The Fire Witness

112

Night is falling as Flora heads to the recycling bins behind the grocery store to look for cans and bottles. She can’t stop thinking about the murders in Sundsvall. She’s started to fantasize about Miranda and her life at Birgittagården.

She imagines Miranda wore suggestive clothing, smoked, and swore. She stops thinking about the girl as she passes the grocery store’s loading bay. She looks in the cardboard boxes stacked near the dock. Then she keeps going.

She starts to imagine Miranda as a child playing hide-and-seek with some friends outside of a church. She sees her cover her eyes and start to count to one hundred. A little girl is running among the gravestones and laughing in an exaggerated way, already a bit frightened. Flora’s heart is fluttering.

She stops beside the bin for old newspapers and cardboard boxes and puts down her plastic bag of empty bottles and cans. She goes up to the container for clear glass and shines her flashlight into it. The light leaps over both broken and whole bottles. In one corner, Flora spies a bottle that she can get some money for. She reaches in and gropes around, since she can’t look in at the same time. Something touches her. It feels like someone is stroking the top of her hand. A second later, she cuts her fingers on a shard of glass. She snatches her arm out and backs away.

She can hear a dog bark far away and then she hears the slow, prolonged crash of glass inside the large bin.

Flora runs away. Her chest hurts and she can’t catch her breath. Her wounded fingers are burning. She looks around. The ghost was hiding among the glass bottles, she thinks.

I see the dead girl as a child. Miranda haunts me because she wants to show me something. She hasn’t left me alone since I lured her to this side by my séance.

Flora sucks the blood from her fingertips and relives how the girl tried to catch and hold her hand. She thinks that the girl tried to hiss something. She can hear it now: Someone was there and witnessed the whole thing. There weren’t supposed to be witnesses, but there was one anyway. One witness.

Flora starts to walk again as quickly as she can. She’s looking back over her shoulder and screams when a man bumps into her. He smiles and mumbles an apology as she hurries away.