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Blondie had closed her hand in the car door. 
    She released Arlene’s hair, hammering at her face now, and finally Dougie moved, but only because Blondie was behind him, shoving him aside. Blondie, yelling things she couldn’t understand, could hardly even hear through the red haze settling into her head. The wet slap of her hand against Arlene’s face, her nose already squashed to pulp and blood, and the chewing sounds.
    Something catching light at the end of his arm, a blow dryer arcing down through the 25-watt incandescence, and the force of each and every wallop passed along to her secondhand through Arlene’s grip.
    “Stop it, man! Stop it! ” Dougie screamed, reached for Blondie. “You’re gonna fucking kill her, man!”
    And Blondie, those weren’t words, far too perfect an expression of her own confusion and pain and anger for words. One last time the handle of the blow dryer connected with Arlene’s face and the plastic shattered and bone snapped and Twila’s hand slid from slack and broken jaws.
    Twila crawled, scrambled, slinging crimson and skidding on piss-sticky linoleum past Dougie, into the hall and the murmuring press of bodies gathering for the show. 
    When the twins gave a party, everybody came.
     
    Past noon, and the day drifts into mid-summer scorch and the water-lie shimmer of blacktop mirage. The syrupy scent of kudzu through the window isn’t all that different from the zombie rot that seems to get stronger whenever Arlene starts flinging herself against the bathroom door.
    The twins are on the floor where it’s a little cooler, Twila’s head resting in her brother’s bony lap. Running down the batteries in their portable CD player, This Mortal Coil and the Cocteau Twins, nothing harder because her head still thrums, the buzzing at the base of her skull spreading slowly as the hornets honeycomb her brain. Her stomach’s churning from the pointless bout with lunch, hardly three bites of the cheddar cheese and stale bagel sandwich before she threw it right back up. She wants to doze, wants to dream back down to the dead pit where the hornets and the sounds from the bathroom can’t find her.
    Blondie’s brushing her hair, working out the tangles and rat-nest snarls, and Twila knows he’s only singing with the boom box so she won’t see how freaked out he is. If she avoids his face, it might even work. She closes her eyes, focusing on the voices and the melody and the pleasant prick of the brush’s teeth on her scalp.
    “Listen,” he says. “ There . Did you hear it?”
    Twila opens her eyes and stares up at the three rosaries hung around his neck, onyx black beads and three perfect crucifixions, and she listens. 
    Somewhere down the street, gunshots and the hot squeal of tires. Men shouting and one more shot that sounds somehow very final. But no sirens, no sirens for hours now, and she wonders if all the cops are finally dead, or if they’re just hiding somewhere.
    “That was close,” Blondie says, and the fear edging back into his voice makes the hornets wriggle and buzz.
    “Hey, Abbott,” she says, straining for her own voice through the gravel rasp. “Which is easier to unload, a truckload of bowling balls or a truckload of dead babies?”
    But he’s still watching the open window and the simmering chrome sky and doesn’t even seem to notice. And fuck, she feels way too shitty to joke, but the pinched desperation around his mouth and his pecan-shell eyes is worse.
    “Dead babies,” he answers, when he finally answers, “You can use a pitchfork.” 
    “And what’s worse than a truckload of dead babies?”
    “A live one at the bottom,” he says, “eating its way to the top.”
    “And what’s even worse than that ?”
    He misses his cue. Down the street, brakes shriek before the crash. 
    “Blondie?”
    “It makes it,” he says. 
     
    Under a sallow, pig-belly sky, the dead pit yawns and breathes out charcoal smoke and the gentle grey sift of ashes. Twila