Act Three When the Footlights Fade

On a warm September day, in the full sunlight of bright afternoon, Millie Rennart was enjoying a mid-afternoon walk with no timecard to punch when she was accosted in the middle of the Main Street crosswalk by a man with shaking hands and a set of teeth too regular and too white to be anything but false.

"You," he snarled in a low voice like rust and dark spaces.

Millie was raised to be polite, but he was being so very rude, and they were in the middle of the street, for Pete's sake. So she walked on, trying not to limp. She was no spring chicken, but she was twenty years the man's junior, and outweighed him by a good hundred pounds, and that was before lunch at Harry's, where that good looking Howson boy liked to smile at her as if she was half her age. (She'd like to rip his clothes off right in the freezer, is what she'd like to do. But that would be to forward by half, wouldn't it just?)

The old man reached out a wrinkled hand, too slow. She was past him.

A Revolution of Small Things

It began with a toothbrush. A pearly blue Smith ProGlide, gripped in the hand of a nine-year-old boy.

When the police came knocking, Adam Scott Bell came to the door with a Smith ProGlide and a mouth full of suds. His parents were next door at the Harry's place, but they'd always trusted Adam to do the right thing. So he'd never open the door for a stranger. But this was the police. Adam swallowed the suds (good for the teeth, bad for the belly, he knew that well enough but he wasn't about to spit in the umbrella canister, was he?) and climbed the stool to look out through the little window. Two policemen, red-faced in the cold. Hands on the butts of their guns, with the little leather snap unsnapped. That, Adam decided, was cool. Definitely something he'd tell Zach about at school the next day.

He unlocked the door.

"Hey, kid," the taller of the policemen said. He had a voice like a steam engine, loud and foggy. "Your parents in?"

Adam was never to tell a stranger where his parents were. But these were the police. "No," he said.

"They left you alone here?" the smaller cop said. He was a quick little man with a face like a shovel, flat and almost featureless but for a humorless crack that passed for a smile.

"They're just next door," Adam explained. "If I need them, I have the number. I was getting ready for bed."

"Yeah," the bigger of the two said, wiping his nose on the back of his hand as he stepped in. "That's not going to happen, kid."

Coming Home

Truck paused at the base of the stairs to look up into the shadows. The light was out at the top. Dory wasn't expecting him.

That shouldn't have hurt, but it did.

The smell of boiled cabbage and fatty meat hung in the air, oppressive as poverty. His fault. If he'd stopped for that light--

Truck stood the Mulick kid's bike up against the wall, and started up. The wooden stairs were sticky. They creaked underfoot. By the time he was halfway home, he was clutching the railing, his heart pounding, the darkness blurry before him.

"Stay another night," Dr. Simkins had urged him. "Just for observation." But Truck had been in a coma for seven months, and another night was a lifetime.