Free Malus Domestica by S. A. Hunt Page A

spotlighted familiar sights that brought back a flood of nostalgia.
    Much of the town was different—there was a new Walgreen’s, and the Walmart had become a sprawling co-op—but underneath the shiny new veneer of change were old landmarks saturated with memories.
    There was the bridge she used to play under when she was a kid walking home from school.
    Jim’s Diner, where she had her first piece of cheesecake.
    The funeral home with the giant sloped parking lot that she’d sledded down one winter and crashed into some spare headstones at the back, leaving a bruise on her ass.
    Walker Memorial, where she’d gone to church a few times under the instruction of her therapists in her junior year of high school. That lasted about a month, but she could still hear the vaulted echoes of footsteps, smell the varnish on the pews, the dusty carpet, the faint piss-reek of ancient hymnal books with stiff pages.
    “Been a few years?” asked Joel, turning down the stereo so he could talk. He took out an iPhone and texted someone, typing with one thumb.
    “Yeah.” Robin spoke to the window, the world wheeling past her face like a diorama. They passed the Victory Lanes alley on 7 th and Stuart, the neon sign out front showing a bowling ball knocking two pins into the rough shape of a V over and over. “It has. I didn’t think I’d ever be back here. Lot of bad memories. I said I wouldn’t come back.”
    “You said this morning you wanted to pay your respects to y’mama?” He attached his phone to a magnetized ball on the dash, click, where it perched above the radio like a mounted GPS.
    “Yeah. I might visit my old house too, if I think I can handle it.”
    Joel sniffed, tugging his nose. He glanced out the window and then back at her as if he were about to give her nuclear secrets. “Ay, you want me to go witchu? You know, moral support? I don’t know when you wanna go, but I got some time off comin.”
    “I don’t know yet. Maybe some time this week.”
    “Lemme know. I’ll be there with bells on.” He flicked the tiny disco ball hanging from his rearview mirror and sun-cats danced around the interior of the car. “Jingle jangle.”
    Fisher’s comic store wasn’t quite on the main drag through town, but it was tucked into a homey little street one block over, a narrow slice of old-fashioned Americana. Knick-knack shops, drugstores, a pet shop, boutiques, barber shops, a bar, lawyers’ offices, a Goodwill, a soup kitchen. They passed a looming gray courthouse and a redbrick police station.
    The Monte Carlo slid into an angled parking spot on the street next to eight or nine other vehicles and Joel got out, taking half the stack of boxes out, leaving the rest for Robin. “Did you say Miguel donates these pizzas?” she asked, picking up the boxes and pushing the car door shut with her hip.
    “He sees it as advertising.” Joel said, suggestively tossing out a hip. “Give em a taste, they gonna come back for more.”
    Robin chuckled awkwardly.
    She felt for the curb with her toe and stepped up onto the sidewalk. The windows of the comic shop were painted with intricate images of Spider-Man and Batman in dynamic poses, Bats in his blue-and-gray Silver Age colors. Over their heads was F ISHER ’ S H OBBY S HOP in flowing cursive.
    A man came out of the comic book store and held the door open for them. “You trying to hurt me, man,” he told Joel, eyeing the pizza. He was brawny but slender, with a V-shaped torso and a round face.
    “Fish, you the one doin it to yourself, don’t blame me. I eat like a human.”
    The comic shop was dimly lit by bar fluorescents. Comics were only a fraction of the wares on the shelves—there were scores of rare, niche, and run-of-the-mill action figures still in their blister packs, board and card games, Halloween masks cast from various horror movies and superheroes, film props, videogame keychains, themed candy.
    A life-size Xenomorph creature from the Alien movies lurked