Free The Dispatcher by Ryan David Jahn

too hard. He felt bad about it, it had been an accident, but she’d misbehaved and she needed to be punished, and if he punished her a bit too much, well, that was as much her fault as it was his. If she hadn’t misbehaved in the first place he never would have lost his temper. He put her into the ground beside the last Sarah and went looking for the next.
    That one screamed and screamed when he grabbed her and he put his hand over her mouth to silence her. She stopped screaming, but she stopped breathing too.
    Then there is this Sarah. He spent a week fruitlessly searching before he finally decided to go up to the petting zoo. It was on the north side of town, near Interstate 10, and mostly people who visited were traveling through. They saw the signs,

BULLS MOUTH PETTING ZOO PUBLIC RESTROOMS
    and their kids bugged them till they agreed to stop for half an hour. Since it was Saturday there would probably be a dozen Sarahs to choose from.
    It was a pleasant April day with a breeze just strong enough to make the trees whisper.
    Kids were running around looking at all the animals—pot-bellied pigs and rabbits and miniature horses—and reaching through the fences to pet them. Some of them were buying celery and carrots from a woman with a vegetable cart.
    Everybody else was there with kids. Henry felt very conspicuous walking alone. He felt like he must stand out, the only giant at a midget convention. But nobody seemed worried by his presence. He was in public and behaved accordingly. A sort of dumb open-mouthed smile pushed up his cheeks, his eyes wide and bright, his hands in his pockets, legs doing a going-nowhere shuffle. Just a harmless old man probably there with his granddaughter who’d run off someplace, maybe to use the restroom.
    ‘Would you care to buy some vegetables to feed the animals?’
    ‘Not today,’ he said, pulled out his pockets to display them empty, and shrugged.
    ‘Maybe next time,’ the woman said.
    Then he saw her, the Sarah he wanted, standing just behind the woman with the vegetable cart. She was standing beside her daddy and a teenage boy, looking through a fence at an alpaca.
    ‘Look it, Jeffrey!’ she said as the alpaca pulled a piece of celery from her fingers.
    ‘I am, dorko.’
    ‘ You’re the dorko, dorko.’
    She was the one. Beatrice would love her. Her face was a bright oval, green eyes alive with joy and humor. Beatrice would absolutely love her. He knew she would.
    He followed the family around from a distance, waiting for his moment, but her hand remained within her father’s as they walked. Eventually they circled the entire petting zoo and headed for the exit.
    He followed them out to a dirt parking lot east of the petting zoo and watched them pile into a red ’65 Mustang with a primer-gray trunk lid. He got into his truck and followed them out to Crouch Avenue, and then left onto Grapevine Circle. They wound round Bulls Mouth Reservoir, water on their right, a bunch of trees and mustang grapevines and blackberry bushes on their left. By summertime half the houses around the reservoir would be loaded with jars of homemade preserves. They pulled the car into a driveway at 44 Grapevine Circle. Henry drove all the way around the reservoir, made a u-turn when he got to an intersection, and went back. He parked across the street and a few houses down. He had to wait for hours, till her mom and dad left without her, and later still, till the teenage boy watching her finally made her go to bed. He sat and waited, urinating into three beer cans while he did so, setting the warm beer cans just outside his truck on the asphalt, and watching the house. He hummed to himself. He nodded once at someone walking by. Once the little girl was in her bedroom Henry got out of his truck and walked the perimeter of the house. He peeked into her window and watched her change for bed. Little Sarah. He waited till she was asleep before cutting the screen away with a box cutter. He didn’t