The Unraveling of Mercy Louis by Keija Parssinen

taut with each bite. For a little while, there’s a strange relief in the discomfort of being stuffed to popping, drowsy and warm and full up.
    After I drop Annie, groaning and ripping belches, back at home, I drive up LeBlanc Avenue. Past the Market Basket, where yellow police tape is the only reminder of the morning’s drama, the football stadium rises, its tall light posts angled over the field like chrome flowers.

    Hopping the perimeter fence, I start a slow jog down the straightaway in front of the home stands. The humid air is wet on my face. From the interstate, the sound of traffic arrives, muffled, steady. In my stomach, the undigested food sloshes with each footfall. Around and around the track I go, not fast but moving, until I lose count of the laps. Eventually, the sun dips behind the horizon, casting in pinks and oranges the veil of smog from the refinery. Feeling purged, I lie down in the middle of the football field, the grass damp and fragrant at my back. Around me, the chorus of crickets, a quickening in the air as night falls. Tomorrow is almost here, the first wide-open day of summer.
    Watching the late afternoon turn to evening, I’m struck by a sudden sense of loss, knowing that each sunset like this is moving us closer to the end. Is it possible that in a few months, this sweet-smelling earth will be scorched beyond recognition? That soon I will have to leave behind this body that has given me so much? Lying there, I poke my belly, feel the resistance of the muscles. I wrap my arms across my chest, a hand on each bicep, thinking of the hours I have spent lifting weights, working this flesh to strength. Quickly, I do a couple of leg lifts, thighs and calves pressed together like a mermaid’s tail, heels tapping the ground before springing up again. The acidic gift of muscles at work. When I try to picture myself bodiless in heaven, I see my soul like a white cloud, naked and ordinary, in a sky full of them.
    Secretly, I want Maw Maw to be wrong. There’s too much I haven’t had a chance to do, not just winning State, but graduating, going to college, kissing a boy, falling in love. You need a body to do those things, you need a world like this one. Look, Lord, I pray. Look at that sunset. A world still capable of such things can’t deserve to end, not yet. Even as I think the words, though, I know that this small moment of beauty is rooted in ugliness, the refinery chemicals the reason for the sky’s riotous light.
    On the way past school, I stop into the Market Basket to buy some bottled water. The caution tape snaps in the wind. Inside, the cashier sits behind the register reading Rolling Stone.

    â€œLooked a little crazy over here earlier,” I say, placing two water bottles on the counter. “What was the commotion about?”
    â€œAin’t you seen it yet?” he asks, ringing me up. “It’s on every news channel here to Dallas.” He shakes the remote control in the direction of the muted television over his head. “The Today show even called wanting details, but something like this happens, a man don’t want to go on about it. My manager’s about ready to fire all of us for the bad press, like it’s my fault that baby got dumped here.”
    â€œExcuse me?” I say, thinking I must not have heard him right. “A baby?”
    â€œCops called it a fetus, but Richie said it looked like a baby to him, little arms and legs and toes and everything. No bigger than a grapefruit, stuck in a beer case in the dumpster.”
    The store’s air-conditioning against my sweaty skin sets me shivering. “Was it alive?”
    â€œNope,” he says. “They don’t know how long it’s been dead for or what killed it. Some doc has to take a look.”
    The room is too bright, dizzying; I sway a step, knocking into a display of chips. The colorful bags scatter across the floor.
    â€œYou okay?” he asks.