Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. I caught a layer shrinking on
his porch and are after midnight, and suspicion tightened my
hands around the chief flashlight. I always kept clip to
my belt. I stepped out of my car with the
engine still warm. The street light above our drive hund
the clock in the municipal post three twelve point two.
Belaise stood on his front step, one foot on the
top stair and one foot hovering. His shoulders folded into himself,
his flannel hung loose. He looked smaller, like a man
trying to fit inside a child's frame. I dropped the
flashlight into my hand and move closer. I have kept
notes on my phone for weeks. I sleep poorly, I
work out shifts, and I left two houses down from
a layers. I tell you that because when I say
I know the difference between a drunk stumble aness, I'm
on speaking from repeated sober attention. Suspicion drove me out
that night. I had felt it for days and had
made me walk the sidewalk at midnight in a threadberhoodye
I owned fore years. He did notice me at first.
His hands clutched the porch rail like a child gripping
a grown up palm. His chaw moved quickly the weight,
as when someone tries to make one voice hold two tones.
I called his name, Olise, My voice was well. He
flinched and spawn and the face that turned toward me
had the same hollow cheeks I had seen in his
photo on the block's Facebook group, but the eyes looked different,
round and orded. He answered with the high countance of
a kid startled in the middle of a game. I
can tea, he said, then stopped, as if the sentence
fell off the edge of his mouth. His shirt sleeves
had ridden up. There was a small hand sized smudge
of dirt on his wrist. He was shrunk, and not
in a way of clothing falling loose, but imposture and
reaching the way his knees bent inward. Missus Hanley opened
her front door two houses over with a mug in
her hand. She saw Alis and that older crossed her
face recognition and a long store of private rules. She
called my name before I could decide whether to move closer.
He shouldn't be out here at this Eyele she said,
but her voice was flat, with something older than worry.
Missus Hanley look at him, I said appointed. She set
the mug down on the seat and came to the
sidewalk with slow, certain gate of some one who had
lived on this block for thirty years. She spin like
this once before the words landed like a stone. She
didn't explain, She only watched Oliz, hands folded under her chin.
Lilis tried to step down, and his foot missed the
stair by half an inch. He made a small noise
and hugged his knees as if cold. I moved to
steady him and found his shoulders collapsing into my palms.
His watch was an old digital with a scratched face.
The hands were frozen at twelve point one in the
dim glow. Missus Hanley, why is it always after midnight?
And Oliz blinked as though he knew the question and
was trying to put its meaning into the right mouth.
We managed to get him inside his small living room.
The front door stuck under the frame. The lock clicked
when I forced it with a shoulder. The smell was
dust and old wool. Olaise leaned against a kitchen chair,
and closed his eyes. His breathing shifted from slow, adult
and hails to a rapid, shallow pattern that made the
thin muscles at his throw flutter. When Marla arrived, she
smelled of cigarette smoke and authority. She brushed through the
doorway with a key I had never seen and a
sudden professional shield. Oliers, What did you do now? She said?
Her fingers twisted the ring on her hand. Her voice
carried the tight ness if someone called out at night
for things they wanted to get private. She introduced herself
to missus Hanley and me without softening, and Marla, I'm
a sister. She did not ask how we had gotten
in Marla's as skimmed the room and stopped on a
closed closet door. She moved to it hand hovering above
the knob. I heard the metallic jangle of keys in
her pocket and the movement of her jaws. She decided
which faced a shore. She he's been sick. We thought
it was neurological. We thought her voice cut, she kept saying.
We thought as if the thought itself had been a
bandaged They were removing. Missess Hanley shook her head. There's
a toy in his coat. She went to the coat
rack by the door and tubbed a dam faded cardigan free.
A small plastic soldier fell out, water beats stuck to
its paint. I picked it up. It fit in my
palm like a child's reminder. I said. There were clothes
under his shirt. There was a small card again in
the closet. There was a music box behind shirts in
the bottom drawer. I heard my voice steady on the
lost items, listing evidence by motion, not interpretation. Marla looked away,
finger nail catching the corner of the closet door. Johntee
opened the closet. She said her mouth tightened, not yet
her hands moved like she wanted to block us, not
only from seeing, but from knowing. We pried the closet.
The lock gave under two screw drivers and a cheap crowber.
Inside we found it ten music box wrapped in newspaper,
a child's cardigan folded flat, and an analog watch with
its hand stopped at midnight. The music box had a
small smear of rost on its hinge and a frozen
note of melody. When we nudged a crank no falsum,
a warped single tone like a child's lulla by hitting
a missing key. Marla, those aren't mine. Her voice was
a low, tight thing. She tried to put the clothes back,
as if re arranging them could rearrange the meaning. She
left the watch face in my hand. Officer Dies arrived
at one in the morning because I called when we
found the clothes. She had a flashlight that cut the
room into white rectangles. Officer Dies for names on the
dresses and kept repeating, no crime here. Medical call at
a repetition would make the obvious gap what we saw
on whether law could touch narrower. She wrote a report
while Olise sat on the sofa with his niece tucked
and stared at the music box. Olaise opened his mouth
while officered Eyes wrote, and his voice shifted again. I
wanted to keep the music, he said, in high, quick syllables,
and then he seemed to be listening to something only
he could hear. He put his hands over his ears
and cult into a smaller shape on the couch. It's cold,
it's small, he whispered, and then he pressed both palms
against the bridge of his nose and squeeze. The first
shift in my emotion moved from suspicion to confusion. I
wanted an explanation that masched human systems illness, shrugs a
failed treatment. I argued that to myself as we moved
to look at the polar as not loose in the
hallway table. The photographs were face after face of Alais
in the same sweat over decades sixty forty twenty, and
in one of the pictures, a smaller pair of hands
rested on his shoulder, too small for an adult. Marla
snatched the photos from the table. There was a private
she said, sharply, and her hands were the kind that
could fold a room into silence. She placed the photos
back on the table and then shoved them into an
envelope and slid the envelope into her jacket pocket. Missus Hanley,
I've seen that picture before. He keeps them like Talisman's.
She touched the edge of a photograph with a finger
tip that had flower marks on the knuckle. There swan
with him and a little boy in an old playground.
I thought it was just nostalgia. I thought it was
lonely men holding onto the past. Not like this, Her
voice broke on the last two words. We sat in
the kitchen, while the Liz's breathing came in ragged bursts.
We talked in fragments because words felt like tools that
could cut our bind. Officer dyers. Did he hurt himself?
Is he dangerous? Maul answered no, he is disoriented. He
needs rest. Her mouth formed a shiltering distance she didn't reach.
Blaise's hands began to fidget, and then he shoved both
palms into his cardigan pockets and pulled out damp folded note.
He unfolded it with the slowness of some one, tracing
shapes to remember letters on the paper was a childish groll.
Be back at midnight, be careful, dantes forget to count.
My confusion shifted into an edge fear when I read
the instruction count what he back at midnight? From where
the letters were lodge and uneven. Thelais looked at the
note and blink slowly. He mouthed the words and then
began to hum. The music box walped latch, not in
the room, but under his breath, like a thread pulling
something loose. The ire crawled toward midnight again in the
clock above the street. We stepped into the backyard because
Liz kept saying he wanted there the metal store clock
in the lamp of street eleven point fifty eight. My
palms were damp. Missess Hanney held a Thermas like it
was a shield. Molla stood near the back door with
her shoulders squared. We watched the porch across the narrow lawn.
As the minute flipped, the liddies began moving oddly, first
a small stoop, then a sudden contraction at the knees.
His spines of movement were not smooth. He folded into
himself and then straightened, as if some one inside him
pulled a different set of levers. I lunged forward when
he convulsed and caught his arm. His limbs contorted in
a way that did not match bone length. His form
seemed to tuck under his torso. He made a sound
that at both a man's slow strain and a child's
thin cry. I felt something press behind his eyes when
he looked at me. Another presence carried on top of
his face like a film, but it wasn't a metaphor.
I could see it as a small change in how
his mouth curved, how his pupils dilated. Hold him, I
told Malla, Hold him by the shoulders. We gripped her
fingers dug into his cardigan fabric. Olaise twisted his head
towards us. In a second, smaller face flickered in his eyes,
a reflection of a different mouth in a different set
of expectations. The second presence was not audible, but Eliz's
fingers moved to count on his knuckles quick and tiny.
Officer Dies called for back up over her radio, and
then turned it off. When she saw the way Les's
shoulders jerked, she stepped back and said, stay with him,
Dante let him out of sight. Her voice had the
clip cadence of someone who expects nothing supernatural to be true,
and yet that night she did not laugh. Alias convulse
one more time, and then became very still. He folded
farther down until he was small enough to sit in
the porch step without his knees hanging his watch. Dad
stopped at twelve point one. The music box fell from
an open pocket and rolled against a concrete seam. Its
metal casing whispered. The sound was like a high note
scratched in the air to fearing. Then something else arrived,
an animal noise in the yard, or a child's laugh
from a half closed window. Missus Hanley looked up and
then down. Dante go past the tracks, she said, suddenly,
to no one in particular, and then to me. She
had not said that before. The sentence landed as a rule,
not folklore. I had to ask missus Hamley what tracks.
She swallowed and said, there's a real line two streets over.
Folks he used to say, not to go past it
after dark. All people used to warn the kids away.
Lilies used to take late walks that way. She didn't
he finish. That was a twist. I hadn't expected the
block of memory that changed how I placed Olaire's walks.
Up to that point, I had assumed this was isolated.
Her words required context. Now what we saw at min
At might link to a place in town no one
crossed after dark. Lais was silent. He lifted his hands
and counted four small, deliberate taps on his knee. He
in a child's voice, camp with me. I counted a lot,
because his eyes held me with a pleading that was
quite adult. We counted eight. On the eighth tapis shoulders clenched,
and he pushed off the step. He was gone when
the porch light flared. No one hurt him step away.
There was only the sound of soft scuffing on gravel
that stopped at the fence. We round to the gate
and peered down the narrow alley that led toward the
track's two streets. Over the street lamps made a ribbon
of dull yellow. The night swallowed the last of his footprints.
Don found as combing his house. Officer Dies filed a
report that read ordinary on paper, missing adult, no signs
of forced entry, no substance detected on paper. The watch
in the music box were evidence. Items of bar coats
in hand. The watch was cool and flat. The music
box offered a warp half melody when spun between finger nails.
Marlla moved through the rooms like a woman sweeping through
a place she had already mourned. He left at midnight,
she said to me once, and then looked away. He
left of his own accord. He chose her voice, both
accused and protected. We found a stack of poloids pin
to the wall and his den. The photographs have been
reducted with black marker and strange places, names and dets
struck out, leaving only faces in the cornice of places.
One photograph had an old playground slide with a layers
sitting on it and a child's hand extended toward his knee.
Another showed him older, holding a small toy boat in
a diner booth. A picture's pin together showed the same
man at different sizes across different years. Officer Dier's close
her notebook and said, we have probable cause for a
missing person aboard. We'll issue an alert. She took the
watch on the music box's items of interest. Keep a log,
She told me. If you see anything, call us Dante,
confront unknown partis alone. She left with the quiet competence
of some one returning to a world that must make sense.
Marla packed a small bag and told a layer's neighbor
she would handle clean up and appointments and anything else
that smelled like responsibility. Missus Hanley offered coffee and cass
whorls without pursing, but with a steady hand. I sat
at a Lai's kitchen table and wrote down what I
had seen. I detailed the contractions, the child's cadence, the stopwatch,
the music box, the polaroids. My hand shook when I
wrote the words count and tracks. The shaking was a
physical sign that something inside me had shifted from confusion
to fear. That fear turned into a kind of methodical resolve.
By morning, I taped the music box into small evidence
back and photographed the watch with my phone. I recorded
the polaroids in sequence. I numbered the items and wrote
their locations for me. Cataloging was the only way to
keep a lid on panic. The act of organizing kept
my jaw from clenching until it aged. Before Maula left
with a handful of photos and a promise to return,
she turned to me. Dante, tell any one about the closet,
she said, And she said it sharply so it would
lodger my memory. As command, if you must tell, tell
Officer Dyers, Dante, tell the internet. Dante feed rumors. Her
eyes were hard and wet at once, she folded herself
into protecting ship. I had seen before in family members
who wanted to hide damage from a world that would
not understand. I left the watch in the music box
under my arm, and the says Hanney beside me, handing
me a thermisalt like a talisman. When I stepped into
the street, the morning air had a thin coal that
made my breath white. I put the watch in my
pocket and the music box in my bag. My note
becud twenty pages of scribbled sentences and the headline I
hadn't tender to ray keep a night lock. Officer Dyers
called me later that morning and read the report back,
missing it all last seen midnight, no witnesses. She if
I wanted to file a statement. I said yes, and
then added, I need to be here to night. She paused,
then asked why. I answered simply because him change. A
pause was long enough to hear her calibrate disbelief into duty.
She i'll run patrols by the tracks. Call if you
see anything. I agreed. When I hung up, I put
the watch on the kitchen table and closed the drawer
over it. I wound up the music box and let
it hitter once before I slid it into a line pocket.
The single watt note hung in the air and then
was swallowed by the sound of a passing patrol. I
went home before noon and slept in the shallow way
people do after a sleepless night. Sleep came in small chunks.
I woke with my hand in the old digital watch
in my pocket. My finger found the scratch upon its
glass and traced it like a prayer of comprehension. By
the time thus came, I had set an alarm for
eleven fifty I packed a flashlight, notebook, and the music
box wrapped in a bandana. Must Haney called from a
porch and told me to be careful in three different ways, practical, moral,
and superstitious. She dawntey go past the tracks unless he
re ready to count, and then she clapped her hand
over her mouth, as if she had proclaimed a secret.
Her warning was both a civic instruction and a superstition,
handed down with a plate of cookies. When the street
clock approached midnight again, I stood on my lawn and
watched Oliz's house. I had changed from suspicion to curiosity,
to dread to resolve over a span of ten hours.
The emotion shifts had been visible in my body, a
tightening jaw, a shallow breath, a decisive step forward. The
night opened like a wound, and I walked toward it.
At eleven fifty nine, I heard a sound behind me,
a car door, then missus Hanner's whisper. If anything happens,
maa Thys will be up his route By the tracks.
At one, I whispered back, I'll wait by the fence.
She put a thermos into my hands and said, bring
the watch if you can. I tucked it into my
palm and felt its flat face against my skin. The
porch light across the yard flared at midnight. Lie stood
there again, smaller and more deliberate. He looked at me
as if he had been waiting, and then moved. He
walked toward the gate in the exact deliberate rhythm of
the child's counting we had tried to match. He paused
at the fence, turned once, and looked back at the house.
His mouth put together the word sorry with the slowness
of a child learning in adult apology. He stepped through
the gate, and the knight swallowed him. I called his name,
and my voice went raw. The sound of his scuffing
feet on gravel faded. When I reached the gate. There
was only the film of dew and the grass, and
a faint smer of small prints heading toward the tracks.
I followed them until the yard narrowed in the lamplight shifted.
Then I stopped, because the Prince simply ended at the
chain link boundary by the alley beyond the trucks, the
reels lay like a line of no return. I watched
the horizon for a long time, and then turned back
to Alise's empty porch. The watch in my pocket taped
against my palm, though its hands remained frozen at twelve
point one, as if the mechanism wanted to move and
couldn't he. I put the music box on the porch
step and wound at once. A warped home played and
then broke. Dawn came with a las gune and with
new tasks, log entry, his phone calls, and no decision.
I decided to document every midnight. I decided to keep
the music box and the watch under my control. I
decided to learn what the counting meant. As I left
ols house that morning, I hesitated outside his gate, clutched
the watch, and heard the faintest sound behind me, a chal, small,
deliberate counting from a mail book across the street that
stopped at three and then vanished. I turned toward the
sound and stepped forward. When the porch light clicked off,
leaving the music box a single walped note in the air,
like a question that refused to resolve. I pried the
back window and stepped into a living room, Whererillaz folded
in an arm chair, limbs collapsing like a marionette in
the dark. Suspicion drove my hands. Suspicion made me break
him without calling for help. He was smaller in the
low light, shoulders pressed towards his ears, knees drawn up
beneath the card. Again, I turned the cheap flashlight against
the ceiling and watched dust flash across a pole's clock
on a mantel. A municipal post clock had rid twelve
of two. When I left my car, the house cock
read twelve ten, and the second hand had stopped at
one minute past midnight. I say suspicion because I could
not let the image on his port be the only proof.
The night I had first seen Alis shrinking at his
doorway was a clear physical event in my head to
refuse to be explained away, I had put my car
keys in my pocket and told myself I would only
watch that memory. Him getting shorter under the street light
made me come back. The sheep flashlight hung from my belt.
When I climbed the crooked porch steps and pressed the
window frame, the room smelled of old wool and dust.
There was a lamp knock sideways on the coffee table,
teak broken in three pieces in the rug, and a
lay still in the arm ship, breathing like someone trying
to keep two different rhythms in time. I stepped closer.
I saw his hands too small for the sleeves, fingers
cold tight. I touched his shoulder. His skin was cool,
and he did not look up. I said, Elise, and
his head turned with a childless lowness. He answered in
a voice that was both him and not him. Maggie,
he said, and his mouth shaped the name with the quick,
innocent trust of a child calling for a familiar adult.
I had the thinness in it and felt my second emotion, doubt,
slipping into fear. Doubt had been a background noise since
the porch that first night. Now it sharpened into immediate danger.
I moved to the arm chair and tried to lift
him by the shoulders. My hands met bones that had
the wrong ratio for the man I knew. The Liz
sacked against my palms like a coat that had been
turned inside out. He made a small sound, half laugh,
half hiccup, and reached out with both hands, fingers searching air.
His eyes were glossy steel blue, but rounder, and the
line on his forehead that I remembered was a shallow
fold now instead of a worry. When I bent to
steady him, he clung to the arm of the chair
with surprising strength, and then folded again. The window I
had forced to enter slound shut behind me with a
gust of cold that knocked the lamp. I spawned and
heard footsteps outside on the porch, rapid determined done to
let him go. A woman hissed, threw the thin gass.
Maggie shoved the back door open and came in without knocking.
She had a coat half on and one shoe, and hied.
Maggie's shoulders were set like some one a fight. You
had it, she said, and then softer you took too long.
She moved to Liz, ignored me for a second, and
put her shoulder under his back. Her voice changed when
she said his name, Eliz, Eliz. Hold on. Maggie's hands
were steady. Her first lines were practical. We lift him together.
On three one two we heaved a Lie's body folded further,
hips collapsing toward the floor. He made a wet sound
that reached my throat like a cut officer dies as
cruiser lights painted the curtains outside in a thin blue
band and then stopped at the end of the driveway.
Maggie's brow snapped up at the sound of the siren,
and the next motion shifted through me from fear into
a harved, pragmatic focus. I tightened my grip and matched
Maggie's rhythm. Dios banged on the front door with the
heel of his hand and called out neighborhood wellness check
any one inside. His voice had the official flatness I
had heard before the professional distance that tried to smith
horrors into checklists. He was in the porch as if
he'd run the block. A second later, the front door
opened and he stepped into the hall with his flashlight
and a paper notebook already in his hand. His eyes
darted at a Liz, and then as what happened in here?
He asked? My voice came out clipped he regresses. After
midnight he collapsed in the chair. We thought you should
check him. Maggie Oliz's first and lost name. Quickly thelaes
morn Dies repeated the name into his note book. Ome's
pulse he said, the way officers say, show me to
make action concrete. We move the layers towards the howyso
dye as could reach him. He confosed mid's step and
not jerk that pushed eyes backward on to the wallpaper.
The officer swore and steadied himself against the hallway banister Jesus,
he said, breathing through it. His hand hovered near lays
wrist and then pulled away like something that surprised him.
I blocked a closet with my elbow and yant. The
door opened, because an instinct told me the house would
hold answers. The closet was packed with adult sweaters, a
box of navel pill bottles, and a wall of polor
or is nailed in a cramped grid. I stepped closer
in trout the flashlight. Along the photos. There were faces,
some older than a layer should be, for the dates
written in byrow and the white margins handprint, small dusty
over leg grown men in suits. The polaroids were pinned
and taped and smeared with corrections. Several had dates from
decades earlier. My suspicion hardened into a new edge betrayal.
The layers had been hiding a pattern. Maggie grabbed my arm,
whispering he started them after ninety eight. He needed to
remember who was coming and going. Her voice cracked on
the last three words, shiddy years, like they were charges.
I pulled one photo free with my finger nail. The
paper assisted and then came away with a soft rip.
It showed Deliz smiling at a picnic table with a
child size hanprin over his mouth. Officer Dyas walked into
the study and saw the wall. He flipped a page
in his note book and said, you have medical records,
anything that explains He stopped when he looked at the
poor words. He did not write the first thing down. Instead,
he stepped to the closet end pointed to the handwritting
on a corner. What is that date, he asked, Jane tenth,
nineteen eighty eight. Maggie read the timeline did not fit
a normal illness. I pulled the drawer on the bedside
table because the layout mapsed my mental map from watching
him from across the street. The drawer resisted and then
slid open with a crack. Inside was the tin music box,
its paint chipped, the whining key swollen with age. My
hands began to shake for the first time, and the
feeling shifted again from betrayal into a thin, cold clarity.
This object wasn't he incidental? It had wait. I turned
a box in my palm. It fit in my hand
like a child's treasure. There was a stick of a
small boat on the lid, and when I wounded, a
sharp metallic chime started to unwind into a luller by tune.
The sound altered the room. It made Olaise in hale
and go still. Dawn Tea Maggie started and then cut
herself off. She watched a box with both hands on
Olay's shoulders. The music rolled into the space, and a
second voice answered it, not from the box, but from Alaise.
The voice inside him layered over the child's cadence, as
if multiple records were playing on top of each other
and the grooves were out of sync. The li's mouse
shaped woods in a slow, deliberate way. The boat home returned,
followed by a stacado aldo syllable that belonged to some
one else. Dias took a step back, and then another one.
Olai's hands fex like the hands of a very small
child trying to find a window. When it back, DIA's
his voice lower, Now stop it. My arm tightened around
the box. Maggie's naels were white on Olai's card. Again
she is named softly, then Lauder Olaise. Please. He opened
his eyes, and the child's eyes blinked for a moment.
I missed the adult calculation in them. The room filled
with a quite so specific I could count the panes
in the window. I paused the winding key. The lullab
hung somewhere between notes. The metallic breath. Billia's glapsed into
a heap on Maggie's lap, and then settled, with a
child's trust, into the crook of her arm. He sighed
like some one who had been trying to hold two
breaths and gave up one. Diyes took a breath that
sounded like a man reconciling two possibilities. This isn't a
call I can file without something official, he said, I
need a clear medical problem on paper. Other doctors. Maggie
looked at me. Her eyes had a new raw edge.
Accusation and pleading all at once. You him he couldn't
go past the tracks when he was a kid, She blurted,
at me you it was the rule you. I realized
she meant pattern of rules. We both had spoken as children,
the small taboos our neighbor had kept like a litany.
My reply was, then I told him not to wander
alone after midnight. I didn't know this. I felt the
paragraph of memory from the porch press against the present.
The night I had seen him shrink. My earlier actions
had been shipped by suspicion that had become an imperative,
find proof and stop it. Dyers cleared his throat. We
can try to get an ambulance to hold him under observation.
But if this is not a recognized disorder. He left
the sentence open, like a report, waiting for a diagnosis.
Maggie's shoulders tightened. She pushed Alais toward the hallway and said,
we don't he want him in a hospital. If they
take him apart on a table and lose what we have,
he is family. Her voice had a different logic, preservation
over exposure. We argued in short lines, we need doctors?
Does we need recos Maggie, If you hide him and
he hurts someone, he won't he hurt anyone? Die Is,
Maggie snapped he is sick. He needs a house. He knows,
not a ward. I say, Maggie, we found his polaroids.
We found this. If you refuse, I can take copies.
I can give them to the station. Her reply was
immediate No. There were three more exchanges like that, quick
and clipped, each name used to anchor who had the
standing to decide. When the argument broke into the cold
arithmetic of procedure, Lais made a sudden motion. His hands
grabbed the tin box on the night's end in a
child's clumsy reach. He wounded himself in a way to
assured the motion had been learned, not yesterday, but over
many nights. The music rose in Elise's face bunched up
with a look that was not pained but tight concentration.
He hummed along under the melody, but then the olled.
A voice leaked through a rasp that spoke a sentence
and eclipped the dull headence not yet wait. That sentence
made dire's step forward. He understands dire shot by his
own words. I loungaged for the box because the pattern
in front of me had to be stopped with an action.
Maggie shouted no, dire saw and reached to hold my arm.
Elaise's hands closed in the box, and he pulled it
toward his chest. For a heartbeat, his small body tensed
like a bowstring, and then all at once he shoved
the lid closed the interior, and no snapped, and the
sun folded into silence. Olaise's chest hived, and he began
to shake. The climax that held the whole night came
in the next six heart beats. Eliza's shoulders rose and
fell rapidly, his voice layered, The child chimed a single
right syllable and an old man's syllable ancer beneath it.
With anger, he pushed himself up and slammed both palms
on to the night stand, which banged the arm of
the chef free. He looked directly at me with an
expression that was not the open, trusting one before. It
hid calculation and memory in it. You shouldn't have touched it,
he said, in my ear voice that belonged to a
forty two year old mind, angry and lucid. My hands
were on him before I thought to move. There was
a second when every person in the room made a decision.
Maggie stepped back and then forward. The eyes grabbed the
phone and started calling despatch. I tore the music box
out of Eliz's hands and smashed it on the floor.
The lids skittered across the rug and metal shots fell
out like teeth. The melody warbled, and he keeped as
if something inside it was struggling to finish a sentence.
Eliz convols and then went still. His body relaxed into
a tire deep silence followed the impact in the exact
waysir and followed gunshot and movies. The room smelt suddenly metallic,
like open coin rolls. Thus much rose and caught the
beam of Dya's flashlight. Maggie's palms were called on Elise's back.
Dres breathed out slow lines into his radio. He sounded
younger when he was shaken. He and the receiver unit
is holding patient responsive but altered, requesting m's a mental
health lisson. The formal voice returned to cover to rhonas.
When the ambulance took over, paramedics examined Olaise with effishient hands.
He checked people's pulse and ask standard questions with them
familiar tenderness, Eliz, can you tell me your name, one asked.
Delaise answered in a horse whisper o Liz mun He
kept repeating it like a mantra. Then he asked for
a glass of water and for Maggie by name. They
wanted to take him to the hospital. Maggie argued, not yet,
not unless they say why. The paramedics said, gently, my
m we have to stabilize him. If he regresses again,
he could hurt himself. Dyes put a town on Maggie's shoulder,
as if to weigh the scale. He Maggie, if you
refuse it will become a custardy thing. You want him home,
You need documentation. She looked at the polaroid wall and
then at the smash music box. Her face change from
a hard protected set to a look I recognized, weary. Decision.
Maggie let them take Olais with conditions. She signed a
foreman and then folded it into a pocket with trembling fingers.
She to me, make coppies of everything, every photo, Give
one set to eyes, give one to a lawyer, keep
one with you. If you lose them, I lose him.
The line was strict and practical. She named options like
a person naming a ladder over a sink. Do it now,
she added. We spend the next ire catalog in photographs.
Diers took notes, and against Habit photographed the wall with
his phone and low with the dates. We wrote down
which polaroids had small hand prints, in which had adult signatures.
There were names scrolled on the back in Ali's crumbed hand,
some more people I recognized from neighborhood fires. Some were
names no one could place. The pattern made a slow,
terrible coherence. Blaise had been tracking repetitions, a record of
nights when someone or something had come through his life.
At three in the morning, we were standing outside as
the ambulance pulled away with flashing red lights. Looking at
the hedges. Maggie had to lay his cardig into her
chest like a shield. Diers watched the vehicle until it
vanished down the block. Then he turned to me and
Officer make and by exhaustion, if what you found is real,
he said, I will write it up as part of
the incident report. I'll recommend an investigative follow up. He paused,
But I can promise what the paper will do with it.
These things get filtered. I felt a sudden, hard anger.
Frustration at the evidence we had might simply become a
folder in a stack. I had the polaroid in a
Manilla envelope and Olaise as stopped for a torch in
my palm. The municipal clock on the post at the
convary twelve o one. When we left the yard, Maggie Dantes,
leave him in the open, put them somewhere safe, I said,
I would. She clasped my wrists, saw him shrink on
the porch before write. She asked, you were the first witness, Dantes.
Let them tell you it didn't happen. I said, I
want tea. My voice was low and close. She repeated
his name like a protection. Olaize more, and we walked
back toward our houses with the polaroide pressed inside my jacket.
The nut had thinned into a kind of brittle light.
A dog barked and then stopped. I thought of the
first knife again, the porch picture frozen in my head,
and felt a closing shift inside me, from simple fear
to responsible, stubborn resolve. I could not, in good conscience
allow the music box and those pin photographs to remain
buried in some one's drawer. I had to make a
choice not to let them be erased by procedure. At dawn,
I sat at my kitchen table, spread the polaroids on
the laminae. I set the stop watch on top of
one picture and looked. Each image had a month and
a year in a different hand, some more annotated with
small notes. Returned left at nine captain side, not to
the tracks. The words were precise and almost legal. I
began to catalog them on to her notebook page, copping dates, descriptions,
and any writer. By mid morning, I had three stacks,
coppas for the station, coppas for Maggie, and set e
in an envelope and tucked into the lining of my jacket.
Maggie called twice that morning. The first time she was
raw and angry because hospital staff had insisted on testing.
The second time she was quieter. He sleppt most of
the day, She said, he woke around five and asked
where his music box was. He didn't he remember the closet,
He didn't he remember the polaroids. He if he'd been naughty.
Her voice broken the last word, I said, what did
the doctor say? She sounded small when she answered day.
They would run scans, check for toxins, maybe a seizure
disorder day about sleep walking. They didn't Tea say anything
about She left the sentence hanging. Two days later, Olaise
was back home. The hospital had released him with the
diagnosis of a truncent episode and a referral to a
patient neurology. They gave Maggie a printed summary that read
like a form altered mental status possible desociative event. Di
As filed his notes and after a week sent a
brief memory recommending follow up with the department as behavioral
health liaison. The official trail would be a thin line
of paper. The private truth had more weight. Elaise woke
as an adult and stayed so. He was slower. Sometimes
he blinked at the morning sunlike everyone else in the street.
His hands looked proportionate again. When he hugged Maggie in
a living room, he called me by name and laughed once,
like someone relieved to see a neighbor. He had anesia
for parts of the night, and for the small hand
prints on some polaroids. He kept a stopwatch strapped to
his wrist. He once did I do that? Did I
make that face? And Maggie, you did, but you read back.
Now we'll find out why. He I don't tea want
to be a problem, and Maggie answered, you read not
a problem, you refamily. The lines were plain and domestic,
and they tied up what the hospital could not. I
returned the coppice to Diers in person. He nodded at
the polaroids like a man handing evidence he wished were simple.
I'll keep those in the station fault for now, he said,
if Pattens show up us where this helps he use
the word pattern without drama. I left him with the
envelope and a numbered call. Maggie and Olais sorted the
polaroid again, frame by frame. The layers insisted on cataloging
the dates he could remember. He found one from nineteen
eighty eight with a child's handwriting. He'd never explain. He
about a name in a corner. Maggie him the family
had always kept lists of rules as a joke. The
Lais listened and then shrugged, but his fingers lingered on
a coroner where a small handprin faded into the emulsion.
Weeks passed, the nights grew longer and then shorter. The
municipal clock still clicked in its steady way. The wristwatch
that its stopped at one minute past midnight was fixed
and wound and wound again until it took normally. Sometimes
late night I would passed by a liz port and
look up. The house lights stayed on seldom, and when
they did, the silhouette of the window looked like a
man thinking about ordinary bills and groceries. Days later, when
the spare key was in the jacket pocket, I found
a fold of polaroids stuck at a book of local
ordinances at the library where I worked a midnight shift.
It was one of the ones I had fought coppered,
and someone had written on the back of note in
the same crump hand as olaise es keep him from
the tracks. I folded the paper and slid it into
my pocket. It felt like a small fuel for what
I intended to do with the copies, not to announce them,
but to arc of them in a slow, patient way.
I made three additional coppies and placed them in three
separate envelopes, each marked with dates in the phrase did
not destroy. I left one with Dyes, one with Maggie,
and one in a safe deposet box whose number I
wrote on a page that no one else would find
without asking me. On a morning when the sky was
a flat gray and there had been rain, Laise came
to my door. He carried the fixedress watch in his
palm and set it on my kitchen table. He looked
smaller for a moment, and then stead. I dun'tee liked
the idea of others finding those photos, he said, naming
a practical fear instead of the nights. Who would believe me?
Who would want to? Maggie had told me earlier he
had asked the doctors the same question. I answered, simply,
we will keep copies and tell truth when it matters.
He nodded, and for the first time I saw no
child or all voice lace in his speech. He sounded
like himself, cautious, polite, tire. He slept without regress in
that night. The next night he slept without regressing as well.
Weeks became a month, and the pattern that held him,
like a track loosing its ties, did not return. We
never found another intact music box. The tin on the
floor had broken in a way that made it impossible
to wind and impossible to repair. The polaroids remained a
stubborn record scrolled with dates and small obsessions. They were
evidence of something that had happened and of something that
might have been stopped. I realized now that my choices
that night were not heroic. I forced a window, I
broke a child's object in the hope of stopping a
harm larger than paperwork. My suspicion in that first paragraph
turned into a choice. Act on what you see, even
when the system asks you to wait for proof. Maggie
decided to trust a hospital for the scannon to earn
the fear of keeping her brother closed. Dyes chose to
write an official record rather than file an anonymous complaint.
Lis and And returned to a version of himself that
could answer questions at breakfast and make grocery lists as
concrete upcomes of the truth of what we did. The
polaroids of Boxton labeled now the watch its on a
shelf that catches the morning light, and sometimes I whined
it and listen to the steady tick. The Lizmos is
lawn again. He calls out when the mail comes. He
looks older when he laughs, and younger when he laughs
too hard. We do not speak of midnight rituals or
of rules past the tracks in the way children would
tell a Dare we say only the pragmatic things? Medication, appointments,
follow ups? Who will pick up milk? The final concrete
moment I will keep from that night is small and exact.
The stop municipal clock on the post, the one that
reads rumin us one when I left to liz House,
was reset by the city a week later and now
shows one minute past midnight like any ordinary instrument. I
watched a change with another neighbor who had never left
her port since the ambulance. We did not speak. I
slid the last polaroid I kept into the glove compartment
of my car and closed the door. The photograph was
of the layers on his porch, shorter in the light,
a child's hand pron faint on the margin. I put
the stop for a stwitch into his palm the next afternoon.
When he asked for it, he felt his weight and
said thank you. I left before he could blink at
the small missile gaze, and the house closed its cutains
against the late sun. When I locked my own door
at night, I checked the window lutch twice. The suspicion
that motivated me in the first half of The night
still sits under my ribs sometimes, but it now moves
me to careful acts, copy signatures. A fallen call to
check on some one that night resolved into a few
clear outcomes. The music box was destroyed, the polaroids were
carped and set side. Alias regained a stable adult wakefulness,
and Maggie kept him close. The final image is his
concrete and mundane. I said a stop for wristwatch back
into oliz palm, and watched his fingers close around it,
like a promise or a habit. He held it there
and bried, and I walked away with the polaroid to
my jacket, and the memory of the lullaby warped into
metal and dust. Outside, the municipal clock read one minute
past midnight on its face, fixed by hands that care
for ordinary things. Inside the cardboard box of photographs, where
it's on my closet shelf, in a labeled envelope. The
night is no longer a rule I must break by myself.
I told dives where copies were hidden. Maggie knows where
another copy is. Oliz wears his watch and remembers his
brother's name. The immediate danger we held in our hands
that night was stoked by a physical act and by
choices that other people made. Afterward, the music box is
broken into useless pieces on a rug in a living
room that smells like old wool and detergent. That is
the end of the night, in the beginning of the
long ordinary work of keeping a person safe, And that
is the end. Thank you for listening, and I will
see you in the next one.