City of Orange by David Yoon

Author:David Yoon [Yoon, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

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The can rolls to the bottom of the slope. He calms himself down. He evens out his stance.

For a panicked moment, he thinks he can’t feel the brass key in his shoe anymore. Maybe the hours of constant pressure have numbed his nerves there. Maybe Crow Boy stole it in the night. Maybe the sweat and moisture thinned the brass into foil thin enough to melt on the tongue.

He digs a fingertip into his shoe, reaches the humid strata beneath, and with relief feels the front of the key. He knows it’s the front because he can feel letters stamped there like he’s felt many times before. Beheld it, admired it, noticed how his fingertips smelled like brass afterward. Tiny brass molecules deposited into the colossal winding canyons of his fingerprints.

Everything here is a provocation, he thinks. Key, crow, boy, old man, abandoned house going up in spectacular flame. You’re just trying out one form after another.

Who is this you? Please don’t tell me it’s me. Because then I’d really be stuck here forever. I’ll see my wife come rising up out of the ground, my baby, too.

They’d come up again and again and ask, Why didn’t you stop it?

There’s no answer to that.

He rubs the key in his shoe again and again, oh God, oh thank God, it’s still in there. That very important object so warm to the touch that he can’t let it go and just stands frozen, crouched in place like one of those poor Vesuvian souls.

He sees a pop of invisible light all around him.

In the next instant he remembers tossing empty cans, this time into a tall steel trash bin, using their kitchen wall as a backstop. Two points. She hated when he did this.

But she hadn’t been home that day, had she.

He fetched another from the fridge, cracked it open, took a sip of something. A margarita, from a can.

A long while later—who knew how long, it didn’t matter—the police called to confirm his address. Using the first number in the favorites list is a common tactic we use, they said. We just need to confirm your relationship with your wife. There’s been a crash.

What crash, he said. He’d been watching a movie about warring tribes of acrobatic vampires versus muscle-bound lycanthropes, and there was a big face with bloody fangs stuck on the screen.

What about the baby? he said. What’s going on?

Sit tight, sir, said the police. We got someone coming over right now.

A trio of officers arrived. Two men led by a woman, who did all the talking.

Your wife, she said, heard the sirens of our squad cars in pursuit of the suspect and she followed absolutely the right instinct when she pulled over to the right shoulder of the flyover.

Good, okay. So she did the right thing. He offered them water. They refused.

The suspect was traveling over ninety miles an hour when he struck her vehicle from behind. So unfortunately, sir, while pulling over is absolutely the right

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