The sky is skull white. Rachel crosses dusty parking lot into pale glowing food mart. She stops first in the lady’s to slip on a hot pink lace bra from Victoria’s Secret. It peeps bright through the thin white tee but does obscure her nipples. She drifts slow between the aisles, touching things. Her jacket tied around her hips, sleeves dangling. She examines prices doing internal math, thumb and finger tugging at her lower lip. The bus ticket is still good. If she can get another ride she can cash it. In the curved mirror overhead she glimmers the clerk watching her. She hasn’t pinched anything not yet. Rachel doesn’t hurry. After a minute she walks to the front to buy a pack of Marlboro lights. The clerk is young white thin with a pale scruff of beard. He makes eye contact with her good eye and looks away. Tucked in the waistband of her jeans is a stolen chocolate bar. She could have paid for it but Rachel is superstitious. Taking one small item from the corporate machine brings good luck her mother used to say. The chocolate is already melting. Outside she eats it in quick bites. Drops the wrapper and watches the wind kick it away. She smokes a cigarette hungrily, the smoke filling her.
A group of men white and brown lounge against the fenders of a truck. They smoke and eat sandwiches from foil wrappers and pass a thermos. Their boots and jeans are covered in mud. The men openly look at her. Rachel feels her hips move like a pulse.
Oh my my, says one fat man. Oh baby.
Another strokes his pale belly. Rachel feels her hackles rise and her skin goes tight and shivery.
Rachel palms the switchblade and spreads her arms like wings to let the men glare at her pink lace bra for two fast heartbeats then one more.
The men wince and look away.
She walks on past. Beside a row of telephone booths she sees a battered gray Saab maybe twenty years old. One headlight smashed. The rear window gone, replaced by a sheet of plastic. White smoke coughs from the tail pipe. The car is empty. A young man roughly her age with black hair and smoked glass blue eyes stands with analog phone cradled to his ear. His lips don’t move. He writes a number on the back of his hand and lets the phone drop spinning on its metal cord. His dead cold eyes linger on her unblinking.
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