They had already driven to every place across the city where they thought Aria could be. Necessity meant the other children were sustained with takeout food. Even though they reveled in it, it challenged Mrs Johnson’s delicate self-concept as a mother.

Now they were playing a waiting game. A waiting game heavily tainted by guilt and notions of all the possible things that might have happened to Aria.

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 4

“You have not mothered me life, you have not fathered me life.”

The sentence repeated like poisonous poetry in Aria’s mind. She had been hiding behind a Pizza Hut for what felt like hours, waiting for the store to close. Beneath the delirium of her hunger, she felt humiliated. Before leaving, she had not considered what her life might be reduced to, nor what she might be reduced to doing after she ran away.

In a trickle as slow as molasses, all the employees had gone home for the day, except one. She could see him through the window, appearing and disappearing while puttering around the store. He bore his heavy weight like a cross that had been nailed to him long ago. She felt infuriated with how satisfied he seemed with his meager sense of power and the blatant underachievement that, tonight at least, he seemed oblivious to.

“Can you just be done already, goddamn, what the fuck is there to do?” She said the words out loud even though, with both distance and glass between them, he would never hear them. The projection of her irritation did not hurry him at all. How could she expect it to? This man was oblivious and she was hidden to the point that he would never know that she was there. Eventually, her irritation was disrupted by the assault of the sound of grating metal. The back door had opened. She watched the man carry four pizza boxes out to the dumpster and throw them in.

Aria waited despite her nerves, like a predator knowing that it cannot act on its prey just yet without losing the chance altogether. She suffered a few more minutes of watching him resume his puttering before all but a row of dim fluorescent lights went out. Still she waited just those few moments longer to ensure that he was gone before rushing to the dumpster to tie the loose end of the shoelace that was affixed to Clifford’s collar to the dumpster wheel.