The Radio Magician and Other Stories by James van Pelt

each other the way strangers do.
    “People can’t camp out at the mall. Did you call the cops on that trailer?” Trellis asked the night guy.
    “What trailer?”
    “West parking lot, next to the highway.”
    The night guy put his flashlight in his locker. He looked puzzled. “I thought about it. I’m pretty sure I did.”
    “Call it in?”
    “No, think about it. Are you positive it was here earlier?”
    “Yeah, all day yesterday.”
    “If it’s still parked at closing, we can report it.” Then he told Trellis a ten minute long joke about a skinny blonde, her fat boyfriend and a wheelbarrow filled with wet cement.
    Trellis glanced at the monitor before heading on his rounds. “Did you notice that trailer?” A strong sense of déjà vu swept over him.
    “What trailer?”
    While Trellis tested his walkie-talkie’s batteries and read the morning’s routine, thoughts about the trailer flitted away.
    Later, when Trellis stopped at Pretzel Palace for a mid-morning snack, he found himself thinking about a mushroom cloud under a red circle and slash. He finished the pretzel before rushing back to the video surveillance room. No cars were parked next to the trailer, but four people stood outside the door. He headed for the west exit, keeping the trailer’s slippery image in his head, pretty sure that if he stopped thinking about it for a moment, it would squirt off like a minnow.
    Acetone smells from the nail salon distracted him, but he ignored them long enough to make it to the doors, and by then he could see the silver shape at the parking lot’s edge.
    “What are you folks doing out here?” Trellis asked as he approached.
    “Waiting our turn,” said a house-wifey woman in a tie-dye blouse and fringed jeans first in line. Sleep circles so dark that she might as well have a pair of black eyes marked her complexion.
    Without a tinge of irony, the man behind her said, “Saving humanity.” He wore an “I Served” Marine Corps patch on a flight jacket. His face too was haggard.
    Behind them, beyond the sidewalk, traffic zipped by, thirty minutes short of rush hour.
    “Do you mind if I go in?” he asked. The people in line creeped him out. Their postures were odd, a strained mix of nervousness and resignation. He imagined inmates on death row if they had to form a line for executions.
    “No rush,” said Marine Corps patch.
    Trellis knocked on the door. The woman who answered stepped onto the metal stair protruding from the trailer’s side. A piece of black yarn tied her gray hair into a ponytail. She blinked against the sunlight. “We’re going as fast as we can,” she said.
    “Um, sorry. I’m not with them. Mall security.”
    “Oh.” She turned to the inside. “Mall security.”
    “Invite him in.”
    A powerful wave of incense surrounded Trellis as he mounted the stair, and it took a second for his eyes to adjust. A woman who could have been the twin to the one at the door sat at a short and narrow table on the opposite side of the trailer. Beyond her, a small sink, a spice rack, and a drainer holding three plates and three cups were tucked under the cabinets. A curtain hung from ceiling to floor and wall to wall, hiding the rest. The ceiling pressed close enough to Trellis’s head that he had to duck. No one else was in the trailer that he could see.
    “Sorry to bother you ladies. It’s just that you have been in the parking lot for a while, and it doesn’t look like you’re shopping.” He sat on a chair bolted to the wall next to the door.
    The lady who had let him in sat next to the other. If they weren’t twins, they had to be sisters. “No, we’re not.”
    “We’re not doing anything illegal,” said the other. She looked at her sister. “At least nothing immoral.”
    “I didn’t say you were,” Trellis said. “But what are you doing?”
    A man wearing a hooded sweatshirt, the hood up over his head, pushed aside the curtain. In one hand he held a fat white candle, in the