Free Radiant Days by Elizabeth Hand Page A

bag, were gone.
    “Bring it back!” I screamed.
    Everything was in there—everything that Clea hadn’t taken, anyway. Sketches, a book filled with drawings, wads of paper where I’d drawn bleary-eyed passengers on the Metro, homeless people on park benches, rough sketches for new tags.
    But no wallet, no money, no credit cards or checkbook or ID: nothing that would have made the old canvas bag valuable to anyone but me.
    I swore and began to cry, but there was no point. The bus was long out of sight. My only hope was that the boys might leave it on the seat or dump it wherever they got off. I wiped my eyes and ran back across the street, up the steps of the house, and on up to my room.
    The place looked ransacked, but it had looked that way forever. As far as I could tell, nothing had been taken except my bag, not that there was anything to take. Some T-shirts and flannel shirts, dirty sheets and pillows, a mattress on the floor, cans of spray paint. I picked among these, shaking each can until I found one that was mostly full. I set it aside and kicked at the pile of clothes until I found a pair of painter’s pants, a long-sleeved T-shirt, the old leather bomber jacket I’d bought at a thrift shop months ago but never worn.
    I pushed a broken chair against the door and changed. Then I crossed to the windowsill and gingerly felt around inside the fist-sized hole in the wall beneath it, until my fingers closed around the plastic change purse wedged inside. I removed it, dumped the coins on the floor, and counted them: thirteen dollars and twenty-seven cents. I put the money back into the change purse and shoved it into a pocket, went to the ancient tackle box that held my art supplies, sat cross-legged on the floor, and pored over them.
    I finally chose a few oil pencils: jade green and viridian and Moorish red; a cobalt that, when mixed with Moorish red, turned a startling violet; Alizarin crimson; coal black and narcissus yellow. I took some charcoal pencils and an orange marker; some expensive brushes I’d stolen. A sketchbook the size of my hand, its first few pages covered with rough drawings of eyes but otherwise blank. I tore a piece of flannel from a gray plaid shirt and rolled the oil and charcoal pencils inside it; tore the sleeve from the shirt and slid everything else into it, tied off the ends, and stuffed it into the deep pocket of my pants. The sketchbook wentinto another pocket, along with the nearly full can of yellow spray paint.
    I stood and surveyed the room. Light sifted through the windows, amber deepening to russet in the corners. Across the walls and ceiling, Clea’s painted image slept and laughed and danced, her long eyes fixed on mine, her mouth parted to murmur a secret no one would ever hear. Like the leaping forms of ibex and bison and mammoths, flowing across the walls of an undiscovered cavern: a lost world that no one but me would ever know had once been real. I pressed my hand against the wall, for an instant let my cheek rest upon Clea’s profile, those lovely, empty eyes that stared into the darkening room.
    Then I split. I took the stairs two at a time, and left all the doors open behind me. When I reached the sidewalk I stopped and turned, with all my strength hurled the key at the vacant house, and raced across the street to catch the 80 Metrobus, the same one the boys had taken.
    I grabbed a window seat near the door and pressed my face against the glass, scanning streets and sidewalk. I didn’t see anything that resembled my bag, or anyone who looked like Errol. The bus rumbled down North Capitol Street, past the old post office and the sandblasted hulk of Union Station, cut alongside the Mall, and headed toward Northwest. The seats and aisles grew crowded with people, carrying briefcases, Sunday newspapers, shopping bags from Hecht’s and Woody’s. A skinny guy with a Mohawk shambled on board, pushed his way to the back of the bus, asking for change.
    “Get a job,” I