John Holman

You would like to go home. These drug runs are getting tiring. Besides, Mississippi makes you nervous. You look past your sun-darkened elbow out the window of the van at the house Rusty has sent you to. It is low, thick-looking, and made of red brick. Looks like a kiln. Stiff yuccas sprout from the bristling yard, and a dead palm tree bends against the right corner of the house. Timmy leans his sweaty face from the back, over your shoulder. “Rusty sure know how to pick ‘em, don’t he?” he says, breathing hotly on your ear.

I began to confuse silence with invisibility. Not merely in the way schoolchildren sit mum in the back of a room, though my experiments with silence took that form. Sure enough, teachers did not call on me in class, kids did not speak to me or look at me during recess and lunch. I was convinced that I could disappear if I was silent. I would walk the most dangerous streets—skim them hushed. I discovered other invisibles, nearly invisibles really, since I could hear them. Others could not, I guessed because they were listening to something else, like their thoughts or their heart beating and so got mugged without ever knowing what hit them. But I could hear their shoelaces tap, the wind in their jackets, the in and out of their breathing. I moved among them, my shoelaces trimmed, my clothing fitted. Back then, I held my breath for hours.

I got out. There was a line of tractor trailers parked about fifty yards from the building, and a couple were at the gas pumps farther to the right. I went into the diner to find out where we were. Just as I got inside, a man got up from a booth and blocked me.

“Hey, slut,” he said.

He cradled a tan cat in his left arm. He wore a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut out, and dirty army pants. He pointed to my crotch. “How’s that doing?”