The stone wasn’t hot at all. It was cool. It was blessedly cool, and he laid his face upon it, a weary pilgrim who has finally arrived at his destination and can rest at last.

⟵ ⟶

When Becky lifted her head, the sun was either coming up or going down, and her stomach hurt, as if she were recovering from a week of stomach flu. She swiped the sweat off her face with the back of one arm, pushed herself to her feet, and walked out of the grass, straight to the car. She was relieved to discover that the keys were still hanging from the ignition. Becky pulled out of the lot and eased on up the road, driving at a leisurely pace.

At first she didn’t know where she was going. It was hard to think past the pain in her abdomen, which came in waves. Sometimes it was a dull throb, the soreness of overworked muscles; other times it would intensify without warning into a sharp, somehow watery pain that lanced her through the bowels and burned in her crotch. Her face was hot and feverish, and even driving with the windows down didn’t cool her off.

Now it was coming on for night, and the dying day smelled of fresh-mown lawns and backyard barbecues and girls getting ready to go out on dates and baseball under the lights. She rolled through the streets of Durham, in the dull red glow, the sun a bloated drop of blood on the horizon. She sailed past Stratham Park, where she had run with her track team in high school. She took a turn around the baseball field. An aluminum bat clinked. Boys shouted. A dark figure sprinted for first base with his head down.

Becky drove distracted, chanting one of her limericks to herself, only half aware she was doing it. She whisper-sang the oldest one she’d been able to find when she was researching her paper for freshman lit, a limerick that had been written well before the form devolved into grotty riffs on fucking, although it pointed the way in that direction:

“‘A girl once hid in tall grass,’”

she crooned.

“‘And ambushed any boy who walked past.

As lions eat gazelles,

so many men fell,

and each tasted better than the last.’”

A girl, she thought, almost randomly. Her girl. It came to her, then, what she was doing. She was out looking for her girl, the one she was supposed to be babysitting, and oh, Jesus, what an unholy fucking mess—the kid had wandered off on her, and Becky had to find her before the parents got home, and it was getting dark fast, and she couldn’t even remember the little shit’s name.