If you look at Alice\u2019s movement on the map, at first, she\u2019s standing in her house under the wall she painted Naval Blue, fixating on its imperfect edges because she has a tendency to think she\u2019s better with an angled brush than she actually is, and then she\u2019s looking at the text message from her sister-in-law\u2014\u201che still hasn\u2019t shown up\u201d\u2014and the tiny dot that is Alice on the map moves almost imperceptibly, pacing down her creaking hallway, contemplating\u2014should she go, should she bring her kid along\u2014and her husband sighs, exhaustion on his breath, \u201cjust go,\u201d he says, so the dot that is Alice on the map gets in the Honda, turns the key, rides the familiar interstate, chugging south to her hometown, where she alternates thinking of her missing brother and not thinking of him, and then she gets a call\u2014her youngest sibling who lives near the gulf\u2014”I think Mom needs to know, and maybe we should file a missing person\u2019s report,\u201d so the dot that is Alice on the map drives faster toward her mother\u2019s gravel driveway, where she throws the Honda into park, feels the car door opening and then slamming shut, feet thwacking on gravel, hand rapping the knocker, her body floating into the house, and the dot that is Alice freezes stone-still in a kitchenette as she tells her mother he\u2019s missing, and her mom cries, perched on the corner of the couch looking so ornithischian, and she asks Alice, \u201cwhat-do-we-do, what-do-we-do,\u201d and fuck if Alice knows, so they participate in the most logical activities\u2014they call hospitals, county jails, and impound lots looking for him and his truck: Navy blue Ford F-150, not sure from where it was towed\u2014not sure if it was towed\u2014not sure if it was in a wreck, but it is missing, it\u2019s missing and it\u2019s been missing for 48 hours, and it\u2019s still missing, and then Alice\u2019s phone buzzes\u2014her oldest sibling who flew in from California\u2014\u201cwe found his truck, we found his truck at the gun range with the tires blown off the backend, and it\u2019s locked and there\u2019s no one inside,\u201d and so the dot that is Alice on the map moves to the gun range to look at the Navy blue Ford F-150 with its shredded-off tires, and she progresses slowly this time because she\u2019s on foot sloshing down a utility corridor wet with mud, grass neon green, walking in boots that aren\u2019t really made for walking, but it\u2019s the only pair she brought, and she tells her mother, who is with her now, \u201clet\u2019s go slowly so we can notice,\u201d and they look for tracks, and they see the squishy paw prints of raccoons with their pointed nails, and they see deer hoof prints, and they see a steep ravine that culminates in a muddy-water ditch, and they see a storage facility, nearly falling down with its boat stalls made of crusted, corrugated tin, most of the doors flung open and some of them twisted off to lay on the ground, and so they peer into each boat stall looking for his body, and it isn\u2019t there\u2014it isn\u2019t there thank God\u2014and they exhale after squinting into the last stall, but also, they don\u2019t know where to go, so the dot on the map remains unmoving as Alice stares off into the grayness of the clouds, at the bare branches of the trees covered in lichen, at a security camera that has no footage of her brother because it\u2019s just a hunk of plastic\u2014a decoy\u2014and then Alice gets a call from his wife who says, \u201che\u2019s here, he\u2019s here, he walked through the woods for 20 miles, he slept in the woods behind the Baptist church,\u201d and apparently he strolled in casually, and he even rolled the trashcans up the driveway, and after hearing that detail, Alice traces his route on the map\u201420 miles, it was really 20 miles from the gun range to the Baptist church to his house, and then the dots\u2014his, Alice\u2019s, their siblings, their mother\u2019s, his wife\u2019s\u2014meet on the blue chenille couches of his living room, him staring at the wood planks of the floor, them staring at their hands clasped in their laps, Alice staring at the decades-old picture of the siblings framed on the mantle, taken while they waited to ride that spaceship carnival ride\u2014the Gravitron\u2014where centrifugal force spun them at 3Gs, where their bodies suctioned against vinyl cushions, fog machine billowing, their limbs paralyzed, couldn\u2019t touch each other if they wanted to\u2014and didn\u2019t it feel like that now\u2014spinning, spinning, spinning\u2014together, all in the same room finally\u2014but were they really together if they couldn\u2019t reach out and touch hands?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The dot on the map remains unmoving as Alice stares off into the grayness of the clouds, at the bare branches of the trees covered in lichen, at a security camera that has no footage of her brother because it\u2019s just a hunk of plastic\u2014a decoy\u2014and then Alice gets a call from his wife.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":22462,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","writer-kaci-neves"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21898"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22463,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21898\/revisions\/22463"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}