Listen to Me by Hannah Pittard Page B

the sun were being reflected back and forth by the darkening storm clouds and its position wasn’t exactly what it should have been. A magic trick. A sleight of hand. Prestidigitation in the sky.
    This—US-35—was the ugliest leg of their trip, and they’d be on it for the next couple hundred miles or so, until it dumped them into West Virginia and onto Interstate 64. Maggie almost always drove this stretch. She didn’t mind the reduced speeds, and she wasn’t too bothered by all the stoplights. They were punctuations in an otherwise uneventful trip. Don’t misunderstand: she didn’t actively enjoy these 200-some miles—who could?—but she didn’t . . . Well, she didn’t take their ugliness personally, the way Mark sometimes seemed to.
    To her, Ohio was just sad. Sad and neglected. A state that didn’t know it was already dead. Like animals at a kill shelter. They didn’t know that all that water and all that food didn’t mean anything about the possibility of a future. All it meant was that some good people were fighting a war they’d already lost. What the animals couldn’t know: they were already dead.
    As a pre-vet, she’d been acutely aware of the rancor non-pre-vets felt for kill shelters. But Maggie and her peers never chimed in when the outsiders started up. They understood, and Maggie in particular—without any of them then having all the facts—that kill shelters existed in the same way no-kill shelters did. Nobody
wanted
to kill the animals—nobody who volunteered at a shelter, anyway: she’d read the article last week about those kids up in New York who poured lighter fluid on a three-legged dog and then set it on fire. But that was different. With kill shelters, the reasoning was straightforward: the money and space simply didn’t exist to maintain the animals while they might have waited to be adopted. The idea that volunteers at kill shelters were happy about all those soon-to-die kittens and puppies? A preposterous notion, which brought her back to Ohio: just because you were born there, just because you had been raised there and hadn’t had the sense or opportunity to get out, that didn’t mean it was your fault. In the game of geography, you and yours simply hadn’t lucked out.
    Mark, though—and Maggie knew the diatribe by heart because she’d heard it dozens of times before—he believed that Ohio deserved itself. Those first few times during the early years of their marriage when they’d made the mistake of stopping at major travel plazas and witnessing firsthand the overweight families in their over-large T-shirts eating their oversized meals in their over-tall cars—the sight had filled Mark, every time, with a noiseless sort of rage that could last all the way to Virginia, to his parents’ farm. And Maggie knew this for a fact because she’d felt the noiselessness in those early years; she’d been the recipient of its meanness. She, not Ohio, was the one who handled that odium, and so, very quickly, she established a new route—one that favored the smaller, slower roads they were taking now—and she volunteered to drive the segment so that Mark might sleep his way through.
    Ahead, in the far, far distance, there was a crack of lightning.
    â€œDid you see that?” said Mark.
    Maggie rolled up the window. They car sealed itself with a
whump.
A sign on the side of the road indicated that the speed limit would reduce in the next mile.
    Mark messed with the radio. “We should try to get Gerome to do something sometime soon,” he said. He stopped at a weather station. Local schools were already being canceled on Monday. It was only Saturday.
    Maggie nodded. “I agree,” she said. “You were right. We’ll need a hotel.”
    â€œI should have let you find us one online,” he said. “You’d have gotten us a