Free Farewell Navigator by Leni Zumas Page B

phlegm, hobbled by gangrene, heels printing blood in the snow, unable to find the right road. Like my father, most Town natives got swallowed up by the outside world if they agreed to step into it. Kids off to college stayed away for good; two-week vacations turned into permanent leaves; fortune-seekers, once departed, were rarely seen again. As a result, the Town’s population was dwindling steadily. One of the high schools had already been shut down. The dentists had moved away for lack of patients and we walked around with bad teeth.
    After the birthday cake was gone I found a state map and stared at the little square south of Springfield that the Town was supposed to occupy. The space lay empty. The Town was not listed in the index. I was shocked to learn, at eleven years of age, that I did not live anywhere. I told myself there had been an error at the map factory and from that point on scrutinized every map I could get ahold of, assuming there must be some record of our existence. I worked diligently to collect them—stained scrolls from antique stores, cheap laminates from gas stations—and pasted them into notebooks. I had maps fromevery continent, world atlases and national cartographs I’d sent away for. If I had to live in an invisible city I wanted at least to own charted proof of places that did exist.
    At the Laundromat I found Lily. We had been meeting there almost every night of the summer to buy coffees and spend quarters on pinball. Our patterns of migration were reliable.
    I heard a kid say there’s something happening at the Y.
    Like what, I said.
    Something, I don’t know, who cares? Finish this. Lily handed me the coffee cup and snapped open her compact and we drove lipstick on. We look fucking smashing! she declared and we ran down the slope behind the Laundromat to cut across the park, the wind lifting our dresses.
    The YMCA gym usually stayed empty, but that night its windows were blazing when we walked up. A handful of kids had collected at the door’s mouth. Lily and I took our place among them, those kids in brown lace-up shoes and denim jackets who shared with us the same bad luck of getting born nowhere.
    It’s a concert, one of them said.
    There had never been a concert in the Town. Live music only happened if there was a wedding.
    A charcoal van plowed up the drive and four boys stepped out. They might have been angels, weird as they looked to us. We stared at their two-colored hair, stiff with pomade, and at the four matching black bullrings in their sunburnt noses. (No one had seen a bullring except in magazines; none among us had ever attempted one, not even the kids who tattooed calligraphy on their knuckles or carved symbols into their forearms with heated-up knives.) These boys wore long velvet coats, studded belts, striped trousers with buttons at the calf, and box-heeled boots youcouldn’t have purchased within a three-hundred mile radius of where they now stood.
    Like pirates, breathed Lily.
    Inside the gym, a red glow from the exit signs turned their bodies into black paper cutouts. While they fussed with the amplifiers we waited dutifully, grateful for this unexplained gift of disruption.
    Their music was tuneless and played at volumes so high the notes could not separate themselves and were left for dead under the static. I could not pretend to like it, but I was enthralled. The gunfire decibels, the stuttering howls, their dripping mouths, the grisly discomfort of the chords: together it announced, in no uncertain terms, Your life is not happy and neither is mine . Inside the frantic noise the singer hovered and slouched, spitting out wails at random and only opening his eyes between songs, to scan the meager audience, to lift his chin at us. He was the only one I watched. He was not good-looking in the way singers are supposed to be. As a little boy he had probably been winsome and soft-eyed—poised to grow into a handsome man—but now his face was bruisey, gutted. I