He turned on the flashlight but cupped his other hand around the front so that it didn’t make a great circle of light—a big old spotlight might attract someone’s attention, and Ronnie had become very good at not attracting attention to himself—and walked slowly forward, guiding the light to the spot where he thought he’d seen—

—and there it was. A child’s arm; bruised, with a few streaks of blood running down the forearm, the hand turned upward with its fingers curled like some kind of claw.

Take a deep breath, Ronnie. You know what to do.

—I love you Suzanne, I love all of you…but could you maybe please not talk to me for a minute or two? I’m not mad or nothing, but…you know…

The reply was silence.

Looking back over his shoulder to make sure the street behind him was still empty, Ronnie moved toward the arm, pointing the flashlight’s beam at the muddy ground. He came around the row of trash cans, stepped over the one that had been knocked over, and then knelt down, taking care to upright the overturned trash can in order to hide himself.

This was the worst part, coming across one at night like this. Ronnie had never really liked the dark—not that he was afraid of the dark like some kind of cry-baby sped ree-tard, no…it just seemed to him that the dark always made people think about dying, how dark it was in the coffin, buried under the ground, and maybe being reminded every night that you were going to die was kind of mean. He wondered how long the child’s body had been out here. If it had been left less than two or three hours ago, it still carried some ghost, some remnant of its final minutes, and Ronnie Knew that he didn’t need even that much, all he needed was a few seconds, or one; a single second of memory contained unseen threads connecting it to the countless memories and sensations that the child had carried since the moment memory and sensation had first registered. One second of memory unfolded countless times, revealing the entirety of their existence. So much, hidden inside so little.

He moved the flashlight’s beam toward the child’s face…or what was left of it.

The beating had brutal, monstrous, and vile. The little boy’s head was almost pushed in at a couple of spots, and both his hair and skin were lacquered with blood. And he was still alive.

Ronnie lay down the flashlight and flexed his fingers, wincing as he heard the tiny bones crack.

“It’s gonna be okay,” he whispered to the little boy.

One of the child’s eyelids spasmed, then began to lift, making it only halfway. Beneath was an eye so filled with blood that it appeared almost black, except for the smallest, thinnest ring of white right in the middle. Ronnie had watched a cop show on TV one night and heard one of the characters refer to this as an “…eight-ball hemorrhage…” (at least, that’s what it sounded like); it had sounded funny at the time, because the only eight-ball Ronnie had ever seen was the Magic kind, the kind you asked a question to and then shook it real hard and then turned it upside down to read the answer. But there was nothing funny about this.