The Need by Helen Phillips

Author:Helen Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

19

She woke up in the Pit. She was alone. The Pit was its normal color. So was the sky. She cried for joy, realizing it had all been a nightmare, though she was confused about how she had managed to fall asleep in the Pit. She was partway up the ladder when she glanced back and noticed a penny glinting down there, half-covered with dirt already, must have fallen out of her pocket; even though she had always been conscientious about avoiding that sort of contamination, she did not go back down to pick it up. She told herself she would get it first thing in the morning, but for now she was dying to get home to the kids. The parking lot was empty, which was strange, because she had driven to work that day. Or maybe she hadn’t, maybe David had dropped her off. The morning felt long ago and fuzzy. She ran toward the Phillips 66, which was undamaged. She looked through the big window and saw that the Bible was there, its glass case not shattered. The whole place had its normal serene early-evening feel, Corey and Roz already gone home. Her bag wasn’t beside her desk where she usually left it, which was also strange, but at least her keys were in her pocket. She wanted to see David, to tell him about this blip in her day and try to figure out what had happened. She would walk home. She felt elated. She would surprise the kids and David.

She would be happier than she had ever been.

She was wearing dark clothing and it wasn’t until she reached the second telephone pole on the frontage road (a passing trucker honked and flashed his lights and yelled out the window, “You okay?”) that she admitted to herself that her jeans and black shirt were hardened with a sticky, rusty substance. She had been so brilliantly ignoring the brownish smears on her hands, the throb of her temples. She ran back to the Phillips 66. She unlocked her locker and grabbed her change of clothes and went into the bathroom and washed herself and swapped the clothes and shoved the messed-up clothes in the locker and worked hard to forget about them.

She walked along the frontage road as night fell. She watched handfuls of birds reel in the sky. Her elation had dulled but she pretended it hadn’t. She needed to be home and she began to run and by the time she reached the thoroughfare she was nearly sprinting. She treated the neon sign of Excellent Laundromat like a finish line. After passing the Laundromat, she turned right. She was ecstatic because even from two blocks away she could see that they were playing out in front of the house. She could hear them and she could see their bodies, perfectly intact. David was holding Ben and counting nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, ready or not, here I come! Viv was hiding in a silly place, in plain sight, only a quarter-hidden by the crab-apple tree.

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