Free The Adults by Alison Espach

my hands and get his attention, but all I managed to do was drop my glass. I turned to run and the pieces of broken glass etched into my heel. I flopped like an empty sack on the tile, and when I stood back up, Mr. Resnick was dead. His body was as still as a wind chime in a glass case, the earth so completely balanced that morning.
    I didn’t move. Life came and went so fast. I was warned about this by my mother and father, who yelled when I ran down the stairs in slippery socks, or by my teachers, who kept us off the street during recess, and here it was—the end—dangling in front of me on a rope, Mr. Resnick, dead before the morning paper arrived.
    I looked around for help.
    There was broken glass over the floor. I waited for someone to yell at me, for my mother to scream, “Emily, pick up this mess!”
    But the kitchen was empty.
    The broken glass was spread around me like a rug.
    I was the only person in the world who knew Mr. Resnick was dead, and the only person who could see me was Mr. Resnick through the window, but his eyes were fixed, pointing in two different directions, making it appear as though he wasn’t there at all, or like there were so many interesting things to look at before you died, he couldn’t choose.
    I ran for my father. The glass dug farther into my foot with each step. I was at my father’s bed, shouting something none of us can remember, and my mother told me later that it made all too much sense when she woke up to an empty house, following a child’s bloody footsteps over the oriental rug and out the door to find our poor neighbor hanging from a tree.

6

    I would tell all my boyfriends that the most tragic part about the whole scene was Alfred, who ran out of his house in a red Starship Enterprise shirt that read, SHATNER FOREVER! on the front. Men would laugh and laugh at this, stroke my neck, my thighs, their beards tender like feathers between my legs. They would love me for the way nothing remained sacred in my presence, seek me out for this, kiss me down to the bone.
    “I just don’t understand,” Mrs. Bulwark said in her workout suit, not ready to give up on the idea of a morning jog. The adults circled around her like concerned hawks. Mr. Resnick’s body had already been photographed, put in a bag, and taken away in an ambulance. “I just can’t believe they are putting him in a bag like that. Like he was some bad fruit at the grocery store.”
    The police had sectioned off the Resnicks’ house with yellow tape, and all the morning joggers and dog walkers stood on my driveway to rubberneck. A beagle barked loud from the back of the crowd, pissed he couldn’t see.
    “And he just mowed his lawn yesterday,” Mrs. Trenton said. “God, this is sad.”
    “That wasn’t him,” Mrs. Bulwark said. “That was Mark.”
    “Tom never mowed his lawn,” Alfred said.
    “That’s a bad sign.”
    “The sign of a deeper sense of apathy. A man who doesn’t care about his lawn probably doesn’t care about anything around him.”
    Janice and the Other Girls had been picked up by their mothers, who hurried them into their vans with one arm, half-asleep. It wasn’t until Janice looked back at my house like the whole place was damned, the grass, the lamppost, the American flag, the potting soil against the garage, that I realized, yes, we were damned—I had suspected this two days earlier when I saw my father watering the drooping tiger lilies and asked, “Dad, why are you doing that? They’re nearly dead.”
    “Why eat?” he said. “Why anything?”
    My father had run outside and then back inside to reschedule a conference call, and I stared at the basement window knowing that he wasn’t returning because Mrs. Resnick was standing in front of her house now, my mother’s arms wrapped around her body like a sheath, and Mark was at their side, an unreachable figure, brown hair uncombed, his eyes wild and heated like an abused animal’s, ready to bare his claws and attack my