The Insufficiency of Maps by Nora Pierce

Author:Nora Pierce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Twelve matchsticks, and I’ve decided to dig them up and light them. I flip through the pages of my TV guide, but my maps are all unreliable, mountains and blobs and shapes that lead me nowhere, so I just dig around everywhere I can remember until I’ve found seven of them. I sit down cross-legged in the alley and light each one on the ragged cement. The sulfur crawls up my nose into the space between the back of my eyes and my forehead. I watch the blue-yellow light, so many colors dancing around inside it, until it burns down to an inky black softness and I have to drop it. I try to hold each one longer and longer, until a faint gray-black shadow appears on my fingertips.

Afterward I scrape up all the ashes and stubs of sticks and bury them far away from Grampa’s house where some men have come to repair the sidewalk. He calls to me from where he leans out of the screen door, his cowboy hat hiding half his face in shadow.

“Get back here, Alice,” he says. “I told you not to wander too far.”

I scrape an X on the wet cement with the heel of my shoe and run back to Grampa’s house.

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