Reaper by Katrina Monroe

try.
Awareness finally found him as he passed a food truck, and the
sound of crackling animal fat and the strong smell that accompanied
it punched through the fog.
    There didn’t used to be food trucks. There
didn’t used to be anything. Home had been bulldozed, built
over, and now looked nothing like where he grew up.
    As he sat down at a picnic table in front of
the food truck, it started to rain.
    He laid back and let it sting his face,
keenly aware of every drop. Rain. Another thing to add to his
multiplying list of things he hadn’t seen, felt, thought about, in
ages. When Oz was a kid, and even into his teenage years, he would
stand in the driveway when it rained, just to feel it. He would
imagine that each drop clung to a small badness particle that’d
clung to his skin, and dragged it with the droplet to the ground,
away from him. There wasn’t enough rain in the world for him to
feel that way now.
    The shower was brief, as Florida showers are
wont to be. Soon the heat would take away any proof that it’d
rained only moments before. Oz sat up to find Cora looking at him
from under a black umbrella.
    “You’re soaked,” she said.
    “You can tell Bard that it’s done. Mark’s
gone.”
    “I’m not here for Bard,” she said, closed the
umbrella, and sat down next to him.
    “Your ass is going to be wet,” Oz said.
    “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
    Oz smiled, but it faded quickly.
    “I’m sorry,” she said.
    “I feel like that’s not going to be the last
time I have to watch someone I care about, die.”
    “Probably not.”
    “Am I being punished? Is this some twisted
form of Hell without the fire and brimstone?”
    “No. The way I understand it, you stay
wherever it is you call ‘home.’”
    “So this is home for you, too?”
    She nodded. “It’s changed a bit.”
    The slightest shadow of sadness veiled her
face. Oz wanted to hold her. To be held.
    “How old are you, exactly?” he asked.
    “You should know better than to ask a woman
how old she is, Oz.”
    “Ballpark.”
    “Older than you.”
    “Obviously.”
    Cora smacked his shoulder, but she
smiled.
    “Are you really a lesbian?”
    Her eyes swept over the ground and her
fingers tangled around each other. Oz had never learned how to talk
to women. Probably never would.
    “You shouldn’t let Bard get to you like
that,” she said.
    When Oz didn’t respond, she added, “I’m not
really sure.”
    “Seems like something you ought to be sure
of.”
    A poncho-clad couple sat at the table across
the Oz and Cora. They shared a peck before silently dismembering
the barbequed ribs on their identical Styrofoam plates. The aroma
made Oz’s stomach growl.
    “The summer I turned sixteen,” Cora began, “I
fell in love with a girl. Her name was Elizabeth and she had the
most beautiful singing voice I’d ever heard. She used to come to my
family’s Inn and sing for the travelers. I’d sit on the stairs and
close my eyes and imagine that she was singing her love songs just
for me. She had a husband, so I knew I didn’t stand a chance. But
while she sang, I imagined she was mine.
    “One day Elizabeth came by while my parents
were in town and I was tearing my fingers to shreds trying to get
the previous day’s gunk out of a stew pot. She confided in me that
her husband had been nasty to her and that she needed to get away.
She sang for me while I worked.
    “For several weeks it became a routine for
us—Elizabeth visited more and more frequently to keep me company
and to escape the terror of her husband. At the end of the summer,
I confessed my feelings to her. I expected to be scolded or
slapped. I expected her to run from the Inn and that I’d never see
her again, but when you keep feelings that strong tucked away,
after a while, they start to kill you. Instead, she kissed me. It
was the most exquisite thing I’d ever experienced.
    “We carried on an affair for a while. Long
enough to decide to run away together. Her husband