Free After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones

stuck his finger in a hole in the woods, is probably screaming for help right now. But everybody at the rest stop, they’re screaming too, at least with their eyes, and the mother, that’s got to be the mother, just collapsed by the trashcan, crying. All the other dads beating the bushes, scouring the cars. One trucker blocking the exit, so nobody can leave until the boy’s found. A tape-wound tire beater held down low by his leg, the brim of his cap pulled low and serious.
    No.
    Jonathan looks to himself on the picnic table, tells himself to look up, to help, to come into the woods, save the boy, save this boy, but now, now the inevitable: the boy’s dad, breathing hard, pulling open car doors in the parking lot, everybody standing aside.
    Look, look, Jonathan says to himself, across all that space, all this time.
    And he does, he looks up to the camper, to the boy unaccountably not there, but it’s too late, has always been too late.
    By this point the boy’s dad’s striding across the grass to the fag on the picnic table, striding across, reaching down for the fag’s chin, tilting his head up, the fag’s eyes so guilty, so crying, and then the dad’s shaking his head no, not this, making the obvious connections—deserted bathroom stall, hide what was left in the river—his other hand coming around from his waistband, the pistol right against the fag’s face, the sound of the gun not even there, the father blowing off two of his own fingers even, the fag’s brains sloughing down onto the picnic table like jelly.
    The mom, screaming something now, pulling herself up with the lip of the trashcan. The other dads pulling their families close here, now. One of them looking over his wife’s shoulder to Jonathan, standing at the edge of the trees. Seeing what Jonathan can feel now, should have felt all along: no shirt, his shorts so stupid and giveaway, rolled up a turn or two farther than decent company would ever accept. The ruler in blue ink on his lower back, extending out to nine inches.
    Of course.
    This is where Lucas went. All along, this is where he was, where he is.
    That second dad pushes his wife to the side, steps forward. The first dad, the eight-fingered dad, sees too, and raises his pistol through the red mist still in the air, Lucas falling back from it, tearing through the trees, running headlong away, his own breath heavy in his ears. Finally crashing out through the ditch, falling up the other side, into the crush of interstate commerce, into a moment’s inattention, so that he could have been a deer, a dog, a bag of trash. Less. Only enough left of him to walk back to the rest stop at dusk, to what’s left of the love of his life, to take his hand and continue this camping trip, to keep doing it over and over until they get it right, find the mountains, drink their plastic-tasting water, rub sunscreen onto each other’s noses, push their thick-socked feet deep into their sleeping bags and know that nothing can touch them, up here. That it’s just them.
     







my didn’t die against the dashboard that day, but the surgeries are still coming. His prom date, she’s going to have to look inside to see the real him.
    In quick succession, then, I flamed out of my year-to-year contract at our branch of the state university, was back to stocking tools and air conditioners at night.
    And this. Talking about books.
    More and more, I was thinking it was the only good thing I had in me. My only real gift. And that, if I didn’t share it, then the next time one of Jeremy’s bills came due, my wife’s dad wasn’t going to come through with a check, or the surgeon that day was going to have had one too many drinks at lunch.
    I’d put up a flyer at the library, the Laundromat, the carwash, both coffee shops.
    There were seven of us, most Wednesdays.
    This week we were reading Stephen King again. Marcy from the bank had recommended him, because, she said, she was too scared to read him alone. So we