The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

sunny. She shielded her eyes, staring into the gaping maw of the coffin. Her brain was unable to come up with a reason for its presence.

“We have to call the police. Right?” She was absently rubbing her sweaty hands along her pant legs. Her mind raced in a million directions: someone dug this up and dumped it here. But why?  Who did it? Who was in it? Where is the body now?

“If we call the cops we have to stick around. This is my lunch hour, Hel. One of us needs to keep their job. I know it sounds nuts, but how about we just move the car and act like we never saw it? Someone will notice it. Doesn’t have to be us.”

Someone will notice it. How many others had said the same thing that day she wondered? She stared the length of the street one way, then the other. It was a block of brownstones. Someone was eventually going to see it. Maybe someone already had. She squinted down the road, finding it unnerving that she couldn’t recall a single car passing in the time they’d been standing out there. A loud caw caught her attention, and she looked up. There was a big blackbird on the phone line, heavy enough for the line to droop. Its feathers gleamed iridescent in the noontime sun like a puddle of oil. It looked down at them as she looked up, and like the street, the creature was oddly still. Its head didn’t swivel; instead, it watched her, still as a statue. She shivered in the heat and turned away. When she glanced up a moment later, the bird was gone.

She wanted to get as far away from the street and the coffin as possible. Surely someone who lived on the street would call the authorities. But then again, wasn’t it as likely someone on this street had the body that used to occupy the coffin? How often do we assume someone else will do the right thing?

She knew she could wait. She could call, and she could sit in her air-conditioned car and wait for the cops. David could go back to work, and then they would have an interesting story to share over dinner. For once.

But, in the end she didn’t, they didn’t, though she couldn’t recall how he got her to leave and tell no one. Cowardice, no doubt. Helene’s fear of being a white woman in a rough neighborhood. Helene’s fear of being left alone with a coffin, even an empty one. One of those reasons, perhaps all of them. It wasn’t hard to get her to go; David was not that persuasive. More annoying than persuasive. He bitched and whined her out of it. He appealed to her laziness.

Now the regret settled into the vacancy in her chest. A vacant hole, like an empty coffin.

There was a dead body out there, out of its grave. A year ago, today, her father died. She couldn’t shake the eerie feeling the two events happening on the same date gave her. She didn’t much believe in coincidence, and she wasn’t a very superstitious person. But the coffin, empty and old, baking in the sun next to a rotten couch on a city street…it was wrong.

Helene gave up on sleep, thoughts of coffins and death pecking at her. She couldn’t bear to be near David, snoring and sweaty and totally indifferent to the day’s bizarre events. So, she got up and decided to make coffee. She could get a start on the job hunt early. But she was exhausted and only stared at her closed laptop. She couldn’t shake the dream, couldn’t shake the guilt. They should have told someone. Who just drives away from a coffin on the ground? What kind of people lived in that neighborhood? Was it for cult rituals? Voodoo? A gang initiation thing? A sex thing?

Unbidden, she pictured old dried flesh flaking off on a kitchen table. An old mummified corpse surrounded by candles and hooded people. Unlikely. Probably just stupid teenagers with nothing better to do.

As she sat with her coffee, she stared out at the quiet city street. The first vestiges of morning greeted her: the lightening of the sky and an occasional car passing by. Soon it would be bustling and alive again. But wait—

On the opposite side of the street, a man stepped from the shadow of a tree. His head tilted, he looked right into her window. Tall, with dark skin and dark clothes and very thin. She gasped and leaned away from window, pulse fluttering.

When she dared look back, the figure was gone.

Could have been coincidence, just some man walking, notices a light on, he looks up just as she looks out…but the dread squeezed. Too many coincidences. She remembered the blackbird, a crow or raven, she couldn’t tell the difference, city girl that she was. The uncanny way it watched her. Was this about what she and David knew, what they knew and didn’t report?

“Not everyone is out to get you, Helene.” Her father had always teased her for being paranoid. Said she never trusted anyone, was always looking over her shoulder. Didn’t have enough faith in humanity. He’d been quietly disappointed that she didn’t take after him and his big heart. He didn’t understand that a petite pretty woman who trusts that easy, who wanders through life inevitably becomes a victim. Helene wasn’t a fool. It was easier to be kind and generous if you were a big man. The world loved big white men.

The last twenty-four hours proved she was right, not her father. The kind of humanity that digs up coffins and leaves them on the side of the road in a pile of garbage is not good. Thinking about her father inevitably led to thinking about him dying, and then thinking about him dead. Her father was in a coffin now. She could remember him lying there, deflated and empty, a shell, in the