Kandace Sees the ISIS Video and Needs to Leave

It’s so bright! Lambent. The stretch of hot afternoon. And the windows ticking like a clock timing the retarded sun. Sash, mullion. Just the nothing-happening of it. A typical Kolob day with nobody her age. So she’s on the internet they finally got just clicking and clicking, following the links. This One Weird Trick to Melt Fat. Army Spouse Waits for Him With Triplets. You mean wife, she thinks. Or possibly not. Iraq Veteran Held on Domestic Violence. Islamic Extremists Torch Christian Icons. Iconoclasts. To, finally ISIS Recruits Burn Lebanese Pilot in Cage, and she clicks. It’s a YouTube video.

And she has to leave. She knows it now. Between the bars and out. The heat on the side of her face and the tiny room and the wall of his fucking boxes. The kitchen is a little cooler but the stink of dirty dishes and the cat. She will make herself so small she will slip between the bars and go.

There is from now on a stench over the place and before her shut eyes always that horror of the boy in the cage. It won’t quit. All cut noon and night by the black vertical bars. The gossip and the looking at her. Like the bikers checking her out, her mother’s boyfriend crowding her at the top of the stairs, Kade with his big hands, the Sheriff’s wife, the fluorescent-lit one judging at her in the mirror. She’s like a dog in here.