine, the Colorado state flower. I spotted the original ticket window, now incorporated into the Terminal Bar. I paused beneath the hall’s sixty-five-foot ceiling and imagined walking up the stairs to the Crawford Hotel and staying in one of its specialty rooms — one styled like a luxurious nineteenth-century Pullman train car.
Then I went back outside under a gloriously blue sky and breathed in the air I’d planned on breathing for months, maybe years. I walked through the glass doors of the Union Station Pavilion, which housed the underground bus terminals, and descended the staircase. I checked the departure times and gates. I’d crash at the friend’s house for a couple of days while I decided on my next move — my next city, my next state, whatever took me away and away and away.
The tunnel seemed to go on for miles. Three football fields, I remembered reading. I located my gate and sank onto a bench.
A transit cop came strolling by. Bile rose hot and sharp in my throat. In the tunnel’s soft light, it was like all the metal on the officer glowed. Like he radiated. Like he was shedding sheets of electricity in curtains that snapped and sparked.
He drew closer.
Tell him, said a voice. It was an accident. Tell him.
I buried my face in my arms.
Tell him. Before it’s too late.
A familiar voice said, “Seph.”
I lifted my head before I could stop myself. Not three feet away from me stood PI Endcott.
The transit cop walked on by without a glance.
“Well, well,” Endcott said. “I’d’ve thought you were smarter than that, Seph. Purchasing a Denver bus pass with your debit card. Guess you thought we wouldn’t look back that far. Wouldn’t put two and two together. You’re the smartest kid in school, the teachers tell me. But here you are.”
He sat next to me, put a hand on my knee.
“It’s time to go home. Your dad’s got a few words he’d like to say to you.” He smirked and leaned in, took a sniff. “You smell, girl.”
He stood. I noticed for the first time how soft he’d gone since leaving the sheriff’s office. His belly poked at his shirt. His face carried rolls of fat around the neck, like linked sausages.
“Come on, girl.” When I stood, he gave me a push. “I’m right behind you.”
I dragged my feet all the way back out, feeling acceptance of my fate suck like mud at my heels. I heard Mom’s voice saying, Sometimes we start off with the wrong dream, that’s all.
Sometimes, I wanted to tell her, someone steals our dream.
Outside, the sun was still a blaze of glory in a sky like the vault of a chapel. People hurried by, gulping down sandwiches and lattes, checking their phones, chatting with friends.
I walked over to the light-rail tracks and watched a train approach.
“What are you doing?” Endcott gripped my elbow.
I had choices. Even with a blackened soul, I had choices.
There were a lot of different ways to live your life. When you’d done something you never thought you were capable of, it opened doors into a dark place filled with infinite possibility.
There was power to be had, once you found your detonator.
I thought hard about it as the train pulled into the station, only feet away. A stumble. A nudge.
But that would be letting a short-term goal get in the way of something far more important.
The train pulled to a stop.
Maybe I no longer deserved a shot. But my mom did.
Carnegie Hall, here we come.
I pulled free of Endcott’s grip and gave him a smile that made his eyes narrow. I turned on my heel, heading away from the vast station with its terminals and train tracks, its historical building and pavilions.
He hurried after me. “Seph? Persephone! Young lady, slow down.”
“Why don’t you walk faster?” I tossed the words over my shoulder. “I know my dad is dying to see me.”
Sangre
by D.L. Cordero
Auraria
“Gota.”
Rogelio heard the whisper from his threadbare blue recliner, drowsy brown eyes opening to the feel of goose bumps creeping up his legs. The bedroom he shared with his second-youngest brother was vacant, save himself, as the whole two-story brick house should’ve been despite the rustling in the hall. He leaned forward, straining to listen, looking at his watch.
Only five minutes past nine.
His trim black eyebrows knit together. His mother, father, sister, brothers, aunt, uncle, and cousins should all be at Mass, praying with the rest of the parish that continued to gather. He couldn’t bring himself to go with them, a hesitance that boiled into heated arguments with his mother. No matter how much she guilted him, he couldn’t be persuaded into stepping foot inside another católica after Archbishop Casey had every priest in Denver tell its people to vote for the bond that robbed Rogelio of his home.