Apology

was dead.
The gash along the side of her head looked suddenly severe, as did the swathe of matted hair. Light was beginning to fill the space between them. Dark blood, he could see now, was what coated her hair and the side of her face. Shoe fell to his knees. He put his ear to her nose and mouth.
Why didn’t you do this sooner?
He didn’t mean to move her head, but he did. Now there was a tiny flutter of breath that kept returning.
He started to cry.
He knew she was alive.
A ball with his nephew’s name lay beside her.
For some reason, he picked it up and threw it out of the pit as hard as he could. Then he pulled the shovel out of the ground. The blade made a small sucking sound. He chucked it free of the pit.
His only thought now was that he needed to get her out, but there was no way he could do it alone. He wiped his face and took a deep breath. What had made him think that things had changed, or even that they were going to change?
Above was the world that would not believe him. Above was the world that would not think it was possible that he of all people would have shown up to work early. Nor that he had simply found this girl unconscious, fallen down into the pit where he had been the day before.
He could not summon any logic.
Nothing made sense, except for what he already knew of certain things. When had anything ever gone in his favor? Long ago he had jumped a train, expecting to see more of northern California, maybe even parts of Oregon, and instead, the farmlands outside the freight car’s sliding door eventually ended with sign after bewildering sign for elsewhere. His intentions occupied one space while his body occupied another.
He could not bring himself to look at her again. There was more light now.
The girl’s cough startled him.
Her eyes were open; the pupils of each were dark as her hair.
He looked away. He closed his eyes.
Above him were the holes in the painted gourds. Large holes that were doorways into the same structured hollowness. An inexplicable nothingness that he had, from time to time, mined with a bent spoon and a tiny flame.
“I’ll call someone,” he pleaded as he tried to climb out of the pit. “I’ll make sure they know you’re here. I won’t forget you.”
He picked up the shovel. He thought of ridiculous things like the prints made by the tread of his boots. Should he go back down and try to smear them clean? Would that even be possible? All was evidence that someone as insignificant as himself had actually existed. This thought was a tormenting one.
But there were very few things that tied him to this world after all. His brother and his family, yes. The few bleary Polaroids stashed in a drawer somewhere in Taos, he imagined. He would wipe the shovel down and drop it in a nearby ditch. The murk of water would clean the rest. He didn’t want to be spotted carrying it any farther than he had to.
He dragged his foot behind him as he tried to leave the site. He felt he was being pulled down. Tackled from behind. That’s when he remembered the football, his nephew’s name on it. It seemed important to remove that from the site too. He didn’t know why or what it meant. He searched the brush near the pit. He couldn’t find it.
Then he did.
The ball lay hidden in the grass like some kind of giant egg. He picked it up, as if he were being watched, and slipped the ball under his flannel shirt. He hunched to hide this held object. Pressed to his side, it felt like a tumor that had moved on its own, out of his body and into a strange kind of freedom that was never meant to be.
No, it was a stolen egg from long ago.
Shoe made one phone call, an anonymous one to the company office. The receptionist was a silver-haired woman named Josie, whose large collection of Hummel figurines from home had eventually found their way to her desk at work. She was busily arranging them into a kind of narrative when the phone rang. The interruption flustered her slightly at first, and then the cord almost tipped her cup of coffee. It was all she could manage not to yell into the phone as she put the receiver to her ear.
Shoe cupped the bottom half of the phone with his hand. His nieces were in the next room arguing with each other over whose turn it was with the hair dryer. They were getting ready for school. He wished he had chosen a quieter space, or even better yet, had called from a pay phone. That would have been the smart thing to do, he could hear his childhood friend Vin goading him.
“Excuse me, sir, but I kent hur you,” Josie had calmed down but was fumbling over her own accent. She reached for the small boy in a kelly-green short coat and orange bow tie. He had his eyes closed and was singing his song into the air above him. It didn’t make sense to have him facing the statue of a woman carrying a basket of flowers in one hand and holding a little girl’s hand in the other. The woman wasn’t the girl’s mother anyway. The woman was taking the girl to her mother.
“There’s been an accident,” Shoe said.
“A what, honey?” Josie said. She decided on putting the boy to the farthest end, where he could sing out over the edge of the desk. Past the clear plastic square of paper clips and out into the void of the office. Then Josie put on the glasses hanging from a thin chain around her neck and glanced at the