Free Dan by Joanna Ruocco

Help had crept into her house and crouched beneath her kitchen sink, and maybe Dr. Buck too, and Hal Conard had made his rounds through the streets of Dan.
    Nothing can really be known about the morning or the night, thought Melba. I suppose that’s why we have dates. The numbers make tiny equations and we can learn the numbers and feel like we’ve settled something. Melba, not for the first time, marveled at the strangeness of morning and night sharing a date when they were so palpably distinct.
    If Melba were mayor of Dan, she would see that this was changed. It would be her first initiative. Day and night would be divided, no longer lumped together by the chuckleheaded mandate of the calendar. The change was bound to be popular; it was reasonable, and it would serve to speed things up—dates flying past, two or maybe even four dates in a twenty-four hour period—so one no longer had to drag along from midnight to midnight, forced to consider an experience so protracted and yet so disjunctive as a single unit.
    But when before did I ever hanker for a political voice? Melba touched her throat gently, then pinched and wiggled her windpipe, rather roughly.
    I’m so tired of thinking, she thought. The only distraction is small bodily manipulations and I’m tired of those too. She looked with hope at the bakery door. The bakery door banged open. In walked Don Pond.
    Thank—, thought Melba.
    Don Pond was the bakery’s first customer every day, but he never boasted.
    “It’s luck, Melba,” Don Pond had told her, long ago, back when they were still assessing one another’s prospects as people. Melba had just handed him his bags of garlic sticks and psyllium husk brownies and listened politely.
    “I don’t move faster than other men,” Don Pond had said, “and I don’t wake up any earlier. I can’t say I’m more deserving than they are, either. In fact, many would say I’m less deserving.”
    Soon a precedent was established. Don Pond would always linger after purchasing his baked goods, making modest claims and waving a garlic stick so that salt and chips of toasted garlic fell onto the counter. He and Melba would lick their fingertips and press them down on the counter, returning their fingers to their mouths and sucking off the savory crumbs. Melba came to enjoy these interludes with Don Pond, except on occasion, when Don Pond was in a mood and his modesty became taxing.
    “I’ve caused a lot of suffering, Melba,” Don Pond would confess.
    “Oh Don, you’re in a mood,” Melba would interrupt but he would not be put off. When Don Pond was in one of his moods, he interrogated himself ruthlessly, finding fault after fault, and nothing Melba said to encourage leniency made any impression. Just the other week he had stomped into the bakery and Melba could tell from his patchily shaven head and bare, goose-pimpled arms that he was in the throes of a mood the likes of which he had never before inflicted upon her.
    “I’ve caused a lot of suffering, Melba,” he began. “I mean physical suffering! To others. In podiatry class, I discovered a splinter in the sole of a classmate’s foot, and I dug for the splinter with a needle, dug deeply, until I had exhausted myself. Can I tell you a secret, Melba, something I’ve never told anyone?”
    “Is it because you see me as a person of little consequence?” asked Melba. She retreated through the swinging door into the back of the bakery as she said it, overcome by emotion. She opened and slammed the walk-in refrigerator door so Don Pond would think she was checking on the pitchers of eggs. The cold blast of air felt good against her face and neck. Melba liked Don Pond. She felt close to him when they laughed together, licking their fingers and tasting the pungency of lightly charred garlic: such a flooding, intimate taste to share with someone before most people were even awake. Then he had to spoil it by bringing up secrets, secrets he would only tell to a