Hypocrisy abounds; after robbing Venus I fish out the keys for my childhood home. We keep it locked up snugly. Perhaps we are afraid to lose our past, meagre as it is.

I take the hairbrush and mirror from Rita’s dresser. Noting their condition, I rummage around father’s workroom until I find a can of silver polish and a soft rag. A canvas grocery sack hangs from the foyer coat rack. I pluck it from its perch and fill it with a few canned goods, a jar of instant coffee, and some packets of oatmeal. I find five bottles of water left in back of the pantry.

I begin my journey back to the mine.

*

The Dunford Incorporated coal mine first began operating shortly after World War II and had been Evendale’s main employer for the next four decades. But then a tragic tunnel collapse took the lives of a dozen miners. Eventually, through resulting lawsuits and legal fees, this accident also took the life of Dunford Inc. The company declared bankruptcy and shut down the mine in 1983. It has stood in the arid field on Evendale’s outskirts ever since.

I escaped Evendale in 1991, moving to the city in search of myself. At that time there were rumblings of a new company purchasing and re-opening the dormant mine, but it was not to be. When Dunford Inc. laid my father off (mercifully, a year before the collapse) he used to tell my sister and me that there was hardly any coal left in those shafts anyway. I’d always thought these words were merely a way for my father to balm his wounded pride, but given that no one has seen fit to resume clawing at those tunnels, perhaps he was speaking the truth.

Either way, the site was left to rot; its towering iron scaffolds bowing like aging men, its subterranean maze resting hushed and hollowed like some vacated netherworld.

As to the origins of the mine’s more recent and more rarefied role in the lives of the townspeople, accounts differ depending on whom you ask. That a posse had formed to rescue a child who had scrabbled down into the shafts on a dare and gotten lost seems to be the most common account. But the age and gender of the strayed child varies from teller to teller. A point that does run uniform through this folklore is the discovery of the greenish light.