He just shakes his head. “Nothing good’s gonna come out of this, Atlanta Burns. Nothing.” He tells her he’ll put together some names, figure out a way in, that he’ll call her when he knows. Then he slams back the rest of the beer and doesn’t bother offering her one.
* * *
Chris sits on her front stoop as peep frogs peep somewhere in the distance. He’s got a white terrier in his lap. Both of them have rope burns around their neck.
It’s a dream, she knows. The house behind her is her house, but it isn’t. And the cornfield over there is too big, too green, too well-lit under the moon to be real. And Chris is dead. And the dog is dead.
All Chris says is, “You’re barking up the wrong tree.”
The dog laughs with her voice.
* * *
She doesn’t have any Adderall so instead she goes into her mother’s medicine cabinet, but she doesn’t find much in there, either. Mama’s not exactly a fan of most prescription drugs these days, claiming she used to be addicted to… it was either Xanax or Valium, she can’t seem to remember which (and that leads Atlanta to believe it was probably both at one time or another). Most of what’s in the cabinet is allergy meds and Motrin.
Fine. She goes downstairs and nukes a cup of instant coffee. It tastes like dirt from the bottom of a workman’s boot but it’s hot and it’s caffeine and just to be sure she drinks three more cups before the sun comes up.
Eventually the sun comes up and she’s not sure what to do with herself. She washes some of the dishes in the sink. Makes herself breakfast, which is really just ramen noodles—the ambiguously-named “Oriental” flavor, which she suspects tastes less like anything Oriental and more like soy sauce. Ramen noodles have been a breakfast staple of hers for years for those (many) days when her mother did not come down to make anything. Cheap. Easy. Oddly comforting to an anxious stomach before shipping out to another day at high school hell.
As she’s slurping noodles she hears footsteps upstairs. Then a toilet flush. Then footsteps back to bed.
Atlanta sits. Finishes her noodles. Putters around. Feels useless. Like a pair of fake nuts hanging from the back of a pickup truck—ornamental, stupid, a worthless decoration.
It’s an hour later when the phone rings.
“It’s on,” Guy says. “They got a fight next week. We’re in.”
Atlanta’s heart drops through the floor like a plummeting elevator.
* * *
They call it a farmer’s market but it’s no such thing. It’s a dirt mall—a big concrete rectangle with stall after stall smashed together in a big U-shaped arrangement. They have farm stuff, sure. Amish sell jams, jellies, jars of Chow-Chow, red beet eggs, pickled everything. A few stalls compete for produce—curiously, little of it actually local. But then you have the homely old twins who sell old electronics and appliances—tape decks, decrepit vacuums and vacuum parts, old RC cars. Or the pet food store that has a live alligator in the back they like to show off (his name’s Arthur). Or the butcher counter whose meats smell a little too sweet, a little too sour, like they’re on the edge of going south if they haven’t already gone that way. Then there’s the food stalls. Everything from fried chicken to Cuban sandwiches to Kenyan food to sugar-crusted elephant ears big enough to use as a trash-can lid. Food smells mingle together with body odors to make a confusing olfactory experience.
Shane travels behind Atlanta, ogling and ooh-ing.
“You really never been here before?” she asks.
“Huh?” Shaken from his reverie.
“I said, you’ve never been here before?”
“Nuh-uh. No. I just thought it was… I dunno, a farmer’s market.”
“Name’s kinda misleading.”
“Whoa!” Shane runs over to a table outside a dimly-lit stall, finds a true oddity—some taxidermist threw together a true chimera: a frog’s head on a bunny’s body with what looks to be a tabby cat’s tail. It sits beneath a cracked jewel lamp which is also for sale. “Look!”
Atlanta makes a face. “I’d put that down. You’ll get fleas or something.” She snorts. “Maybe that’s why they call these things flea markets.”
“It does smell.”
“I bet.”
Suddenly his eyes shift, catch light, see something else that fills his fool head with excitement. “Comic