Bear mace isn’t like other pepper spray. A can of dog deterrent sprays maybe five, ten feet. More a cloud than anything. But bear mace is a concerted blast—a geyser of pepper spray that shoots in a thirty-foot jet. Powerful enough that it doesn’t blow back unless the wind’s bad—and today, the air is still as a chair in an empty room.

The can empties in about five seconds.

For those five seconds, Atlanta can’t see much. She knows that the Mexic—er, Venezuelan kid hit the deck inside the dumpster. Heard the thump of his body. The other three, well, she can see their shapes thrashing around—first standing up, then down on the ground—but that’s all they are. Shapes. Screaming, howling shapes.

When the can is done, Atlanta wings it past the margins of the lot into the bushes.

The smoke clears, revealing the trio of assholes writhing on the ground. Faces red. Crying. Even from here she can see the blood vessels showing bright in the whites of their eyes. Jonesy’s clawing at his face like he’s got a rat chewing its way out of his sinuses. Virgil is blubbering, with dog crap on his face. He pounds the ground with a fist. The mute, toothy third, Chomp-Chomp, lies curled up like a baby. He whimpers like one, too.

She lets out a long breath.

A little voice inside her asks, Is this who you are now?

She doesn’t want to find the answer.

So she turns and runs. Bag flopping at her hip.

She tries to cry, but it just isn’t coming. She wants to. It’s in there somewhere. But like a stubborn sneeze, she just can’t make it happen, and that’s somehow worse.

Up the long driveway, shoes crunching on gravel. Past the fallow fields on either side. Green starting to poke up, with spring trying to get sprung. In the distance is the Cat Lady’s house. Atlanta doesn’t know her name. Woman’s old and frail, like a bundle of sticks bound up in a moth-bitten bedsheet. Her cats look that way, too: starving, rangy, half-mad.

Atlanta gets closer to the old farmhouse in which she and her mother live. Passes a dead brown Buick that sits off to the side, the car draped in the choking vines and soon-to-be-purple clusters of wisteria. It’s not her mama’s, that car. Was here when they bought the place.

Atlanta takes a moment. Her right hand is shaking. Her index finger in particular.

Then she goes in through the garage.

Mama’s in there. Setting up the cot, pulling sheets over it, fluf-fing some pillow that looks about as soft and comfortable as a sack of grain. A long, lean cigarette is pinched between her lips.

Seeing Atlanta, she quickly puts it out. I’m quitting, she told her daughter a few days ago. Like that somehow mattered.