Read Close Encounters for Free Online

had poked their fingers into a ball of Play-Doh. She could faintly smell blood, bitter like a bucket of rusty nails in water, and rot. She reached to touch the face, slowly, but as she was about to make contact with a congealed mass where the body’s right eye socket should have been, a twig snapped somewhere in the distance, and she sprang up and ran back to the trailer park, wrestling with branches and coiled vines and other foreign arms grabbing for her.
    Lincoln had assumed she was the only one who inhabited those woods. The brush and trees had grown so thick and dark it was hard for even her lithe, twelve-year-old body to snake through the path she had created over months of exploration. It was her private fortress, a fortress that buffered her from the sound of arguments and the smell of overflowing ashtrays and Coors Light and the sweaty, dank smell of Harmon when he spent nights with Lincoln’s mother. In a small clearing by an anemic stream, Lincoln would enact scenes of knights and princesses like those she read about in King Arthur, but could not tell the other kids at school because it made her seem kind of immature when she should be stealing her mother’s lipstick and trying to talk to boys during lunch.
    The body—was it someone she might have known? There were many characters who swept in and out of the trailer park, boyfriends and drug dealers of some of the women who lived there. These women had the weight of children gathered around them like moths—children who cried, wanted, needed those dim blue flames that lit up only when the women smoked. Men like Harmon, shiftless but virile, lethargic but prone to rage. Dark shadows that moved quickly over the sun in random sequences.
    What there is to know about Lincoln’s body: it is twelve; it attends Parkvale Junior High School; it wears a size six jeans and size five sneakers; it has a scar on its right shoulder where she fell off the dining room chair as a child and nicked the corner of the table; it has faint, pale pubic hair that matches her head hair. It has inherited an autosomal-dominant gene for breast cancer from her mother. There is a constellation of moles on her left arm that make her look as if she has freckles .
    â€œYou been out in those woods again, Lincoln?” Her mother appeared in the doorway of her room. Her body was faded, shapeless in some way, like an erased form that still clung defiantly to the paper. A single line composed her, a frown that began at her lips and drooped around her small breasts and growing hips and feet that pointed outward, like a duck’s.
    â€œNo, Momma,” Lincoln answered from the card table on which she did homework.
    â€œYour shoes got all kinds of crud all over them.” Lincoln’s mother tossed the sneakers into the middle of the room. “You clean these up with the hose and don’t ever come into the house with them that dirty again, you hear me?”
    â€œYes, Momma,” Lincoln answered. She picked them up and inspected them after her mother had left. She thought she could detect the faintest trace of blood on them. Or maybe it was something else. She smelled them, her nose deep in the rubber. She smelled grass and earth but not that tinny scent. But maybe something, something that smelled of flesh, decay…something. She took them out to the back and shot the hose at them with such force they lurched over on their sides, the waterlogged laces dancing lethargically in the gathering pool of water.
    The next afternoon, the body was still motionless, a carelessly discarded toy. Lincoln pressed the body with a large branch, succeeding in turning it on its side. She examined the stewed face, soft and red and purple like a bruised, poked fruit, the slight stubble that had been growing that morning or afternoon in which its movement had been halted. She wondered whether the body’s razor still lay by a sink somewhere beside waxed, hard soap streaks on a