Lost Clothes
By Zachary Calhoun
Maribeth drove the rest of the way home with the window down. Radio on, approachable smile. Nobody nervously hiding from such a crime would dare to drive home with the window down.
At first, Maribeth hadn’t worried about hiding. She had just grabbed clothes off the side of the road on the way to work. She had taken the yellow hat and left the stupid shoe behind. But then a neighbor, who bought rice in the checkout line halfway through Maribeth’s shift, said something about a girl from across the way. The girl had gone missing that very morning. Over the cash register, Maribeth said huh, how strange. I’d never guess missing people happened here.
She kept working the checkout line, scanning egg cartons and dropping bagfuls of frozen chicken bodies into thin plastic bags. At the end of her shift, in the locker bay where she changed out of her green grocery apron, Maribeth’s phone blared the shrill tone of an Amber Alert.
Age seven. Brown hair. Last seen wearing a yellow baseball hat. Pink little shoes.
Maribeth drove home and baked eggs with black pepper and salt and she cursed aloud. She tried to distract her mind with the TV shows she could watch for free on YouTube about men running through obstacle courses made from plastic and foam. But all those ads. That noise.
She had to do it. She called the police and reported the little pink shoe and the hat.
But dispatch just said those are clothes. We’re looking for a girl. Then dispatch hung up.
She couldn’t believe it. She turned off the television and laid back on her pleather couch, picking at its fraying seams with her toes.
Did this mean she would need to go back?
Maribeth loaded the front seat of her car with a flashlight, the nylon gloves she used to clean her bathroom, and Ziplock bags. She also packed the clothes she had found on the road, stuffing it all into a milk crate. Then she drove to the intersection. Shaking and cautious, she parked her car around the block. She noticed how differently the sunlight spilled over the Iowan streets when dusk fell and mosquitoes rose from the fickle roadside brome. She hiked up to the intersection with all those makeshift detective supplies and the milk crate tucked under her arm.
She set down her crate and pulled out her flashlight, thumbing the red, grooved on-switch into place. The artificial light pooled over the intersection. This was the same intersection—there were the street signs she remembered, right where she left them; and there were the patches of goat’s heads that tore her ankles in the morning—but there were no clothes in the street anymore.
It was just Maribeth, alone, looking perturbed and unwell on a road in northern Iowa.
A red-winged blackbird dove from a colossal streetlight across the way and landed gently on the pavement. It grabbed some unknown insect or fallen seed from tiny rivets in the asphalt before spreading its red-toned wings and taking flight back into the realm of streetlights and regal telephone wires. The lost shoe must be up there. She looked around. There were a dozen roofs in view and at least a half dozen long stretches of tangled telephone and electrical wiring. The clothes must still be near. They must be up there, near the clouds. That little girl had dropped her clothing on the ground in the intersection and some birds came and gave them a new home. Right now, all the little birds of Iowa are building nests for that stray girl, weaving her shoelaces and the cotton strands of her yellow hat into a house where baby blackbirds learn to sing.
She liked that image quite a bit. She drove home with her windows down and the empty milk crate sat on her passenger seat. She had dumped its contents into the ditch beside the road.
The blackbirds could have it all. They’d know exactly what to do.
THE END
Author Bio: Zachary Calhoun is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Iowa State University and a Faculty Steward of the Everett Casey Nature Reserve. His writing has appeared in Last Leaves Magazine, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, and After the Pause.