She hurries upstairs for her keys, shoes, black jeans, a black hoodie. The Florida summer nights are already well into sweltering, but it’s more important to avoid being seen—or bitten by mosquitoes. Nana’s neighborhood runs mosquito trucks day and night, and Ella rubs Brooklyn and herself with a repellent towelette every time they go swimming, but she’s going to need all the protection she can get. She tucks her phone in her back pocket and slips out the side door, as far from Nana’s room as possible.
Over on the side of the house, there’s a tiny gap between the fence and the garage, and she sucks in her stomach and slides through. She keeps to the shadows as she hurries down the perfectly clean sidewalks. No one is out, not walking and not on the road. Birds twitter and bats sing and frogs scream about frog sex and bigger things rustle in the bushes, but Ella isn’t too scared. This part of Florida doesn’t have bears, and there are no wolves or big predators, and Nana’s neighborhood probably had all the wildlife shipped away or groomed into poodle cuts, anyway. Soon she reaches the little hut by the gates, where she unlatches the pedestrian door and steps outside. There’s a shape in the hut, but it’s huddled in front of the TV. They mainly worry about people coming in here in cars—not going out on foot. There’s not even a sidewalk beyond the gate.
Nana’s house is a little under four miles away from Ella’s house, and there are sidewalks and crosswalks most of the way there. Before the Violence hit, there were tons of people on this route walking and biking and pushing little carts for their groceries. This part of the suburbs isn’t supposed to be walkable, with everything stretched so far out, but people have to get where they’re going somehow. Ella has never traveled between their houses on foot, but she knows the way.
It’s easy, at first. No cars pass. The night is hot but balmy, with a breeze that smells like the ocean, even if they’re a few miles away from the bay. She sweats inside her heavy hoodie but is grateful to blend in with the darkness. It doesn’t occur to her until she’s waiting for a walk signal at a big intersection that there are bigger threats out there than the Violence, that there are still kidnappers and pedophiles and rapists and flat-out creeps walking the streets. She presses the button again and again, hoping the light will hurry up and change but unwilling to risk being caught jaywalking past the state-mandated curfew.
Finally it changes, and she hurries across. An awful smell hits her face, diving down her nose and mouth and making her retch. She scouts around for a dead possum or raccoon, then sees the lump under the eaves of Big Fred’s Floors. In the darkness, with the shadows, she can’t see the plaid shirt and busted-in head, but she can see the stark splatter of blood on the yellow wall. From here, it looks black, not red.
Something deep inside her whispers, That’s a corpse.
The only dead person she’s seen before now was Grandpa Terry, and he was clean and powdery and nicely dressed and contained in an expensive, velvet-lined coffin with classical music softly playing and little butter mints placed nearby. This corpse is a wild thing, uncontained, untouched, uncared for, and it scares the shit out of her, as if it could infect her. It’s been here for at least two days, and…that’s not how corpses should be treated. But there’s nothing she can do about it. That’s just another part of the Violence—this odd helplessness.
She jogs along the sidewalk to get away from it and ends up in front of Red Lotus Massage. Everyone says it’s a human trafficking place where gross guys go to get happy endings, and it doesn’t feel any safer than Big Fred’s. A shoe skids over gravel under the shop awning, and a rough voice says, “You lost?”
Ella runs.
She is, to say the least, not a good runner. That month of Personal Fitness where the coach made them run a mile three times a week was probably the worst month of her life. But she runs until she can’t breathe, and then she pauses under a streetlight to catch her breath. She’s in front of a big red barn now, a folksy shop on the corner where they used to sell fresh produce and raw cow’s milk and expensive honey, where food trucks used to pull up, bringing Latin music and strings of Christmas lights. One time she and Mom and Brooklyn ate corn off sticks at those picnic tables, but now all those homey touches are gone. Like most small businesses, it struggled through Covid and gave up when the Violence hit and hasn’t yet come back, if it ever will. A lone security light shines down on a row of dead tomato plants out front, their wire cages hovering like little ghosts.
Jesus. Everything is creepy, when you’re alone at night.
Ella starts walking again, picking up her pace. She’s back on a residential street, but because it’s Florida, most of the houses are in fenced neighborhoods. Dogs run out to bark at her through gaps in hedges, and a big truck honks as it screeches by, nearly giving her a heart attack. She’s never walked like this, walked because she had to. Her family relies on cars for everything—except for taking the golf cart to that red barn for fruit and corn and Jarritos. Walking feels exposed and unsafe. Walking makes her feel small and slow.
And it also makes her feel wildly, strangely alive.
She can smell everything: swimming pools, dogs, a rogue skunk or badly hidden weed, roses, the difference between pine trees and orange trees and oaks. The air is hot in places and cool and wet in others as she passes by lakes and ponds. Music rides the breeze as she hurries past open windows, and somewhere, unfortunately for their neighbors, a terrible band practices in a garage, making her wince. She stops thinking of herself as an invader, an outsider, and starts thinking of herself as another animal roaming the world. It helps, reframing her role here as part of something instead of as an interloper.
And then she’s finally at her neighborhood. They don’t have a guy in the little hut all day, but they do have keypads at the gates for cars and pedestrians. She punches in the number, which has been the same for five years, even though it’s supposed to change quarterly, and breathes a huge sigh of relief when the door swings open.
She’s safe now. She’s home.
Except…well, home was never that safe.
Still, it’s a nice feeling, even if it lies—that sense of belonging.