Free Black and Orange by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

back window, through the pane . A tumbleweed edged along the bumper, scraping it with a sound like steel on steel.
    Martin came awake and twisted out of his seat. She felt him summon a mantle but she shook her head and signaled all-clear. With a slow unfolding of her arm, she dropped the gun down on her hip and moved the safety into place with her thumb.
    Martin blew some air out and released his mantle. He slumped against the threshold. “You okay?”
    “I’m so hungry I think I’m getting the jitters.”
    He nodded groggily. “We don’t know when the next letter will arrive.”
    “Or if there will be money,” she added.
    “He gives us some every year.”
    “Maybe this time’s different. Did you feel the displacement at the bar?”
    He slowly nodded, although it seemed he didn’t want to admit this for the sake of it being true. “It probably has nothing to do with the Messenger.”
    It started to rain outside.
    “We can’t go on this way. What if the letter doesn’t come until the 30 th ? Do we starve until then?”
    Martin closed his eyes, trying to fall back to sleep. “We’ve used the mantles to steal before. It’s all right. Nobody’s going to hell.”
    “Too much exposure, I think we need to make a stop in Flagstaff.”
    His eyes opened and his face colored now. “That’s not on the way.”
    “I haven’t seen mom and dad in thirty years, Martin. They’ll give us money when they see how badly off we are. Besides, they need to know about what’s happening to me. You said I should own up. Well, here you are.”
    “What the hell are you talking about? There’s no time Teresa. Your parents might not even be alive anymore. And the Messenger said we couldn’t go back—”
    She hit the lever and the back doors popped open. The tumbleweed hopped into the dark brown emptiness. Rain snapped loudly against the pavement. She lit a clove anyway and sucked in. In the rain the smoke struggled for shape. Her lungs suddenly burned with relish.
    “The Messenger has never missed a letter yet,” said Martin, following.
    A mouthful of smoke fell out and stung her eyes.
    “Is this really about telling them the truth?” he persisted. “Be honest with me, goddamn it. We don’t have the time to piss away.”
    The smoke started to hurt. She smashed the half-smoked clove under her tennis shoe. He watched her a long time, seeming unsure how to proceed. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Moonlight bent over the glistening road and made everything look bathed in tar. Martin finally dropped outside and took her waist, pulled her close. His heart thumped quick underneath his t-shirt. She laced her fingers around his puka shell necklace and toyed with one shell for a few moments, then rested her face on his warm chest.
    “We’ll go,” he told her.

ELEVEN
     
    Paul Quintana reflected on the recent past, and not fondly. It was a change from dwelling on the nightmare of his distant past: the smell of his mother, her bright eyes when he flipped the lamp on, the sound of her startled cry, the heat in her skin from the pleasure she thought her boyfriend Freddy had given her—that whole sequence of events was a hateful ambrosia Paul drank daily. But today he couldn’t taste it; things had been reconfigured and he couldn’t decide if that was good or not.
    He thought perhaps it wasn’t black and white. Or orange.
    The rectory sentinels had draped him over a granite coffin. Paul wagered it belonged to some old witch who wrote a Tome or two in her day. The catacombs beneath Mojave chapel had the distinction of housing thousands of Church members, all in hand-sculpted tombs. The brisk winds from lower corridors blew through them in wild trajectories, sounding like wraiths maiming each other.
    Paul’s eyes flicked to turning, bleeding shapes that wound around helixes of darkness. The smell of liquefying meat, a death-reminder smell, hovered around him. If the power of the marrow seeds did not wear thin soon,