Excerpt: Untitled Nashua Tactics Short Story

With barely a thought she reached into her pocket for the ubiquitous digital camera she carried with her. It wasn’t a particularly expensive piece of equipment, but it was better than the little nothing lens her phone came with. It was a picturesque scene: the reflective angle of the light meant that none of the shop signs were individually legible; just one long pale strip of capitalism, running into the distance. Kendra adjusted her framing carefully and snapped a picture before heading into the Burger King.

Just one more year to go, for all of this.

She picked up a whopper and fries for herself, cherry coke to go please. She only remembered the shake at the last second, causing the bored-looking kid behind the register to sigh and punch a few extra buttons to go backward in the ordering process. He was probably someone who went to her school, Kendra thought; she had a vague recollection of seeing those high-set ears in the hallways. If he recognized her though, he didn’t say anything. Kendra imagined that after a while, all the faces on the other side of the counter probably blurred together. Her own summer job twice a week as a lifeguard at the community pool wasn’t exactly earth-shattering, but at least it wasn’t fast food.

She brought the food back out to the car and passed the shake back to the backseat. It was accepted without a “thank you.” After a few moments the voice said, “I wanted strawberry, not chocolate.”

“Should’ve said so,” said Kendra. “If you don’t want it I’ll take it.”

“No, it’s fine.” The voice was sulky.

Kendra dug into the fast-food bag and chomped down a few fries while they were still hot before rolling the bag back up, wiping her hands on her pants, and starting the car. She was careful to look back over her shoulder several times as she slowly pulled out.

“Where are we going?” asked the voice from the backseat. “This isn’t the way home.”

“I kind of wanted to go to the cliff,” she said. “Maybe watch the sunset.”

“Oooo, Lover’s Point,” the voice teased.

“You can shut up,” Kendra shot back as she pulled onto the road. “I don’t even know who you are. You don’t get to judge me.”

“I told you, I’m a god,” said the voice. “I get to judge everybody.”

“You’re not a god,” Kendra said for the umpteenth time. “If you were a god, you wouldn’t be stuck in the backseat of my car.”

“I’m not stuck,” the voice whined. “I could leave any time I wanted.”

“So leave.”

The voice didn’t respond, so Kendra drove her way to the cliff in silence. She thought about turning on the radio, but the only otherwise-tolerable radio station would be doing its daily giveaway for the next twenty minutes, and she wasn’t in the mood for the gratingly cheerful DJ Noizemaster and his eclectic soundboard right now.

The sun was just about setting by the time she got to the parking lot at the cliff’s edge overlooking the town of Deering, New Hampshire. She grabbed her fast food and slammed the car door behind her, walking across pink-inflected asphalt and then rocky scrub to the scenic bench that marked the limit of how close the public was allowed to get to the drop-off. She flopped down on the sun-warmed lacquer coating. No one else was up here; most people had better things to do on a Sunday evening, presumably.

“Ugh, what a horrible little place.” The nearness and clarity of the voice implied that Kendra’s unwelcome stowaway had come out of the car and was sitting on the hood. She didn’t turn to look. She heard the wet rattle of a straw getting the last little bit of half-melted milkshake from the bottom of a paper cup.

Kendra looked out over the expanse of the town she’d grown up in. It didn’t look horrible, especially not with the orangey-pink light of the sunset turning everything to antique gold and nostalgia. It just looked... small. She could see all the way to either end of main street from here, and church street behind it. She could see the high school on the hill across the valley. Go Eagles.

Pulling out her camera, Kendra did her best to capture the way the lighting gilded the edges of the building, making the high school look like some kind of wise guardian perched high above all the lesser constructions at the bottom of the valley.

“You don’t have to stay,” she told the voice. “In fact, I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I don’t want me to stay either,” came the reply. “Why don’t you just get in the car and drive me away from here? Just drive and drive and drive far away, and then we’d both get out of this shithole.”