The bus passed, and he came after me on foot, a black figure against the explosion of light from the bridge. I ran, making my way along the streets that topped the Heights. I cut into an alley, across another street, then into another alley.
Suddenly, inexplicably, my legs gave out. They just went limp. I sprawled in the gravel behind an old garage. A streetlamp not far away shed enough light that I could easily be seen. I managed to crawl into the shadow between two garbage cans, where I lay listening. I heard the slap of shoes hard and fast pass the alley entrance and keep going. Then everything got quiet.
My shirt was soaked with blood. My legs were useless. I’d hoped to make it to the river, but that wasn’t going to happen. The end was going to come in a bed of weeds in a nameless alley. Nothing I could do about that.
But about the man and the woman who’d killed Kid, there was still something I could do.
I pulled the pair of panties from my pocket, the pair she’d given Kid and whose twin I’d found that afternoon at Marshall Field’s and bought with money made by selling my own blood. I drew out my pen and notepad and wrote a brief explanation, hoping whoever found me would notify the police.
I was near the river, though I would never sit on its banks again. I closed my eyes. For a while, all I smelled was the garbage in the bins. Then I smelled the river. When I opened my eyes, there was Kid, grinning on the other side. Like he understood. Like he forgave me. I started toward him. The water, cold and black, crept up my legs. The current tugged at my body. In a few moments, it carried me away.
BLIND SIDED
BY ELLEN HART
I was born in the time of monsters. My earliest memories were of my mother crying because she was frightened for my father, who was off fighting Japan in the Pacific. The names Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin swirled around my young mind like menacing black crows.
I’ve always had a rather mixed relationship with the concepts of good and evil. I know the atom bomb was a horrible genie to release on the world, and yet if the U.S. hadn’t dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my father would surely have been killed. He flew a small plane that was slated to be part of the advance group sent to Japan to soften up their defenses just prior to our invasion. The invasion never happened. Instead, my father came home when I was six years old.
In our house, the bomb was considered miraculous. As a young child, I never thought of it with anything other than a kind of exhilarated wonder. I’d longed to have my dad come home to us, and the bomb made that possible. But after he’d been back awhile, I realized, much to my astonishment, that he was a stranger. I wasn’t even sure I liked him. A year later he was dead. The bomb saved him so he could be knifed in a bar fight and bleed out on a barroom floor. That’s when I was first introduced to the concept of serendipity—another thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. I’m not depressed—or crazy. At least, I tell myself I’m not, but I guess I’ll let you be the judge.
As I grew up, the atom bomb was like a piece of coal flickering blue in my mind, never letting me forget what it had given and what it had taken away. I came to the conclusion in college that people’s views of right and wrong tended to be both situational and generational. But that never really satisfied me, because although I wasn’t religious, I wanted to believe in absolutes. Right and wrong. Good and evil. Maybe that’s a flaw, but it’s who I am.
My name is Leo Anderson, a suitably Minnesota sort of name for a boringly Minnesota sort of guy. I’m sixty-six, part Irish, but mostly Norwegian, a retired school teacher, the divorced father of two. And I’m going blind. Every morning, I wake up and look around my tiny bedroom to see what’s been erased since the night before. It’s a terrifying thing, this going blind business, and I hate it. I also hate being alone, living in this damn drafty apartment after being married for nearly thirty-eight years. Fact is, when I came home and told my wife about my diagnosis, it seemed to open up a sinister trap door in my marriage, releasing an angry accumulation of rabid emotions I never knew existed. Apparently, I wasn’t a very good husband. That part didn’t really come as a shock. I won’t lie to you. It’s another one of my flaws.
