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The old lady lay silently, though not exactly in peaceful slumber. Rather than resting in peace, her repose appeared violated by two city employees hovering over the bed. They were Smith City detectives. Her, or its, eyes were open accusingly, mouth gaping as if to say, “Leave me alone, you bastards.” At least that was Detective Sergeant Jablonski’s impression, and would have also been his choice of expletive if it were him being exposed to the world in a similar condition.

The body lay on its back on the bed, sheets twisted as if fighting its demise, an all too familiar sight to them both. Jablonski’s partner, Detective Second-Grade Edwards, stood in the open doorway to the room. It was a single in a cheap residential hotel. The coroner’s assistant had been called to certify death and he was waiting for her to appear.

Once a popular stay, luring visiting tourists and businessmen, the Statler Hotel had downgraded to cheap lodgings for local residents and prostitutes, showing its age with a sign reading “Stat_ _ _ _otel.” Even local pimps lived in better quarters around the corner.

“Here she is, Trix.” Edwards led the assistant coroner, named Trixie Thompson, over to the reposing body. Trixie’s looks did little to belie her name, in that the lady looked as though she would fit well on the stage of an ancient burlesque theater next door. A tall, fashionably dressed brunette, thick glasses magnified the image of large green eyes, accentuating their color.

“This okay?” she asked, nodding at a cluttered dresser top near the bed as a place to leave her bag.

“Better not. At least until you make your expert opinion, Trix,” John Jablonski told her. In that city, every death rated the heading of “homicide” unless, or until, the cause was known without doubt. Even little old ladies dying peacefully in bed.

“Here, this should be okay.” Using a hankie, he pulled over a kitchen chair that had been sitting in a corner.

Just one hell of a way to start a Friday, John thought.

Trixie sat a brown medical kit on the edge of the chair, laid out a few instruments, and began a simple but, to her, repetitive task of determining an initial opinion on cause of death. While John complained of a few times each week, Trixie repeated that duty three to eight times a day.

While she was busy, the detectives looked the room over. It seemed cut and dried, an old woman dying alone in bed. Neither detective nor the ME expected any complications. It was only bad luck that they’d caught the squeal on their way to work. Hell, it was bad enough, John thought, that they had to suffer through the constant chatter of radios in their official cars, but now the damned things were required in personal vehicles too. Detective work needed concentration, and who could concentrate while listening for a call sign among idle chatter?

“About time we had some free time,” Edwards said, looking out a dirty window at a brick wall. “Jane and I are supposed to go to a PTA meeting tonight. I’ve missed the last two. How you going to spend them?”

“Dunno. Probably sip cheap wine and watch TV.” John shrugged, watching Trixie. Single, he admired that view better than the brick wall showing through the outside window.

The landlady had knocked on Mabel Trum’s door that morning. Since cooking was not allowed in single rooms, the two older ladies normally breakfasted together in the hotel manager’s apartment. That morning, Mabel hadn’t shown up. Since they were such good friends, the landlady had checked on her. Discovering poor Mabel still asleep, she had shaken her by the shoulder, with no reaction. In her capacity, the landlady had seen many dead bodies and recognized her friend would never again be down for breakfast. Checking the magnets on her own refrigerator door, she had called the police to start events rolling.

“Well, John?” Edwards poked a pen at a ten by eleven inch photo of three people standing next to what looked like a Ford from the forties or fifties. It appeared to be a normal-looking shot for the time frame, but more like Bonnie and Clyde in that two of them had the handles of pistols protruding from their waistbands or pockets. Except by a trained policeman such as Larry Edwards, the weapons were barely discernible in the small print. He bent into dim light filtering through the dirty window to study the photo.

“With any luck we should have a weekend off for a change,” he said, looking closer. A rifle or shotgun barrel could be seen through the glass in the back window of the Ford.

“Hey, John. Take a look at this.”

Jablonski leaned over to pick the photo up with two fingers and his handkerchief, holding it to the light. “Don’t look like one of those amusement park backgrounds.” Jablonski studied the photo, glancing back and forth from the body to the teenage girl in the shot. “Looks like a younger edition of our body here, Larry. Wonder if she has a record?”

“I suppose we can run her prints after Trixie gets them? Wouldn’t hurt nothing,” Edwards answered, idly stirring items around on the dresser top with the tip of his pen.

The detectives were killing time until Trixie finished making her ruling on the cause of death from old age in some form or other. Although mildly curious, both knew they wouldn’t really bother running the prints. The two had too much other work to do if they hoped for time off. After Trixie finished, the detectives would search the room for identification, notify the meat wagon and the deceased’s relatives, if any, then go on to other things. After finding a cup of coffee and donuts on the way to the station, of course. Later, Trixie would send a report to them giving information to use in their own one-page summation. That would be the end of it. The two had up to a half dozen of those deaths to check out in an average week.

“I don’t think you guys are going to make it home this weekend.” Trixie interrupted their puttering around. “Come here a minute.” She had the corpse’s head cocked to the side and, using a penlight, showed them several red spots on the exterior of the left ear, along with a small glint of red inside. A dribble of dried blood led from the inner ear down to the earlobe, hardly noticeable unless you were looking.

“I’ll have to take the body back for Dr. Johnson to do an autopsy, gentlemen. It looks from here as though it’s an ice pick wound, and someone has jammed toilet paper in to stop the bleeding. Sorry fellows.” She grinned up at them as though she weren’t all that sorry.

Icepick. Icepick? Jablonski thought. Where the hell did you find one of those things these days? A few years back he had even looked, and couldn’t find one anywhere.

Glancing at his partner, he said, sighing, “Looks like a very long night.”

* * *

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Sonny Jones is twenty, can barely read, and has spent his whole life keeping his little sister safe from a mother who drinks away every dollar the state sends them. When Janie gets caught stealing the wrong man’s pants, the two of them do the only thing they know how to do: they run. What follows is a joyride through stolen cars, pawn shops, bad decisions, and a gang of kids just as lost as they are, while a state detective closes in behind them.

Told entirely in Sonny’s own voice. Blunt, funny, and heartbreaking by turns, Johnson’s Roost is a story about what happens when nobody ever taught you another way to live.

Excerpt:

“Sonny, get me that other bottle, honey,” Mama orders from the couch. “And a Coke. I’m about out.”

Mama’s drunk again, flat on her ass. She says, and can prove to social services, that her back is bad. Shit, her back’s bad from lying on that doc’s table while he screws her. That’s all what’s wrong with it.

Last week, Mama was out back, digging a garden to plant flowers. Her back was okay then. The doc, he don’t give a flying fuck since he gets laid for only five minutes of writing a paper. Then she shows the welfare an gets her money.

Me an my sister Janie, along with Mama, have to live off that money she gets, buying food an clothes, an school supplies. The state pays our utilities, so I got all the free water I can drink, needing it to drown the baloney an beans in my stomach.

“I found the Coke, Mama, but can’t find your vodka,” I call back to her.

We live in a small farming town in mid-Ohio, A-hi-a, as we calls it. It’s called Johnson’s Roost, named after a black family with money that moved here after the Civil War.

Course they was driven off later by white farmers, but only after they’d cleared the land an built up a farm. My ancestors quickly moved in to claim it, only to be hung for our audacity an thievery an chased off the land itself, only getting to keep the farmhouse. The house, being essentially worthless since it was half-burned down in the fighting, we still own. It’s still half-burnt, an that was a hundred and fifty years ago. Well, in our favor, it ain’t as bad inside as it looks from outside. Though the roof leaks in my bedroom, it leaks into a hole in the floor. No big thing.

“It’s there somewhere, Sonny,” she says about the vodka.

I can hear her moving around, the couch squeaking like a herd’a meeses.

“I gotta do everything myself? I work my tush off for you two and get nothing in return.”

Mama ain’t about to do no manual labor, an ain’t, same as the rest of us, got no brains for nothing else. I ain’t never had no old man, him being one of a steady stream of guys in the front door an out the back, timed so as not to be seen by the next. Each one leaves a five-dollar bill on the kitchen counter if Mama is sober enough to insist.

Me an Janie ain’t got half the clothes we need. I got me two pair of pants to her three, an we share four shirts, mix an match. Me being twenty an her nineteen, an close enough in size, they fit good enough. Our shoes ain’t two the same, not even the same color. We keep an eye on trash cans as we pass, hoping to find some what matches. Socks are saved for social functions, standing stiff in a corner of my room until needed.

***

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This little corner of the internet is where I pour my thoughts, memories, and musings. It’s where I try to connect with you through the art of storytelling—one post, one reflection, one wandering thought at a time.

Steve Earle was at the jukebox in a seedy bar when a low cloud of cigarette smoke cut the room in half. He sat in a booth with a clear view of the big screen and pulled a packet of Marlboro out of his shirt pocket.

‘I thought you were giving up.’ Terri was standing behind him, balancing a tray of beers on his right hand.

‘Huh! You’re sucking in more tobacco smoke than I am, just working here,’ Steve said. ‘You look tired.’

Terri shrugged and brushed loose strands of hair from his eyes.

‘It’s been busy,’ he said. ‘Quietening down now, though.’

He motioned his head towards the big screen.

‘You seen them interviewing Gene yet?’

Steve shook his head and lit the cigarette.

‘Heard about it. Thought I’d have a beer and see if I could catch it on the news.’

‘You’re not going to hear much, not over this racket.’

‘Don’t matter. Just want to see what Gene looks like on the big screen.’

Terri smiled.

‘Fatter, balder, that’s about it,’ he said, taking a beer off the tray and placing it on the table in front of him.

‘Isn’t someone going to miss that?’ he asked, somewhat guiltily.

‘They’re five or six drinks past missing anything. I have a break in fifteen. Meet me outside for some fresh air.’

‘Sure.’

Terri walked away through the crowded bar, a sad swing in his walk, as if to say, someone take me away from here.

They’d been friends for three years, ever since Terri came west from New York.

***

Steve lived in a trailer. Two miles between them. The night Terri moved onto the park, Steve was quick to welcome him and spent most of the evening chatting about why he had moved to New Mexico.

‘It must be quiet after the big city,’ Steve said. ‘I don’t suppose anyone leaves there unless they have to.’ He wasn’t expecting an answer. Terri never gave one.

It really was none of his business.

But then, unexpectedly, Terri relented. ‘My father threw me out of the house after a family friend said he’d seen me holding hands with another guy in Central Park. My father didn’t like fags, nor was he going to have one in his house. Funny thing, really, the guy I was dating found someone else the same day. I was left with nowhere to go, so I ended up at the bus station and took the first bus out, and kept taking them until I ended up in New Mexico. There was no plan; it just seemed like the right place to stop, with enough money left to rent a place and find a job,’ he said, then continued after a pause, ‘I had never known that New Mexico was alien central. I came from a strict Catholic family who believed the only extraterrestrials came from Heaven. I grew out of that, into cynicism. I didn’t really believe in anything much at the time.’

The problem was, Steve did believe, and more than that, he was paranoid about it. Steve began to assume that Terri might be a government agent. Such a thought only fuelled his paranoia, to a point where he was about to leave the trailer.

Terri smiled. He had read Steve’s face.

‘Of course, people should believe what they want,’ he said, ‘that’s perfectly fair. Like you might believe I’m a government agent, Steve, which, if I can reassure you, gays are not welcome in those kinds of agencies. But tell me, why are you here?’

***

Gene had suddenly appeared on the screen. His was the second story, after a couple of soldiers who had been killed in an ambush in the Middle East.

Terri was right. Steve couldn’t hear the newsreader, but the captions at the bottom of the screen were enough.

Under Gene: Filmed UFOs.

Gene looked earnest as he answered questions. When they cut back to the reporter, instead of the normal smirk that accompanied these stories, there was excitement.

The caption changed: Clearest images captured to date. Government has asked for a copy of the video.

The scene cut from the interview to Gene’s tape. As it began to roll, Steve sat forward. The noise in the bar subsided, and people turned to look at the screen. It was shot during the day, which was unusual. Normally they were grainy night shots of dancing lights. But these were more than lights. They were metal balls, three of them. With nothing to gauge them against, it was hard to tell if they were the size of a baseball or the size of a football field. They moved quickly through the camera’s field of vision, slowing only once as if they wanted to look at Gene, then they were gone.

The noise in the bar resumed, as the story returned to the reporter standing in front of the trailer park sign. An ET-ville sign was visible over his shoulder, along with the comments underneath: ‘more sightings and alien abductions than any other park in the State.’

‘You ready for some fresh air, Steve?’

Terri grabbed his hand and pulled Steve out of the booth. They walked through the bar and into the parking lot out the back.

Terri had always seemed to know Steve better than Steve knew him. There was always some distance between them, something in both their lives that neither had fully revealed.

Steve breathed in the clear night air.

It reminded him of the first night of their friendship.

***

After three years, Terri knew everything about Steve. His father’s constant look of disappointment, his first unsuccessful attempt at straight sex and even less successful attempt at gay sex. Anything Terri found out about Steve was revealed slowly, in disjointed memories that Terri had to put together later.

The potted biography: Steve came from California, a product of a broken family. He’d been married twice, both ended badly. The first produced a son, who was drinking at fifteen and had run away at eighteen. Never showed up again. Steve liked New Mexico; he liked the climate and the fact that people, for the most part, kept conversations short. He worked as much overtime as he could get, hoping to have enough to trade up from the trailer one day.

Steve didn’t have many friends, spending most of his spare time with Terri. His reason: he liked talking to Terri.

***

Terri climbed onto the hood of a pickup, leant back and looked at the stars.

‘Can you believe Gene?’ Terri said. ‘Someone was telling me he’d make a couple of hundred thousand from selling that film.’

Steve shrugged, propped himself against the driver’s side door and lit a cigarette.

‘That’ll make some televangelist happy.’

Terri laughed, then leaned across and took the cigarette out of Steve’s mouth. He puffed on it once, but didn’t inhale, then crushed it out on the heel of his shoe.

‘I don’t know why you don’t give up,’ he said.

‘It’s about the only vice I have these days.’

A couple of guys came out of the bar, arguing about some football match in the distant past. They found their car, sat inside and turned up the radio. Springsteen blasted across their conversation for a moment, then disappeared with their taillights into the street.

‘Do you believe that film?’

Steve shifted a little, looked uncomfortable.

‘I guess I want to believe. How about you?’

‘Sure. The same, but you know me. I’m a born sceptic.’

Terri looked up at the sky and saw the flashing lights of a passenger jet moving through the stars.

‘When I was a kid, and my dad and I still got along, he took me to a play. Off-Broadway. It was by an Irish guy called Brendan Behan, and it was about a man who was waiting to be executed. They called him the Quare Fellow, but you never saw him in the play, just the guards and other prisoners. The whole thing was about how the execution affected them.

‘I remember this scene where a guard is speaking to a prisoner the night before the execution. I memorised the lines. He says, “It’s a great night for the stars. If there is life on any of them, I wonder if the same things happen there.” Then he talks about some poor slob on another planet waiting to be hanged and looking out of his cell and looking at our earth and moon for the last time.’

Steve stopped a minute, and thought about that night with his father. Afterwards, his father had taken him to a pub and bought him a lemonade, while he drank Guinness. They listened to an Irish band, and though they hadn’t talked much, it was probably the happiest they’d ever been together. Steve hadn’t spoken to him in years and probably never would again.

‘There was a time in my life when all I wanted was to be on another planet,’ he said. ‘I figured it couldn’t be worse than here. I even took something once, figured that if I died, I might wake up somewhere else.’

‘What happened?’

Steve shrugged. ‘I don’t know what they were, but I just threw up for a couple of days.’

Terri was quiet for a while, then lay back on the hood of the pickup.

‘Did I ever tell you about my father?’

‘You told me something. Not much, just how you left and never saw him again.’

‘Dad was a drunk, a bad one.’

Steve nodded.

‘That happens,’ he said.

‘He wasn’t always like that. When I was little, he was the best man in the world. Always there, looking after mom and me. Then he changed.’

Terri stopped for a moment. Steve knew he was thinking whether he wanted to finish the story. Terri was like that. Sometimes he would start to let you into parts of his past, then change his mind and the subject.

But not tonight.

‘I was eight years old when Dad disappeared. He was gone for a couple of weeks, and then they found him wandering on some back road, hundreds of miles away. Here, actually. In New Mexico. For a while he didn’t know who he was, so they kept him in some state hospital. When his memory finally came back, they shipped him home. I remember being so excited. We thought we’d lost him forever and this was like some sort of resurrection. Except it wasn’t. When he walked through the door, I could tell.’

He paused again. Steve prodded.

‘What?’

‘He was different. It was like something had been drained out of him. He just looked nervous and was sweaty all the time. Then he started drinking, and that made him angry. First he only argued with my mother, then he started hitting her.’

‘He ever hit you?’

Terri shook his head.

‘The police came around a couple of times and then the minister. It was him who started my father talking, though I think he was sorry he did, when he heard what Dad said. He told us that he’d been pulled up by a light into this giant ship. That he’d spent weeks there while they probed him and watched him. Then they dropped him off on that road.

‘I remember him telling the minister that the worst thing was that they didn’t say a word to him. Not one word about where they came from. Why they were here. And so now all he had were these questions that he couldn’t get out of his head.’

Terri sat up, looked relieved, unburdened.

‘Sounds like a Spielberg movie, doesn’t it?’ he said.

Steve nodded, lit another cigarette.

‘I guess he’s got to get his inspiration from somewhere,’ Steve said.

‘He left when I was ten, a week before my birthday. Just like my kid. Never heard from him again. I always thought that maybe they’d come back for him. Or maybe he’s just some drunk living on the streets somewhere.’

‘Is that why you came to New Mexico?’ Terri asked.

Steve thought about it for a moment, then shrugged.

‘I don’t know. I just can’t get over Gene seeing those goddamn things. I’ve been here as long as him and never seen anything. Not one goddamn light in the sky.’

Terri slid off the hood and stood there looking up. There was another plane moving across the sky.

‘You think aliens have flashing tail lights?’ he asked, smiling.

‘Who knows. They have to indicate somehow, I guess.’

Terri took Steve’s arm.

‘Time to go back to the drunks.’ He grabbed the remains of the cigarette out of Steve’s mouth with his free hand.

‘You’ll never go to heaven if you smoke,’ he said, and then walked Steve back to the bar.


***

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Author’s Note: There’s nothing unusual about this story; it is full of clichés, almost to the point of boredom, and for most of us, this very real story is just that. But too many find it tragic, unforgettable. I saw a tragedy happen in real time yesterday. This is a fictional account of that observation.

***

When it happened, everything seemed to go perfectly still. It was as if time itself stopped for those few seconds. Those were the seconds that changed my life forever. I have heard many people say that if they could go back in time, they would change this or that. There is only one moment I would give anything to change.

Here is what happened.

First, let me introduce myself. My name is Dave Archer, and I have a brother named Carl, two years younger than me. Sure, we had our battles growing up, as most siblings do. As we got older, we became more tolerant of each other’s company, and eventually we learned we actually liked hanging out together: parties, get-togethers, all of it. He was my best friend.

Anyway, when it happened I was twenty-five, and he was twenty-three. We were on our way to meet our girlfriends. I was dating a blonde named Lisa, and Carl was dating a girl named Wendy. We’d met them both in high school, and both relationships were going strong. Carl told me he was planning to ask Wendy to marry him. I knew they’d be happy together. I also knew Lisa would start bugging me about marriage the second she heard about Carl’s plans.

We were headed to the movies to see the latest comedy the girls were dying to watch. Personally, Carl and I would’ve preferred an action flick or a horror movie, but sometimes in life you make compromises. When we were a few feet from the theatre, Carl realised he’d left his wallet in the car. I offered to run back and get it, since I was faster than him, but he waved me off and said he’d meet me out front.

I started toward the theatre, and that’s when I heard the screech of brakes behind me. A loud thud followed. A woman screamed and ran toward me, her face frozen in shock at whatever she’d just seen. It was Wendy.

Even before I saw her face, I knew what had happened. I knew in my heart that something terrible had happened to my brother. Call it a sixth sense, call it whatever you like. All I knew in that moment was that everything had gone still, and I felt like I’d been dropped into a nightmare.

I didn’t want to, but I knew I had to see what happened. I slowly turned around and saw a crowd gathering around my brother, lying on the cold road. A pool of blood surrounded him. He wasn’t moving at all. The driver sat behind his red van in a daze. I later learned he’d been drinking and had run a red light.

Without a moment’s hesitation, I ran to him, screaming his name. I couldn’t believe what had happened. I didn’t want to believe it. I wished it were some weird joke he’d cooked up to freak me out. But when I reached him, I knew he wasn’t joking. It was all too real. My brother, my only sibling and my best friend in the entire world, was dead.

It didn’t take long for the police and paramedics to arrive. Wendy held Carl in her arms, tears streaming down her face. All I could do was stare, stunned. I still had a hard time believing what had just happened.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the police cuff the drunk driver. That’s when it hit me: that man was responsible for what happened to Carl. He’d stolen him from Wendy, from his friends and family, from me. A rage built inside me. I had never been so angry in my life. It felt like something else had taken over. All I wanted was revenge.

I charged at him like an angry bull at a bullfighter, determined to make him pay. It was a good thing another officer was nearby. If he hadn’t stopped me, I would have killed the man who killed Carl.

The officer who stopped me wasn’t your average cop. He was more like a walking mountain than a man. He tackled me to the ground with ease and pinned me there. Even in my rage, his strength held me down. It took a while, but I finally settled. I’d never been that angry before, and I hope I never am again.

The same officer brought me a coffee from a nearby shop as I sat on the curb. I was surprised by the gesture. After I thanked him, he told me he understood: most people would have reacted the same way. He even admitted he might have torn the guy apart himself.

He told me he needed to take a statement and asked if I was up to it. I said I was, and gave him my account of what happened. As I talked, something suddenly hit me: we both still lived at home, saving up for places of our own, paying our parents room and board. Mom and Dad would have to be told. It wouldn’t be easy for anyone.

I told the officer that Carl and I still lived with our folks, and that they had to be told. He offered to handle it himself, and I was tempted to let him. But I didn’t. I told him it might be easier coming from me. He patted my shoulder and stood, his eyes telling me he didn’t envy what had to be done. Now I understood how the police must feel delivering that kind of news. This was worse. I had to tell my parents that their son was dead.

I still remember, clear as day, how our parents reacted. When I walked in, they read on my face that something was wrong. I told them, fighting to hold myself together, and my mother ran upstairs and locked herself in her room. Dad and I could hear her crying for the next five hours. Dad sat in his chair in silence for a few minutes, then looked at me and asked how I was doing. I told him the truth, including how I’d reacted when I saw the drunk driver in handcuffs. He nodded, went to the kitchen, and came back with a bottle of whiskey and two shot glasses. “I think we could both use a shot or two,” he said. My father was never much of a drinker, but he kept a bottle around for nights like this. I needed it, and I was grateful.

That was two days ago, and it still feels like a bad dream. I keep hoping I’ll wake up any moment, that Carl will walk in and say, “Hey, I’m not really dead, it was all a mistake.” I know that will never happen. Today is his funeral. Today we say goodbye.

Right now I’m sitting at his desk, waiting for it to be time to leave. We each had our own rooms, but there are good memories in this one. We used to play cards and board games in here on rainy days. I used to sneak him cookies when he was grounded, and he’d do the same for me. He was always a huge baseball fan, and his trophies for best catcher still sit on his dresser. One of his favourite posters hangs over the bed.

Looking around the room, it hits me: he’ll never use it again. He and Wendy will never get married. I won’t dance at his wedding. He’ll never have kids of his own. No more good times, no more beers together. It isn’t fair. He had his whole life ahead of him.

It’s time to go, and I really don’t want to. I don’t want to say goodbye to Carl. I’d give anything to have him back, even my own soul, if that’s what it took. I slowly get up from the chair and go to the door, taking one more look around the empty room. This pain is mine to carry now. It’ll ease with time, but the scar will always remain. The sorrow overwhelms me as I close Carl’s door for the very last time.

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Richie Bartucci kicked the screen door open with such force that it bounced off the side of the house and nearly caught him in the face on the backswing. Cursing, muttering, he started to pace, lighting a cigarette and blowing a thick cloud of smoke through his nostrils. He was mad, violent mad, a vein swelling in his temple, squirming like a big fat worm just under the skin. Growling, he kicked a potted plant clean across the front yard.

“Nadine, get out here, right now!”

“I don’t want to,” whined a voice from inside the house.

“If you don’t get your butt out here, I’ll come in and drag you out!”

Moments later, his sister appeared in the doorway. Hair in disarray, blouse torn, a purple mouse shrinking her right eye to a watery slit. She stood there sobbing, her good eye unwilling to meet his glare.

“Let’s go, Nadine. We’re gonna find the guy that did this to you.”

“Please. Let the police handle it.”

Richie snorted a laugh. “The Keystone Kops in this town? You’ve got to be kidding me. They couldn’t find a week-old corpse in a closet.”

Maria Bartucci swept forward and wrapped a pudgy arm around her daughter’s shoulder. “There’ll be none of this big-brother machismo, Richard. The time of vendettas is over, a relic of the past.” She combed Nadine’s hair with her fingers and gently touched the bruised eye, and the girl flinched. “I’m going to call the police right now, and you can stop your foolish talk.”

“Pop would’ve done the same thing and you know it.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt about that.” A pained look spread across Maria’s ample face. “But your father is gone, Richard. He’s, he’s nothing but a memory now.”

“An ever-present memory,” Richie retorted, taking in his mother’s black dress, the black stockings, the black shoes. “So now it’s up to me.”

He flung the screen door open, grabbed Nadine’s arm and hauled her onto the porch. “Let’s go, sis. We’re gonna cruise till we find this creep. And when we do, God help him, I’m gonna.”

“Please, Richie. I’ve been through enough.”

Ignoring his mother, Richie dragged Nadine to his candy-apple-red Camaro, opened the door and shoved her into the passenger seat. He hurried around, dropped behind the wheel and sat a moment, fuming, before firing the engine. The vein in his temple pulsed as though it might burst.

“Okay. Tell me again what this guy looked like.”

“I told you.”

“Well, tell me again.”

“Elvis, for crying out loud. He looked exactly like Elvis.”

“C’mon, sis. How much could someone look like Elvis?”

“He could be his twin. Black hair, slick with some kind of goop, combed, you know, just the way Elvis used to comb his. Pouting lips. Even a white jumpsuit, with, with red rhinestones.”

“Ah, c’mon. What kind of idiot goes around in a white jumpsuit with red rhinestones?”

Nadine bristled and reached for the door handle. “Well, if you don’t believe me, let’s end this stupid vengeance quest right here and now.”

“Okay, okay, okay. Elvis it is. If the creep’s still out there, he’ll be sticking out like a sore thumb, won’t he?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“There’s no guessing about it.” Richie threw the Camaro into first, stomped the accelerator and screeched away from the curb. “Once I’m done with this jerk and the cops scrape him off the pavement, he’ll be singing ’Jailhouse Rock.’”

“And you too, maybe.”

Richie sped onto Main Street, downshifting and weaving through traffic, ignoring the honks and shouts of the drivers he nearly broadsided. He switched on the radio and, wouldn’t you know it, “Love Me Tender,” by none other than the King. Nadine sank lower in her seat and let out a near-hysterical laugh. To Richie, the syrupy voice had taken on the sound of fingernails dragged down a blackboard. Cursing, he whacked the radio with a fist, then winced and sucked the blood from a ripped knuckle. Stuck behind a slow delivery truck, he shot right, cutting off a car and forcing the driver to stand on the brakes.

“Slow down, for Pete’s sake. What’s the sense of this whole deal if you get us both killed?”

“You just keep your eyes open for the jerk. You see him, gimme a shout.”

“You mean eye. In case you failed to notice, I’ve only got the one good one at the moment.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. I can’t help you. I’ve gotta watch the traffic.”

“Oh, really? Is that what you’ve been doing?”

“Just remember, Nadine. This whole thing’s for you.”

Nadine cackled. “Bull crap it is. This whole thing’s for you and your precious big-brother ego. You, Richie. You and only you.”

“There are plenty of chicks out there who wish they had a big brother like me. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Millions.”

“Oh, pleeease.”

Once they hit the centre of the city, the traffic went bumper to bumper, the humid air sickly with exhaust. It was a little after noon, and the sidewalks were crammed with people hurrying off to lunch, men in suits and women scurrying on high heels. Horns blared, tempers climbed, engines roared impatiently. Nadine spotted a policeman and thought about calling him over to blurt out the whole sordid story, then thought better of it and twisted her hands in her lap.

“You seen him yet, Nadine?”

“If I had, I think I’d have said something, no?”

“Yeah. No. Who knows. Maybe you want to avoid a scene.”

And then, as if she’d summoned him by thinking it, she saw the guy. My God, what were the odds? There he was, white jumpsuit and all, walking into the underground garage of the Ramada Inn. Should she say something, or keep her mouth shut? Too late. Richie’s head snapped round at the sound of her sucking in a breath.

“You see him, Nadine?”

“Uh.”

“Nadine, for Christ’s sake. Did you see the creep?”

A weary sigh.

“Answer me, Nadine!”

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeees. Please, Richie, let’s call the cops.”

“Where? Where, Nadine?”

“He just went into the garage of the Ramada Inn.”

Richie slammed the brakes, shifted into reverse and backed between two oncoming cars, fishtailing, nearly clipping a fender. He spun the wheel to the right, thudded over a speed bump, and shot into the garage. Rubber squealing off the concrete walls, he braked beside the ticket dispenser, his front bumper nudging the yellow security arm. Growling, he waited for the ticket, snatched it free and just about clipped the arm again as he stamped on the gas.

“You see him, Nadine?”

“Yes.”

“Where, where, where? Talk to me.”

“He just disappeared up ahead.”

And then, as they squealed around a corner, Richie saw Elvis for himself, walking around a vintage 1957 Cadillac.

“Wow. Look at that Caddy, Richie.”

“Man, this creep goes whole hog. The King lives.” Richie pulled into an empty slot and left the motor idling. “Okay, Nadine. You stay put while I take care of business. Won’t be long. The clown looks like a pushover.”

“Don’t hurt him too badly. Please.”

“After what he did to you, you oughta be hoping I split his skull.”

Richie shook Nadine’s hand off his arm, flung the door open, jumped out and pushed it quietly shut. Boy, was he primed for this. Left, right, uppercut, roundhouse. The guy was going to wish he’d never been born. He could see it now, the creep bleeding on his knees, begging for mercy. But mercy wasn’t in Richie’s dictionary, not today. Running silently on his toes like a ballet dancer, he closed the gap between them.

“Hey. You. Scumbag.”

The man turned and stared, one brow raised in question. Oh yeah, Elvis for sure. Jet-black hair glistening with pomade, swirled into a pompadour. The pouting lips, just as Nadine had said. And a jumpsuit, white as snow, blazing with red rhinestones.

“Are you talking to me?” asked the man, in a syrupy Tennessee drawl.

“Yeah, you pervert. I’m talking to you.”

“Pervert? Did I hear you right?”

“What else would I call a sub-species that beats up a seventeen-year-old girl? Didn’t quite get all you were after, though, did you?”

“I, uh, don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve got me mixed up with someone else, friend.”

Richie barked a laugh. “Oh, I don’t think there’s much chance of that, pal. Now it’s time for some of your own medicine. More than some, actually. A whole frigging lot.”

“If you don’t leave me alone, I’m calling the cops.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure. Those are the last dudes you want to see.”

As the man slipped his key into the Caddy’s lock, Richie rushed in and grabbed his arm. That was all it took. With surprising speed the guy whirled and threw a punch that Richie ducked in the nick of time. He drove a fist into the midsection, right on a fat rhinestone, and followed it with a knee to the chin as the man doubled over. Elvis reeled backwards, arms pinwheeling for balance. There was a thud as his head met the concrete wall. With a groan and a twitch, he slid down it and ended up sitting on the floor, head bowed, chin on his chest.

Dancing foot to foot, bobbing and weaving, Richie lashed the air with his fists. “C’mon, Elvie. You don’t get away that easy. Get up.”

Not a move.

“On your feet, slimeball. There’s no playing possum with me.”

Then a terrible thought crawled into Richie’s brain, and he took a few hesitant steps forward. God. The creep didn’t look like he was breathing. He knelt, heart hammering, and felt for a pulse at the limp wrist. Nothing. He moved his fingers to the carotid. Still nothing. No. It couldn’t be. It had taken seconds. A few lousy seconds. Richie scrambled across the floor on his hands and knees and peered out from between the Caddy and a Land Rover. Not a soul in sight. Thank the Lord for small favours. He jumped up, bolted to his car and dropped behind the wheel, taking a moment to get his heart under control.

“Richie? You okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine. What happened? You’re white as a ghost.”

“Nothing much happened. Gave the idiot a quick right and he went down like, like a sack of potatoes.”

“There’s more to it than that, Richie.”

“Nadine, please. Just shut the hell up. I’ll tell you later. I promise.”

Richie threw the Camaro into reverse and burned rubber toward the exit, trying to arrange his face into something nonchalant for the attendant.

The old man squinted at the ticket. “You just got here, by the looks.”

“Uh, yeah. Remembered I had a prior engagement. Alzheimer’s at twenty-two, ya know.”

“Well, be it an hour or a minute, it’ll cost you five bucks.”

Richie worked a five, lost it, then caught it out of the air. His hand shook so badly the old man had to grab for the bill three times before he plucked it from his fingers.

“Shaking like that, you’ve got the Alzheimer’s for sure.”

“Yeah, yeah. Take it easy, pops.”

“You too.”

Richie shot onto the street without looking and nearly broadsided a city bus. Sweaty palms clamped to the wheel, dizzy and sick to his stomach, he could hardly concentrate. A bead of sweat stung his eye. He blinked it away and almost hit the bus a second time.

“Come on, Richie, what happened back there? You’re a bundle of nerves.” Then Nadine’s head snapped toward the sidewalk, her eyes going wide as saucers. “Wait a second. Wait, wait, wait. It, it wasn’t that guy in the garage after all. That’s him. That’s the real one, over there!”

“What the bejesus are you talking about?”

“Over there, Richie. That’s the man. That’s the guy who attacked me.”

“Are you out of your frigging gourd?” Richie looked where she was pointing and saw another Elvis, this one done up in a purple jumpsuit festooned with pink rhinestones. “Wha, what the hell is going on here?”

“No. No. It’s not him either. Over there, coming out of that restaurant. That’s him. That’s him for sure. No doubt about it this time. Oh yeah. That’s him.”

Yet another Elvis, this one sliding on sunglasses, dressed in a fifties sport coat and blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up.

And then, to cap the whole insane business, Richie caught the sign out front of the Ramada Inn, and stamped the brakes so hard a police cruiser ploughed straight into his rear bumper. He could only stare, eyes bugging, mouth flapping like a fish on a dock.

There, in big bold letters: WELCOME ELVIS IMPERSONATORS OF THE WORLD.

The laugh died in Nadine’s throat. On the sidewalks they were everywhere now, a dozen, two dozen, gold lamé and black leather and white satin, pompadours shining in the noon sun, and every last one of them looked exactly like the man Richie had left propped against the garage wall. Exactly like the man who did it. Exactly like the man who didn’t.

Behind him, the cruiser door opened. Unhurried. The scuff of a shoe on the road.

Nadine was still saying it, quiet now, to nobody. “That’s him. That’s him. That’s him.”

Richie didn’t turn around. He was looking at the mouth of the garage, dark and cool beyond the booth, where one Elvis out of all the Elvises in the world was never going to get up and walk out into the sun. And in the few lousy seconds it took the officer’s knuckles to reach the window, he understood he would never know whether the man had done a single thing to Nadine, or to anybody. He would never know one true thing about him, except that he was dead, and that he had looked exactly like Elvis.

***

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When I took my life, I took my affections, my reasoning, my passion. Some said it was merciful, to stop at the point of love, to cease the agony of living without it. That is romantic nonsense. What ended me was the madness of secrets, the stories never shared, the love denied, the wintry passages through boredom, the harmonic intervals followed by summers of discovery.

The killing was easy. The light of my day went out and held no fascination for me. The day before, I was breathing and smiling, charming all I knew, a salesman of wit and charisma.

It was time to reinvent myself, to hide from view, from past affections, from criticism. I killed my brilliance, split my spirit, ended sorrow, and still kept people believing I walked among them.

I remember myself, fleetingly, the way one recalls a dream days later. I am purified of all wrongdoing, released of desire, living now in a world that is my salvation. Gone is the egoism of adolescence, the studious optimism, the hourglass of nocturnal melodies.

There are nights I wish to hail him, this deader-than-dead man, to learn the secret of his wintry nights, his visitations, the simplicity of his breathing. But to my relief, I only ever see him sinking beneath tides.

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There is something strange about coming home after all these years. The passport says I'm British. My voice still carries echoes of home. Yet when the aircraft wheels kiss the runway, I feel less like a man returning home than a visitor arriving with memories in his suitcase.

Then I see my son.

The miles disappear. He opens the gate to his garden, a place he has shaped with patient hands. Flowers nod in the breeze, birds chatter from hidden branches, and the afternoon sun spills across the lawn as if it has been waiting for us.

There is always a chair ready, always a cold beer within reach, always the quiet assurance that I belong. Except I don't. Not really. The garden isn't home. The street isn't home. Even London, for all its familiar sounds and old brick terraces, isn't home anymore. It only feels like home because my son is there.

Home, I've discovered, is no longer a place marked on a map. It's wherever your children laugh without needing you, yet still make room for you at the table. We spend afternoons talking about everything and absolutely nothing.

We sip beer while the shadows lengthen across the grass. We climb into beautifully kept classic cars whose polished dashboards seem to remember younger men than we are today.

We watch football together, shouting advice to players who can't hear us and probably wouldn't listen if they could. We wander beside the Thames, watching the river do what rivers have always done: carry yesterday quietly into tomorrow. These are simple things. Old parents' things.

The funny part is that my son is getting old too. I still catch myself looking at him and seeing the young lad. Then I notice the silver threading through his hair, the careful way he rises from a chair, the conversations about aches that would once have bored him senseless. Time is a patient thief. It steals youth so gently that we hardly notice until one day we find ourselves comparing reading glasses.

There is no sadness in that thought, only gratitude. We have reached an age where being together matters more than what we do together. The beers taste better because they are shared. The walk around the park with the dog means more because we walk it side by side. Even the comfortable silences have become conversations of their own.

When I leave again, people ask if it was good to be home. I always smile. They've asked the wrong question. England isn't home.

My son is.

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There’s a particular kind of quiet in the Dales that you only notice once you’ve lived in it a while. Two workmen leaning on a ranch fence, smoking and watching the horses on the big estate up the valley. A wife running the village dress shop, doling out gossip and diabetes diagnoses in equal measure. A husband who’s thirty years married and still gets told off for a ketchup stain on his tie. A drunk called Danny touching everyone for a pound outside the newsagent’s. Sunday golf, a semi-final he’s got no business winning, and a wife who thinks his dreaming should be “kept down to summat sensible.”

Home, James starts here — in the small, well-worn rhythms of James and Eileen Parr’s life in a Dales village, thirty years into a marriage that runs on banter, mutual exasperation, and the kind of love that’s stopped needing to say so out loud. It’s the sort of ordinary evening you’ve had a hundred times: guests coming for dinner, a gin and tonic, the vicar running late, a joke about Beethoven turned down too quiet.

And then, without warning, it isn’t ordinary anymore.

What follows is a story about what a small community actually does when one of its own is in trouble — the doctor who drops everything, the workmen who show up at the church, the sister who flies in from Ireland with “just in case” supplies for a wake. And it’s a story about what comes after: the strange, unglamorous work of building a life back up, one lawn mowed and one conservatory designed at a time, until, carefully, unhurriedly, something like hope finds its way back in.

It’s funny before it’s sad, and warmer than either. If you know what it’s like to live somewhere small enough that everyone’s business is everyone’s business, and to be loved in that particular, unspoken, Yorkshire way, you’ll know these people before you’ve finished the first page.

Read Home, James now on JKTalla.

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I needed to know when the dreaded corporate meeting would start. You know the kind. A bunch of self-centred muckety-mucks gathering around a table to discuss the company’s latest problem. This always results in a pattern of “blame-storming” until some poor sap with the least influence and the least to do with the problem gets all the blame. The satisfied attendees adjourn while the problem remains on the table like a glop of cancerous pus. Uncleaned. Unresolved. Still there. Rent’s still due, though.

Thinking about the painful farce to come, I stuck my finger in my ear and pulled on my lower lip while balancing on my right leg. This wasn’t self-abuse to distract me from the coming pain of the meeting — well, not only that. I was rebooting my memory chip. It wasn’t working properly. I prodded around just behind my ear. That explained it. The chip wasn’t in.

It wasn’t on the little table by the door, on the dresser, or on the microwave, which, fair, why would it be on the microwave, but panic doesn’t do inventory logic. If I only had my memory chip handy, I would’ve known where it was. I needed what I’d already lost in order to find what I had lost. Beautiful system. Whoever designed it should be personally dragged into the blame storm.

Whatever happened to clappers? I felt again at the slots at the base of my skull. Still forlornly empty. I kept hunting.

Socks, underwear, old restaurant receipts, and tattered coupons for free travel flew about the room as I whirled through my cushy, upscale apartment like a tornado with a LinkedIn profile. All the drawers hung open. Various items of clothing and remnants of documents drooped over the edges of overturned furniture. It had to be somewhere! I mean, I last had it... can’t remember. That was on the chip.

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His body was warm against hers, his touch desirous.

A heavy cloak covered the small window, blocking out the morning light and filling the room with a grey darkness, through which his face was hazy, as if a veil of smoke hung between them.

He would be the one to stay, and love her. He would proclaim a true and honest love for her before all the others, and then she would be somebody, and not just an unsightly scar on the face of the town.

She closed her eyes and held him close as his soft whispers warmed her ear, swelled her heart with hope. For days she’d sensed that the one was near who would rescue her from this shame and degradation, this life of a woman men paid for and no one else would claim. And now he was here. He would love her, free her to walk the streets without hanging her head. How it would feel to hold it up high instead, with tender pride and confidence.

“Marcus,” she whispered softly, and combed her fingers through his thick, dark hair as his quickened breath poured over her skin. The strong scent of cheap perfume hung heavily in the shabby room. It was a scent she would be glad to leave behind for good.

This wasn’t what she’d wanted. But what chance did a woman have, born to a mother who sold the only thing she had? When she knew nothing else but how to seduce and please a man? Every man she’d taken into her arms, she’d prayed would be the one to love her enough to take her away from all this, because she hadn’t the ability to walk away on her own.

You are what you are, Jez. Accept it, and you’ll be happy.

She forced her mother’s words out of her head. How could she accept a life like this? A life pushed on her, forced on her? Even her own name had been a cruel joke, cast on her by the woman she called mother, though a mother she had not been, not the kind Jez had always hoped for. As a girl she used to imagine she’d been born into some other, gentler family entirely, raised soft-handed, wanted. Then the thought would come, unbidden: who was even watching, if anyone, to see a child born into this in the first place? And if someone was, how could they let it happen at all?

It doesn’t matter, Jez reasoned now, as Marcus’s passion welled. It doesn’t matter whether anyone up there is keeping score. All she needed was this man, the one she’d known would come for her. His standing alone would put her back on her feet once he told people he meant to marry her. He would defend her. Protect her. Everything would be exactly as she’d always dreamed it, and then, without warning, the weight of him was gone, dragged off her by force.

“Wha...?” She gasped, eyes wide, searching the gloom. Dark, hard faces surrounded the bed, faces she’d seen a thousand times in the street, faces that had never once deigned to look at her directly. Where had they come from?

She cowered against the headboard. She didn’t need to ask what they meant to do. She’d been caught with a man who wasn’t hers to have, and she knew exactly what the town’s law said about that. Her frightened eyes went to Marcus. He stood in the corner pulling on his clothes, entirely unbothered, and these men were his own kind, men of standing, the same as him. Her fear eased a little. Surely he wouldn’t let them touch her. Surely he’d tell them she was to be his wife, and they’d let his little transgression pass.

“Bring her out,” one of them said, in a low voice, like a man striking a deal. “We can use her.”

“No.” Jez whimpered as rough hands seized her from both sides. “Marcus?”

But her beloved only stood back. He made no move toward her at all. The tenderness that had filled his eyes minutes ago had gone entirely cold, and the other men looked between the two of them and smiled, and in that smile she read the whole shape of it: there had never been any marriage coming. He had used her exactly the way every other man had, and simply had more to lose by admitting it.

If anyone up there had ever been watching, she thought, hanging her head as their dark laughter rippled around her, they clearly didn’t know she existed. Or didn’t care that she did.

The hands gripping her arms tightened, bruising, and someone grabbed a fistful of her hair and shoved her forward.

She was dragged out into a morning that had suddenly turned viciously bright, the sun searing her shut eyes as she stumbled blind, the murmur of a gathering crowd already rising ahead of her. Were they gathering to watch this happen to her.

Her bare heel came down wrong on a stone in the road and her ankle rolled under her, and she went down hard, pulling free of the hands by accident rather than design, huddling in the dust of the road as it rose in a cloud around her. Shame kept her eyes shut. She felt someone nearby stoop and lift a stone from the road, and understood exactly what it would be used for.

“Get up.” Someone hauled her upright by the arm, the hair, the throat, all at once. Grit clung to her skin in a damp film as they shoved her forward through the crowd, and she was grateful, at least, for the curtain her own hair made across her face, so she wouldn’t have to see the town looking back at her.

She had always kept her eyes on the ground as she walked through these streets, so as not to be confronted with her own worth reflected back at her in every passing face. Now, dragged through them at last with nothing left to hide behind, she understood the other truth written on every one of those faces too: that nobody here was going to save her. That she would leave this world exactly as she’d entered it. Unwanted. Unclaimed.

The shade of the market hall’s steps slid over her bare skin like a cool hand, and she shivered.

I don’t want to be here, she thought, and a plea rose in her throat, not here, not like this, but she swallowed it back down. They wanted her to beg. She wouldn’t give them that too.

Why here, of all places? To make an example of her in front of the one man in town they seemed to resent more than they resented her?

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The morning gridlock on Van Ness, the silent, sensor-guided menace of the Waymos gliding through the Financial District at rush hour like they’re auditioning for a horror film about competence, the folks working Capp Street after ten who nobody in city government has a euphemism cheerful enough for yet, these are the price of living in a real city, and once you’re used to them they practically stop existing. Only a bad morning, a near miss, a face you recognize twice in one week, jolts you into remembering they never left. And yet in all my years here, there’s one feature this city has never managed to make invisible to me: the people sleeping on its sidewalks.

I know I’m not alone in this, because I’ve heard otherwise reasonable people describe it, more than once, as “the situation,” in the specific hushed tone San Franciscans reserve for things they’ve decided are simultaneously a moral emergency and someone else’s department. I have a theory that every resident carries around their own private ghost from this crowd, one person, or one cluster of people, who has come to stand in for the entire population the point-in-time count reduces to a headline number every spring.

My friend Aaron found his own ghost recently. He’d noticed, with the specific disgust reserved for people encountering a problem for the first time, that the tents near the new development on Mission Street seemed to be multiplying, and wasn’t it typical of City Hall to let it get this bad again after Lurie promised things were improving. He’d clocked it, he said, walking to the new biotech tower that used to be a parking lot, the one where the condos start at 1.2 million and the ground floor retail is still empty two years after opening. He assumed they were new arrivals. Some other city’s problem, washed up here.

He was wrong. They’d been there for years, further up, before the construction fencing pushed them down the block into his line of sight. It is very hard to simply call them by the names the agenda items use. Yes, there are strollers with laundry piled where a child should sleep, and men with the particular grey pallor of a body that hasn’t been properly warm in a decade. The tents under the 101 overpass near Division, the ones the Department of Public Works photographs quarterly for the mayor’s press release, are made of the same blue tarp and salvaged plywood you’d expect, and the runoff smell in summer is genuinely something the city should be arresting someone over, just not the people living in it.

But I would still hesitate to call them beggars. Watch long enough, and you notice they mostly don’t beg. They repair bikes with real fluency, sell what they’ve salvaged and fixed, laid out on a sheet with more care than most retail displays, trade goods, and look out for each other with an intensity City Hall budget lines have never replicated. I’ve watched a man return a stolen phone to a tech worker who’d dropped it running for a Muni bus, chased down by three people from the encampment who wanted absolutely nothing for it. Try explaining that instinct to a supervisor’s office.

I understand, a little, why Aaron is afraid of that whole stretch of Mission Street, even though I think he’s wrong to be. It might be posture. There is a way some people hold themselves, straight-backed, unhurried, that reads as a question rather than a plea, a dignity that has nothing to do with the balance of anyone’s bank account, and it unsettles people who’ve built their entire self-image around the assumption that dignity is something you purchase.

I understand it because I have my own version of this fear, and mine sits near the Chevron on South Van Ness most days, right where Mission starts feeling like the freeway is about to eat it. There is no rational reason I should be afraid of him. He is a man sitting on cardboard. I am, notionally, the self-sustaining citizen here. And yet.

He sits cross-legged on the pavement, shirt open regardless of the fog, hand out, voice pitched into that practiced, plaintive register, anything, anything at all, kind stranger. He has no visible disability. Wiry rather than thin, cheekbones you’d photograph if they belonged to someone paying you, dark hair matted into something almost stylish by accident, a beard that gives his gaunt face an unearned, mocking aristocracy. His voice begs. His eyes have never once begged in their life. They’re pale, sharp, and they don’t ask you for anything, they assess you, the way a bouncer assesses a line. Every time I pass him I am, for one full second, eight years old again and afraid of a stranger for no reason I could defend in an argument.

Aaron and I are, in our different ways, both unfriendly toward the people who are actually the most powerless in this story. They remind us of something we’d rather not carry to work.

My colleague Priya has her own ghost too, and hers isn’t a crowd; it’s a single woman outside St. Boniface, the church in the Tenderloin that lets people sleep in the pews during the day under a program called Gubbio, an actual, real, quietly heroic piece of policy that nobody puts on a campaign mailer. Priya’s woman is tall, loose-limbed in the way of someone who has walked a great deal further than the city block she now occupies, and she wraps herself in layers, sweaters over sweaters over a torn poncho, so that when she walks the whole arrangement trails behind her like a train, absurd and, somehow, genuinely regal.

“I’ve been seeing her since I moved here in 2019,” Priya told me. “She sweeps the sidewalk outside the church every morning, whether or not anyone’s asked her to. She’s got a rosary she keeps outside her coat, always visible. She packs her bags the same way every single time she moves them, never just scatters her stuff. I used to be nervous walking past her. Now if I go a week without seeing her I actually worry.”

During the pandemic’s first year, something strange happened: the number of people visibly living outside dropped almost overnight because the city moved thousands of them into empty hotel rooms under the Shelter-in-Place program, an actual, functioning intervention that this city managed to pull off in weeks when it mattered enough to somebody. For a while it looked, from a moving car, like the crisis had simply resolved. It hadn’t. It had been rehoused temporarily, at cost, by emergency order, and when the hotel contracts wound down, and the money went elsewhere, the same people came back to the same blocks, and the city acted almost surprised, the way you’d be surprised that a wound reopens once you stop dressing it.

The children are the hardest ghosts of all, and there are, thank God, genuinely fewer of them now than a decade ago, but they haven’t vanished, and the ones who remain wait at the freeway off ramps where traffic backs up onto Cesar Chavez or the Central Freeway exits, holding cardboard signs in handwriting too careful for the message, three feet from a Waymo idling patiently, sensors calmly registering a human as an obstacle rather than a person, doing the one thing it’s actually better at than us: not looking away, because it was never capable of looking away in the first place.

Drivers roll up their windows. It’s almost balletic, the choreography of it, thirty cars at a red light performing the exact same small, practiced avoidance in under four seconds. Pedestrians have it worse. For a while, before the sweeps cleared the tents from around UN Plaza and Civic Center, women walking home after dark from the opera or a late shift downtown would cross the street rather than pass through it, and the same three-block stretch that hosts a farmers market on Wednesdays turns, after nine, into somewhere nobody quite wants to test their luck.

My own ghost from among the young is a kid I’d guess at sixteen, who has the kind of face that makes strangers invent a whole biography for him on sight, something Californio and something else, dark straight hair a shade too glossy for the life he’s living, and a gift that nobody else on the street can fake: he draws. Pencil portraits on printer paper, extraordinary likenesses of whoever’s in the news that week, and lately, because everyone finds it funny, an exaggerated, big-jawed caricature of a particular tech billionaire that he can apparently produce from memory in about ninety seconds flat.

You can find him by the crowd. There’s always one, tourists and off-duty office workers, watching him work outside the Powell Street Muni station, laughing every time he asks, again, whether they want to see him do the ears.

He’s been written up twice by local outlets, gently, sympathetically, the kind of piece that generates a lot of concerned comments and zero actual outcomes. In all the times I’ve stood in that crowd, I have never once seen anyone buy a drawing. I have heard, more than once, that there have been real, serious, well-funded attempts to get him into a youth shelter program, and that he keeps declining, or vanishing, or both, and that the caseworkers have started to talk about him with the specific exhausted fondness reserved for a case everyone secretly likes more than they’re supposed to.

I wonder, sometimes, what drawing the same three famous faces on repeat for spare change is doing to whatever the actual talent underneath it wants to become. The last time I looked for him, on the stretch of Market outside the old Bank of America tower, he wasn’t there.

What was there, scattered across the pavement and already grey with shoe prints, was the work: a dozen versions of that same over-drawn billionaire, and one, unfinished, that might have been the mayor, all of it getting walked into the concrete by people late for the ferry, nobody stopping, nobody looking down, the whole cycle, somehow, still not broken.

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Three envelopes went out that Tuesday, pearl-coloured, unstamped, addressed in a hand nobody could later agree on, small and neat or looping and old-fashioned, depending on who you asked. Nobody at the sorting office remembered franking them. Nobody could say, afterwards, whose round they’d been on.

Betty Stokes winced as she bent for her mail, lingered stooped a moment with an arthritic hand pressed to her hip, then straightened with a long breath. “Hell on high, me poor bones, there’s a getting worse, you know,” she informed the empty garden, and shuffled inside.

She set the envelope on the yellow melamine tabletop, pulled out a chair, and lowered herself onto the flattened seat pad with a small groan. “Now then, what can you be?” she asked it, the way she asked most things that arrived unannounced, and got up again to fill the teapot. Milk, two heaped spoons of sugar, a slow stir while she studied the envelope over the top of her tortoise-shell glasses. She lifted the cup in a hand that shook, not quite imperceptible, and sipped noisily.

“I bet it’s my telegram from the Queen,” she said, delighted, then caught herself. “Silly me. Eighty-two, not a hundred.” She smiled at her own mistake and opened the envelope properly.

The single sheet of paper inside told her, in generously large print, that she had won a place on a mystery tour. All expenses paid. A driver would collect her that evening.

“Oh, how nice,” Betty said, and nothing in her voice suggested she thought to ask who had entered her, or why, or how they’d known to write the letters so large. She simply wondered where it might take her, and went to choose a cardigan.

*

Derek Paterson locked the door of number twenty-two Rochester Grove and looked up at a sky he hadn’t properly looked at in four years. He’d thrown the envelope in the bin the moment it arrived. Something about it had needled him from inside the kitchen swing bin for the better part of an hour until he fished it back out, smoothed it on his knee, and read it properly.

“Poppycock,” he told Horace, who was watching him from the top of the fridge with the particular flat contempt only a cat can manage. “Nobody gives you something for nothing. It’s a bloody con.” He screwed the letter into a ball and lobbed it back where it came from, then went to spoon out the cat’s dinner.

He straightened without the usual click in his hip. He noticed that. He stood there a moment, quite still, turning the letter over in his mind though he’d already thrown it away.

“You know,” he said slowly, to nobody, in a voice that didn’t entirely sound like his own to his own ears, “maybe a trip would be nice. I’ll go and pack a few things.”

Horace’s back arched hard, and the cat hissed at the empty doorway Derek had just walked through.

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I. The Illumination

The illumination struck her so suddenly that she staggered back as if a hand had violently pushed her, and her heart jolted in its cavity, rapid with an excitement that hurt like the pain of a tooth extraction without anaesthesia.

She could not fall in love, because she was already in love. She was in love with Simon. She was in love with Simon. All along, and she had not known it. Simon could not possibly know it either. What a dilemma. What an embarrassing position to be in. And a threatening one too.

Her happiness, so suddenly and exhilaratingly discovered, was already over in the same instant it arrived.

She and Simon could not become lovers. Simon would not accept it. Their friends would not accept it. Their parents would be horrified. Love is not blind. It only pretends to be, in the seconds before it opens its eyes and starts counting the cost.

All along she had been unhappy, angry, bad-tempered. She knew she had been forcing away the people she cared about, did not want that, was horrified by it even as it happened, and yet could not stop herself from acting in the very way that pushed them from her.

Try as she might, she had been helpless.

Now that she had accepted the true nature of her love for Simon, a strange calm descended on her, and she was, oddly, happy again. Content. Enjoying life, the way a woman condemned might enjoy a last, undeserved fine morning.

The most difficult part was still ahead: the pain, the anguish. And she was not afraid of it. She looked forward to it, rather greedily, anticipatorily, the way one looks forward to a wound one has already decided to earn.

Love really was a shield.

When he was not aware, and they were close to each other, and maybe he was talking about something ordinary, the weather, a film, his day, she would lean towards him cautiously, thief-like, delicately, and without his knowing, intoxicate herself with his hard, musky, male scent in long, slow, secret breaths.

These were, perhaps, the moments she loved him most intensely. These moments when the whole of him travelled from him to her on nothing but air. These moments when, without his knowing, they became one.

Often she thought of the future in these moments. She thought, a horrible thought, of the time when they might no longer be together. When they would no longer love each other, or when only one of them would.

And when she thought of the times to come, she thought of what she would remember of him, of these very moments. She knew, without a doubt, what she would remember once he was gone. She remembered, in advance, what she would remember.

She would remember him in the darkening gloom of evening, by a shut glass window in her room, his black eyes unblinking, staring out into the darkness, gleaming with the sharp silver glints of longing, his lips drawn back into something that was almost a smile.

She would also remember waking. Waking to find him looking down at her, at her body, the blankets and bedsheets thrown back, looking with the kind of appreciation a connoisseur gives to his obsession, the kind of look that is not quite love and is not quite hunger, but borrows freely from both.

She never once asked herself, in all these rehearsals of memory, whether he had ever actually looked at her that way, or whether she had simply decided, somewhere in the long grammar of wanting him, that he must have.

II. What Was Left

Simon left.

It struck her again, that same violent illumination, the hand shoving her backward out of her own life, except this time there was no exhilaration folded inside the pain, only the pain, arriving with all the punctuality of a debt finally called in.

Being alone was something new. She had been with him so long that she had genuinely forgotten what it felt like to be a single, whole person moving through a day without him as its centre of gravity. She had built her whole climate around his weather.

The simplest errands out of the house were suddenly frightening. There were so many small things she had never once done for herself that he had done, or that she had arranged her life around never needing to do. Standing in a queue at the bank. Paying an electricity bill. Filling in an application form. She stood at the counter once with a form in her hand and could not remember her own address for almost a full minute, and the girl behind the glass looked at her the way you look at someone who might be about to cry in public, which she was.

For a while she measured time by scent, the way other people measure it by clocks. His pillow, for eleven days, still smelled faintly of him, and she rationed her face against it like a woman rationing the last of something she could not be given more of. On the twelfth day it smelled only of the pillow. She did not tell anyone this had happened, because there was no sentence in ordinary conversation that could carry it without sounding unwell.

Once, on a bus, a stranger sat down two seats ahead of her wearing something close enough to Simon’s scent, some cheap cousin of it, soap or aftershave or simply a man who worked with his hands the same way, and she had to get off two stops early and stand on the pavement with her hand pressed flat against a shop window until the shape of the day reassembled itself around her.

She began, in these weeks, to notice something she had not let herself notice before. When she mentioned Simon to Claire, an old detail, a shared joke, a particular evening by the window, Claire’s face would do something small and careful, a kind of polite recalibration, before she answered. When she asked her mother, once, directly, what her parents had actually found so horrifying, her mother went quiet in a way that was not embarrassment so much as confusion, and said only, “Darling, you know we never met him properly,” and then changed the subject to the electricity bill, which was, apparently, now overdue.

She did not pursue this. There are questions a person can survive asking, and there are questions that, once spoken aloud, cannot be taken back into the body, and she was, by instinct if not by design, extremely good at knowing the difference.

What she was certain of, what she would have staked anything on, was the window. The evening. The black eyes with their silver glints of longing. She could still, if she closed her eyes in the right kind of darkness, produce him entire: the exact geometry of his shoulders against the glass, the exact half-smile, the exact weight of being looked at by someone who wanted her the way a connoisseur wants the one object he has always known he would eventually ruin himself for.

She held onto that. She held onto it the way she had once held her own breath, leaning in close enough to steal something from him without his knowing.

In the end, it no longer mattered whether he had ever known.

Outside her window now, in the evenings, there was no one standing there watching the dark. Only, most nights, if the weather was right, a tree, blowing in the wind, giving nothing away, remembering nothing, needing no one at all to notice that it moved.

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“Mr Holland, do you have anything else to say?”

The woman, forty-ish, hair greying at the temples in a way that suggests I am not her first patient of this particular flavour, gives me a weary look. I turn to Phillip for his considered opinion on the matter.

“I don’t see how it’s relevant, Phillip, but if you insist.”

I look back at the woman expectantly, waiting for her to respond to Phillip’s point.

She sighs, the specific sigh of a professional recalculating her hourly rate.

“Mr Holland. Just for argument’s sake, let’s pretend I cannot understand what Mr Larkin is saying.”

“He’s not speaking French, you know.”

I consider this, then add, helpfully,

“He can speak French, if you’d prefer.”

“It isn’t the language, Mr Holland. We’ve been through this. I cannot hear him. Or see him. Would you please tell me what Mr Larkin is saying?”

I give her a kindly, understanding look, the sort you’d give a dog that’s failed to learn a fairly simple trick, and nod apologetically at Phillip, who is wearing the exact irritated expression he gets right before he starts being unforgivable.

“Phillip says he can see your nipples through your shirt.”

She stands up rather suddenly. I can see this has offended her.

“I’m sorry, you did ask. I told Phillip it wasn’t relevant.”

She’s already writing on her pad, tears the sheet off, and hands it to the large gentleman by the door, built like a fire door himself. He reads it, looks at me, and approaches with a syringe held the way other men hold a parking ticket they’re about to enjoy giving you. I don’t struggle.

I’m hoping my general amiability will buy me some goodwill. It would help enormously if Phillip would stop screaming obscenities at him, but he never has, and I doubt today’s the day.

I met Phillip Larkin on a train. One of the old ones with separate compartments, the kind that still creak along the Reading line like they’re personally affronted by modern rail travel.

We’d just gone through Slough when he stepped into my carriage: short, balding, bespectacled, the sort of mild, bookish face you’d trust to water your plants.

“Always hated Slough,” he said, sitting down uninvited. “Fucking shit hole.”

I was, I’ll admit, quite startled to hear language like that coming out of such a refined-looking mouth. And then it clicked. Who else but the finest poet of his generation could summon such focused contempt for a Berkshire commuter town? I’d read the poem. I happened to agree. Slough is, categorically, a shit hole.

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A storm rolls in off Compass Point, and Nick loses sight of the woman he’s chasing down a rain-soaked Cornish street until he ducks into an old pawnshop to wait it out, only to meet someone else instead. Someone who looks unsettlingly like his fiancée, just older. What starts as one afternoon’s mistake unravels into something far stranger: a hidden photograph album, a man who hasn’t aged in a century, and a family line built on a debt no one alive agreed to.

A gothic short story about guilt, temptation, and the price of things we don’t choose. Read it free on JKtalla.com.

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I was fifteen when I met him. He was twelve. Three older boys had him pinned under the oak tree by the seafront, taking turns.

They didn’t need much of a reason. That was the thing about them, you could laugh now at the sheer poverty of their imagination, the effort it took to be offended by you. ‘What you looking at? You a Jewboy or a queer?’

Insults built for nobody in particular, thrown at whoever stood closest. They never threw them at me. I was skinny back then, but I had a mean face, and they weren’t the type to test a thing unless they already knew how it ended.

That, and my brother was Dave.

Dave was rock hard, tattooed to the wrist, had a name in our little seaside town before he was old enough to buy a drink in the pubs. Nobody touched what was his. Never mind that he’d die a junkie eleven years later, alone in a bedsit, choking on his own sick with nobody there to turn him on his side.

Two years since the funeral now. Five since I’d last seen him. He was the only person who ever properly beat me, over dope, his dope, which I’d nicked. “Don’t you fuckin dare, you little shit.” Holding my collar in his fist. “You got the brains in this family. Don’t you fuckin pickle ‘em.”

Rich, coming from him.

It was weed. Hardly the mouth of hell. But I didn’t know about the other stuff yet. Didn’t know to check his arms. Thought the marks were some rash he’d picked up.

The day I met the boy, I was walking home past the caravan field, the one the council let travellers use because nowhere else would have them. He lived there, under that same tree, and whoever was meant to be watching him was somewhere else entirely. The three who had hold of him were about eighteen. The ones with just enough ambition to stay in town forever. Popping cherries and knuckles in equal measure, practising to be the men their fathers were.

Made them feel large, I suppose, given that they were headed for the factory floor and a wedding at twenty-two to a girl who already had two kids by two other men.

What stopped me wasn’t bravery. It was him. He wasn’t fighting. Wasn’t making a sound. Just lay there with a weary, half-bored look, one shoulder dropped lower than the other, like he’d learned young how to make himself a smaller target. Like this was Tuesday. Like he’d already done the maths on how long it would take.

“Hey. Leave him alone.”

The tall one, the one doing the punching, looked up.

“Or what?”

I didn’t have an answer built for that. I’d only ever fought Dave, and only the once, for real.

“Or what, there’s three of you on one kid. Hardly impressive, is it.”

Maybe the words landed. More likely they had clocked whose brother I was. Either way, they let him go, not before putting a last boot in his stomach for the road, then jogged down the front to cadge cigarettes from the tourists.

I picked him up. He pointed at his caravan, and I walked him there, not saying much, because the only thing in my head was: are you okay? Even I could hear how thin that would sound. At the door he stood there shaking.

“Thank you.”

“Sure. No problem.”

I left feeling like I’d failed a test I hadn’t studied for.

Should have said more.

Done more.

Asked his name, even.

He was younger than me, a traveller kid, and part of me, the part I’m least proud of, was embarrassed by my own decency. Wondered what Dave would say if he found out I’d played hero for a gypsy boy. He never did say anything.

Don’t think he ever knew.

The town hated them wholesale, and not quietly. The traveller kids only turned up at school when the fair was in season, ran to rules nobody else knew, came and went like the weather. Cross one of them and the whole family came looking, except this boy’s lot, who didn’t run with the rest.

Outcasts twice over, disowned by the very people the town was afraid of, which meant you could do what you wanted to them and nobody, on either side, would blink.

That’s the real reason I didn’t go back and make him a friend. I was fifteen. I cared more about how I looked than what was right. Not a complicated confession. Just an ugly one.

His family moved on soon after. I didn’t see him again for the better part of a year, doing my GCSEs by then, the only one in the family with any shot at more than a woodwork certificate. Dad had his own life to drown, one pint at a time. Mum cared enough for both of them, pregnant with Dave at thirteen, married at nineteen, done with school before she’d started it. I did all right. A-levels. A place at university. I still saw the boy sometimes, under that same tree, not in school anymore, watching the tide the way old men do.

The summer before I left, I got into dope myself, evenings with my mate Keith, working out our theories about where we’d all come from, both of us quietly terrified of leaving the only life we’d known. That was when Dave caught me with his stash and beat me properly for the first time. He’d started running with the rough end of the travellers by then. The dealers. Struck me even as it was happening, I’d never dared befriend the boy for fear of what Dave would say, and here was Dave, elbow-deep in the same world. Conscience woke up right about the time his boot found my ribs.

Didn’t speak to him again after that. Couldn’t look at him straight.

A week later I left for good. Tears with mum, a last pint with dad, a taxi to the station. Made the driver stop at the caravan field on the way. The boy wasn’t there. Got out anyway. Palm flat against the bark.

“I’m sorry.” To no one.

Like the tree might pass it on.

A tear went down my face before I could stop it, and then I got back in the cab and didn’t look back. London was noise and light and people who wanted the same things everyone wants, to drink, to sleep with someone, to matter, except they said it in full sentences and weren’t going to spend their lives on a factory line to do it.

I had to go back two years ago, for Dave’s funeral. Stood over the hole and thought about his boot in my ribs, the taste of blood on my teeth, the fact I hadn’t touched a joint since. He’d been trying, in the only language he had, to tell me something. Whether he knew it himself, I couldn’t say. Mum looked strangely lighter after the service. Dad went straight back to the pub, which was its own kind of relief, at least he was predictable.

I drove out to where the caravan site used to be. The council had cleared it after the drugs bust, twenty-three arrests, the biggest of its kind East Anglia had ever seen, briefly national news. The tree was still standing. You could still make out the flattened rectangle in the grass where his home had sat. I sat under it and let the wind do what it does, and cried without being entirely sure who for.

That evening, a pint with Dad for old times’ sake. He told me a story I hadn’t heard: three local lads found dead by the old caravan field, years back, strung up on that same oak tree. Nobody was ever charged. The fair had been in the next town over that week, so the whole town had quietly decided who to blame and left it there. He gave me their names without knowing why my hand had gone still around the glass. They were the three from that afternoon. The ones who’d had the boy on the ground.

Sat with that longer than I want to admit. Pictured them turning slowly under the branches, and nobody stepping in this time. Not even me. The travellers who were still around had apparently just watched, the way you watch some weather you didn’t cause and can’t stop.

Blood’s thicker than water in the end, and some debts get collected whether the original ledger still exists or not.

Stayed a while after that, keeping Mum company, failing to talk Dad into a meeting he was never going to attend. She’d look at me sometimes with a smile already wearing thin at the edges.

One evening: “When are you leaving again?” The way she said it wasn’t really a question about my plans. It was permission.

Left the next morning. Kissed Mum, had the ritual pint with Dad, didn’t ask the taxi to stop at the tree this time. Just watched the field go past the window and kept going, quietly grateful to Dave for the one clean thing he ever did for me.

Near the turning, there was a man against the trunk, in the low sun, the way you lean against something that belongs to you. One shoulder held a little lower than the other. He didn’t look at the car. Didn’t move. I looked away first, and the hedge closed over the view, and that was that.

Some debts get repaid by people who were never in the room when they were made.

Whoever collected on that one, I never asked his name either.

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She was fifteen when a red ribbon was cut from her hair in an underpass, and the boys responsible walked free. Twenty years later, a length of ribbon turns up beside a dead man’s body, and Nell Harker realizes someone has been keeping a promise she doesn’t remember making.

A slow-burn thriller about the friend who came running, the ones who never faced justice, and how far quiet loyalty can go when the law lets you down.

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Read the full extended edition now at JKTalla.com.

(Written in UK English)

MUM eyes the log like it’s the one that got away in 1974. Ignoring forty-six years of physics, she declares she’s “still got it.” SON, ever the supportive sidekick, offers a hand, half spotting her, half filming his own inheritance plans.

She mounts the log…

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