Aurora Magazine 2019

laying with her, procreating with her. Were her moans drowned by his grunts, her body stiff and livid with wifely repulsion? Her daughter stayed away, her son never visited. In the months he’d been watching her, she’d remained alone on the bench. He panicked. The woman pressed her right arm on the bench and the left grabbed a wooden staff-like cane as she at - tempted to stand. Her efforts were labored and once she seemed as though she would fall but caught herself and straightened. She stood toward the small creek that flowed in a lazy J through the park and stared off toward a long-retired train trestle, defunct tracks overgrown by mildly dense forest. Those trees were de - ceptive; the man couldn’t see through them, but they were only about a half-mile wide and hardly capable of getting lost in. Steep cliffs of mud and erosion-formed caves hinted at buried treasure when he was younger, but he was never adept enough to climb the slopes of rock and mire to find out. His thirst was overwhelming now. He knew the woman would walk toward the sycamore to go to her home on Clin - ton Street, but perhaps he could move around the trunk as she passed by. The base of the tree was an ample five or six feet and would allow significant cover, especially since she walked so slowly. But she didn’t move. She kept looking toward the trestle and he followed her eye line. There was a child, aged nine or so, climbing over an erected safety fence. He reached the top of the buried tracks and struggled to get his legs over the concrete top, but managed and lowered himself onto the ledge where a bridge had once born engines and cars full of livestock feed, industrial chemicals, or countless other Midwest necessities. He stood tri - umphantly, smiled at the air gods, then fell. The man quickly glanced at the woman. To be damned, she was smiling. A smirk of delicious pleasure graced her wrin - kles and twilit pallor, and the screams of people not seen split the laggard breeze from somewhere below the ledge, near the water. Distant sirens panicked toward the screaming, and the woman 54