Free A Once Crowded Sky by Tom King, Tom Fowler Page A

up and throw it off the balcony of their apartment, watch it shrink away as it spun into space. If she had powers, that’s what she’d do.
    Finally, some mysterious permutation activates the screen. Of course, Pen left the thing turned up to a typically unreasonable level. How many times does she have to tell him to turn the damn thing down before he leaves the room? She means to reach for the volume, but her hand is unwilling, and she leaves it as it is.
    On the TV, on a channel that should be showing reruns of some asinine courtroom show, there’s an overhead shot of a window burning. The view switches: shots of men and women, their faces mudded red-brown from cuts and bruises, fleeing from something, but not all in the same direction. Anna reaches out; the static of the TV buzzes at the tips of her fingers as she glides her hands over the crowd and demands that each of them be a stranger.
    Some announcer she doesn’t recognize repeats the same familiar phrases over and over. The words terrorist and cause and unexpected come and go, but she’s not really paying attention anymore. At one point hesays something about heroes, but she’s not sure if he’s referring to the game kind or to the firemen or to something else.
    He lost his phone. That’s why I got the call. That stupid boy. He left his phone at the funeral. That’s so like him. And he never went back and got it. So he had hers; she lent it to him. Which means she can’t call him from her cell, because he has it. That stupid, dumbass boy.
    She returns to the kitchen and finds the shattered pieces of their portable on the floor, the back open, the battery missing. They need to get another landline, but they’re waiting until they’ve got a bigger place. They’re always waiting. She keeps telling him—
    She drops to her hands and knees, the hard floor biting at her joints through the small cushion of her sweatpants. It’s not there. Where the hell is it? Where the hell—after placing her ear against the ground, she spies the battery under the cabinet, and she squeezes her fingers into the tight space to reach it. At her touch, it jumps and scoots farther back.
    Why’d they get these cabinets? Why? They could’ve gotten ones that fit better. But he insisted they’d save money this way. He insisted. Jesus Christ! He could—Jesus Christ! Now she can barely make out the outline of the damn battery in the stupid shadow haunting the bottom of her too too small, too fucking small kitchen!
    Her husband can dodge bullets. Though she has her doubts, he claims he could put his fist through a wall and not feel a thing. Before he could drive a car, he was bounding through the air, steering a slit of metal through the clouds of Arcadia, his hand clutching a metal bar attached by a metal rope to a metal man who’d saved the world countless times.
    She asked him once—in the beginning, when they wouldn’t even call what they were doing “dating”—if he was ever scared. “No,” he said, “not once,” and then he was quiet.
    And she knew it was bravado. She knew he had to cover up the fear with something thick in order to do what he had to do; but that was enough for her. He didn’t have to say everything—some of it she could figure out on her own.
    Her thumb and forefinger pinch in, seizing the sides of the battery. Not breathing, she tenderly places a speck more force on the object and begins to drag her arm backward. It moves, just a hair or two, but it moves.
    Finally, she fits both arms in, brackets her fingers on each of thebattery’s sides; with that slight illusion of a grip, she starts to slide the cruel thing out of the gap. As it comes, she whispers to it, coaxes it forward. There’s no one around to hear her, and she tells it some secrets about how she worries sometimes and sometimes she needs to know.
    The battery listens and kindly cooperates by slithering out to the open. She picks it off the floor, but in her rush it slips from her hands