by Jules Archer
This is the story about the killer in your town, the one who left a dead girl in the dumpster, her right eye socket dug out like a ditch. You stared too long, imagining the object that made that hole—pencil, screw driver, baseball bat. Beside you, your father rolling his old pick-up truck away from the crime scene tape, neither of you saying anything at all. Now let’s go forward. This is a story about you, and how you were always living for that dead girl. Because when you said nothing, you made her invisible. So, you named her Ada. Ada, Ada, Ada. Your parents were not impressed. Ada liked this; Ada liked that (green-eyed boys, the cool jiggle of Jell-O on her lips, tequila, Hawk moths), while you filed through life like a prison girl. Ready to wake in the morning and do it all over again. This is a story about you on your feet, running, ready to beat away those long shadows of guilt, sweeping their fingers along your seventeen-year-old spine. You tore up every photo of yourself in the house so your parents had nothing to give to the police. You took your fantasy of Ada on the road, gave up the dream of an associate’s degree in pastry arts. You became gas stations, truck stops, a hitchhiker with a purpose. This is a story of you, changing clothes at an Arizona rest stop, when a man approaches and your thoughts dry out like the desert you stand in. He gestures at your eye, at that swirl of blue and brown your mother proclaimed was a gift from God (a colossal buffoonery of faith you always thought) and grins. “How’d you get your eye like that, girl?” And in your ear, there is Ada, whispering, waiting for you to climb into the cab of his truck, and you have no reason not to do it for her, for Ada.
Jules Archer is the author of the short story collection, Little Feasts (Thirty West Publishing, 2020) and the chapbook, All the Ghosts We’ve Always Had (Thirty West Publishing, 2018). Her writing has appeared in various journals, including SmokeLong Quarterly, PANK, Okay Donkey, Wigleaf, Maudlin House, and elsewhere.