The Displacements by Bruce Holsinger

Author:Bruce Holsinger [Holsinger, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

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• • •

Her neighbors Larry and Colette, the nice couple from Waffle House, find her later, sprawled between tents with her face in her own puke. Her eyes crusted shut. The stench of spattered liquor smokes her nose.

“Come on now.” An avuncular voice. “Come on.”

Larry peels her up from the ground, making a grunt of effort as he helps her stagger to her feet.

“You’re so nice.” She tilts her head so she can see his face in the strung lights. Behind him on the avenue Colette stands watching, arms crossed. “So so so so nice.”

“And you’re nasty drunk,” he says, averting his nose as he helps her into the tent. No one else is home. Home.

“Ha!” she barks.

“Watch yourself out there,” Larry warns. “This place . . .”

“Where are my children? What have they done to my children?” Her cot. She climbs toward her pillow, collapses before she makes it.

“Drink this.”

A plastic bottle appears in her hand. She takes four large swallows of water and retches it to the floor. Larry takes the bottle and sets it by her cot. “It’ll be right here. Now sleep.”

The peak of the tent spins like a flicked coin, a swift blurring fuzz. When her eyes close her stomach heaves, but this time a soft belch is all that comes up. Her hands cross on her belly and her right index finger traces the points and facets of a gem that isn’t there.

She bolts upright.

Her rings.

A four-carat diamond, set with five emeralds. Worth thousands. A last insurance policy, against the loss of so much else. And her wedding band, a ring of white gold identical to the one still circling the cold finger of her husband.

Who? Who could do a such a thing?

Larry. No, not him.

Dorianne. That’s it. Brings her spiked Kool-Aid, lulls her with trash talking about their husbands until she passes out, then slips her engagement ring off her finger. Thieving bitch.

Daphne swings her feet off the cot, set on revenge. When she tries to stand a spike of pain drills through her skull and she collapses with a moan, then nothing.

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