Free Bury This by Andrea Portes Page A

brought! Look at your present, for you and Dotsy!”
    And the Lt. Colonel can hear noise and turn his head slightly, but that’s all he can do, third and goal, fourth quarter, past the two-minute warning.
    And Brad, Katy, Lars, and Danek can stand there, but that’s all they can do, watching Shauna Boggs, they-call-her-the-blob, holding up the wet glass vase, teetering, water dripping down the side, from the newly cut fresh red roses.
    And you can’t reach out in time, how could you, to grab the slippery vase from Shauna Blobs teetering in her cheap black parka. You can’t grab it in time, from the clumsy meat hands on that sloping meat body and so, as you all watch, standing there like perplexed shepherds, the crystal vase with Christmas crimson roses slips out of her piggy hands and onto the floor in a thousand little pieces and glass shards and glass shards with roses and red petals and thorns and thorns with glass shards and water shards and a deadening silence.
    In the background, Favre makes the catch and the announcer squeals in ecstasy and Lambeau Field explodes in a fever pitch of yellow and green. But the Lt. Colonel is left out in the cold, sitting abandoned in the living room, a solitary figure, staring into the kitchen at the three-hundred-pound girl in a parka, a shuddering girl, suspended in glass shards and thorns and beaten-up roses.

FOUR
    A mackerel sky in tendrils over the lake, the lake frozen over in white, tucked in from the lighthouses heralding Lake Michigan. Muskegon Lake ice fishing. Perch. Walleye. Northern pike. The best of the first and last ice pan-fish. Detective Samuel Barnett leaving early morning, 4 AM for blasted sakes, tiptoeing out, trying not to wake his wife breathing deep snug under the quilt.
    Out on the lake, in his makeshift tin-pan shack with heater. A hole in the ice and nothing doing, sat freezing his ass off on the bench, nothing but this Old Style to keep him warm. Goddammit, he shoulda brought two sausage sandwiches, not just one. The wife had offered two, just in case, honey. But no, no, being a stupid little boy kid husband, not wanting to be that known, that predictable, he’d refused. Trying to play the man. And now starving, starving between these flimsy walls of aluminum grating, no more sausage sandwiches and not even noon, hell with it. What a dumb fuck. He might as well relent. The wife was right. Two sausage sandwiches, not just one.
    Over the milk pebble sheet, a charcoal-black figure, a lone wanderer over the splat clear rink, coming closer, closer, closer, a gnat,then a cockroach, then a monkey, then a man. Now, a uniformed man outside the shack. A knock on the rin-tin-tin aluminum.
    â€œDetective?!”
    A sigh, what now. Can’t I just have one day? Is that asking too much?
    â€œDetective Barnett? You in there?”
    Of course I’m in here, dumb-ass, where else would I be?
    â€œUh. Yeah.”
    â€œCan I come in?”
    â€œMight as well.”
    A scutter and a clang off the ting-ting grating, careful of your feet, that ice is no joke. Breath now in vapor gusts, in-out in-out, vapor gasps made of words, out of breath, gushing.
    â€œDetective, there’s someone down at the station. Wants to talk to you.”
    â€œWell, it’s Saturday—”
    â€œI know. I know. That’s what I said, sir. I sure did. But they wouldn’t have it. Said it had to be you they talked to, wouldn’t leave even.”
    â€œWell, what the hell?”
    â€œYou got that right, sir.”
    Air in puffs, made of ice.
    â€œThat sandwich place open?”
    Heading back over Shoreline in the Ford Crown Vic, limited slip rear differential and boy do you need it. Even a barely there wisp cloud day like this the ground goes ice snow sludge slop pebbles ice again. You just never know what’s down deep underneath.
    The station empty, dark in mint-gray chrome, one fluorescent spotlight over the far chrome desk in