The woman—it had to be Rhea Schroeder—handed the tall man another piece of ammunition. He wound his arm.
“They’re trying to kill someone!” Peter shouted into his phone, but there wasn’t any connection. He hoisted himself and leaned out. Even as he shouted, he wondered if this was real, or if he’d finally lost the plot. Fifteen years living in his parents’ house, stapled to an Oxy habit that rendered the waking and the sleeping into the same dreamlike chimera.
“I see you, FJ! I see you and I called the cops!” he screamed.
The kid had already released the second brick. Another crash, another cry from inside the house. A pain cry.
In eerie near-unison, the neighbors turned. Their faces reflected the earth and the sky and the houses ahead of them, and he knew that if he got close he would see his distorted self, too. “I see you! I see every one of you!” he bellowed.
Like the night the sinkhole appeared, the people of Maple Street disbursed. Some jogged for their houses, some hid behind hedges. Some, like Rhea Schroeder （who limped just slightly）， walked slowly and steadily back toward home. A leisurely pace. Infuriatingly fearless.
Lights went on in the Wilde house.
Then came another panicked yelp, this time from a child in there.
Peter rushed past his therapy mirrors and rolled out to the hall. Considered waking his parents, who slept deep, but they got confused at night. Taking the time to explain would only slow him down. He hoisted himself and went down, down, down the chairlift.
His all-terrain chair waited at the bottom of the stairs. The one he’d saved up his disability for. He hurried. Got in, reached to unlock the front door. Then out and down the ramp to the sidewalk.
As he rolled, he felt eyes. They watched from houses. The gape out there, surrounded by reflective orange cones, seemed also to watch. It felt like being in-country. Like Iraq.
He got to the Wildes’ house, only they had no ramp. He hoisted himself down, his stumps on footrests, then rolled to the ground. Dragged himself by the arms, his belly against black, sticky mud. Pulled himself up the first set of steps, panting from unaccustomed exertion, wondering if he’d imagined all this. If he was about to arrive at the Wildes’ door in the middle of the night, and they’d think he was psychotic.
He wrapped his stumps under him. They hurt—fire where his knees ought to have been. Not enough mirror therapy today. He banged on the wood just below the doorknob.
Knock! Knock!
The air was still and hot. It reminded him of the bad place. An oil field, on fire. A kid offering a nail bomb to his CO like an apple, changing all their lives forever.
Knock! Knock!
The boy who answered wore a dingy tank top and no shoes, and for a moment, he was sure this was a trick. He was back in-country. The past had folded over. Followed him six thousand miles and fifteen years.
The boy stood with his hands in his pants. He shook with shock. Larry. That’s right, this was the neighbor child. Larry Wilde.
“S’okay,” Peter panted. “You’re okay. Your mom and dad home?”
The girl with the bandage on her hand appeared beside him. Julia. “My mom’s hurt,” she said. “We can’t get an ambulance and we’re scared to move her ’cause of the baby.”
It took Peter another beat. So this was real after all. How strange, that it should be a relief to him.
From Interviews from the Edge: A Maple Street Story, by Maggie Fitzsimmons,
Soma Institute Press, ? 2036
“I love the New Yorker magazine, but that article and the book that came after aren’t true to life. I don’t think like a computer, in binaries. I didn’t pick a side. Hate one family, love the other. It’s not how rational people engage with their surroundings.
“We were bystanders that summer, watching something bad unfold. Those searchers out there were a constant reminder. Some of the newspeople came to us for comments. We didn’t have any. What could we say that they didn’t already know?… People who’d never lived in our town, who’d never met anybody involved, they kept writing about it online. They had all these theories about how Shelly had escaped and run away, or was faking it. The global warming occultists were worse. Who gets possessed by a hole? Everywhere we went, people at work and the grocery store and our extended families asked us about it. Especially, they asked about Arlo. We knew that we had to do something, take it back from them, because if anyone had earned an opinion, it was us…
“Look at it the other way. What if we’d done nothing? Acted like it was Rhea’s problem. The press and all those blogs would have come down on us just as hard. You can’t get away with being a bystander anymore. There’s too much information. You have to take a stand or people think you’re guilty, too… We didn’t mean anything by the brick. If they were innocent, no harm done. And if they were guilty, well, we’d put them on notice.” —Margie Walsh