Leo looked down at the missing planks, the dark water. He could turn back. He could go home to his damp apartment, his stack of old films, his life of quiet forgetting. Or he could take one step, then another, into the groaning dark.
She stood under the broken awning of the old pharmacy, barefoot in a thin dress, hair plastered to her face. She couldn’t have been more than nine. Leo stopped. Baskin was small—everyone knew everyone—but he didn’t know her. Baskin
“I’ll take you,” he heard himself say. Leo looked down at the missing planks, the dark water
Halfway across, she stopped. The creek below ran fast and black. “You’ve been here before,” she said. Not a question. his stack of old films