Kate Sweeney

The town of Cambridge may as well have been a morgue. Enough boys had died in that tiny town to fill both trailer parks — the Methodist Church on Main Street had seen more funerals than weddings. The single stoplight swung its fading lantern head in the resigned little gusts of wind like a monument to their passings. Even the buildings seemed to have resigned themselves to death in peeling paint and hanging shutters.

The little girls of Cambridge played hard under the weight of their dead brothers. If you saw them out in the school yard, playing with the little boys their age you might not have noticed animal-like urgency in the way they chased each other up and down the slide. The way their pretty blond pigtail braids beat up and down against their backs like war drums. Alabaster arms pumping like pistons. They knew these boys wouldn't last long.

Mothers guarded their children against the darkness like crazed hens nesting in the night. Watching them in their sleep. Sweaty mother hands feeling for signs of life and death all over town. The moon cutting through the dead black darkness missed the singing she heard in the years of their grandmothers: these women had gone wild and silent with fear.

Mrs. Nelson almost never slept until her children were safe on the school bus but tonight the moon was gone from her window and she momentarily fell into the blackness of sleep. Exhausted. Limp. But still smelling of fear. So when Araby walked out the back door of her mama's trailer and pointed her little bread dough white thumb down the long stretch of moonlit interstate she knew she didn't have much time. And she knew she wasn't coming back. Not in a million years.