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this
point, how could it hurt?

 
    Serve the Self
     
    Only a few feet away from the security
light, the night was considerably more palpable. Erica followed
Dawn deeper into the back yard. The other girl moved with tired
resignation. Erica imagined her doing everything slowly. Perhaps
this was why Erica had thought she was on something. Since she was
following her with the purpose of smoking pot, it was possible she
was just one of those people who'd smoked so much pot for so long
she was incapable of moving faster. Perma-stoned.
    Dawn stopped and stared at something. It
took a moment for Erica's eyes to adjust to the low light. Dawn
stood in front of a stack of furniture taller than either of them.
She scratched her head and took an exasperated breath, her
shoulders slumping even farther.
    "Blake said he wanted me to get the fire
started while they were gone. We should have brought some beer with
us."
    "I can help."
    "Probably better do it now. Once we smoke
I'm not going to feel like doing anything."
    "What do you need me to do?"
    Dawn pulled her hair back and banded it into
a sloppy ponytail. She pointed a few feet in front of her. "The
fire pit's over there." She pointed at the pile of furniture. "This
is what we'll be burning." She put a cigarette in her mouth and
offered Erica one from the pack. Erica took it. Dawn slowly lit
both of them, taking a moment to look into Erica's eyes as she lit
hers. Leaving the cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth,
Dawn took a drag, put her hands on her hips, and exhaled smoke from
her nose. The smoke hung virtually unmoving in the thickness of the
air and she said, "I don't see a point in feeding the furniture
into the fire piece by piece."
    Dawn walked to the fire pit and circled the
wide perimeter, her eyes downcast, looking for something. Erica
stood in the same spot, listening to the softly muted sounds around
her while watching the other girl lazily search amidst the ethereal
drifts of their twin plumes of smoke. Dawn came back carrying a can
of lighter fluid, the cherry of her cigarette glowing out from her
black lips.
    With her free hand she pulled the cigarette
from her mouth and said, "Would you mind going back to the barn and
seeing if you can find a dry piece of paper? Newspaper or
something."
    Erica didn't want to be in the barn alone,
even for a second, but said, "Sure," anyway.
    She took a few steps and Dawn yelled,
probably as loudly as she was capable of yelling, which wasn't that
loud at all, "And could you grab me a beer? Thanks."
    Erica thought she'd probably grab one for
herself, too.
    The cold blue light spilled from the barn
and, even before entering it, she thought about the horrors
contained inside, clinically spotlighted under that clear stabbing
glow. She tossed her cigarette, took a deep breath, and went into
the barn. She thought she would dart in, get what she needed, and
dart back out. The smell hit her once inside and she stopped to
look around for paper. She spotted a stack of newspapers to her
right, noting it before her attention was drawn to the pile of
corpses against the back wall. Again, staring at them, she was hit
with a certain feeling. She didn't think it was fear, exactly. She
wasn't really afraid of anything happening to her. Theoretically,
she supposed, nothing could happen to her that she didn't want.
Unless Walt or one of the Boys wanted to do something to her. She'd
have to ask him how that worked. Maybe she could ask Dawn, if Dawn
was one of them. Or did it cancel each other out? If one of them
wanted to do something to her and she didn't want it to happen, was
it still possible for it to happen? What she felt wasn't because
she was afraid of ending up as one of the people in the pile. It
was more like thinking this was what those people had been reduced
to. How they'd ended up. When a person wakes up in the morning and
works hard or just simply exists, she doesn't imagine herself
stripped and decomposing in a barn in the