The ambulance came to take her away.
Lucy stood out in the parking lot with the rest of the diners and staff, the ones that had stayed. Lucy had seen some patrons running out the emergency fire door. “I wonder if they paid,” she had thought as the chaos was ramping up.
It seemed like it had been years since she first saw that girl looking at her through the fishtanks, but it had probably only been a half an hour. Time was feeling very fuzzy to Lucy so she concentrated on breathing evenly and naming things that she saw. “Store” and “blue car” and “streetlight”.
Would they take her to a mental hospital? Lock her up?
The door to the ambulance closed from the inside and the vehicle started away. Lucy wondered if she should go back in to get her left-overs but she didn’t want to take a remembrance of this evening home with her.
The wildfires were still burning in some places on the west coast. The night air was easier to breathe than the smoky, daytime air. Because it was late summer the hot days kept the smoke thick and ,hovering and the sun in the sky turned a bright orange. Breathing outside made you want to lick your mouth like a dog that has tasted something strange.
Lucy got in her car and put the key into the ignition. She looked up, through the windshield, and saw a flyer under the wiper. She unrolled her window and craned her body to reach it.
A blank piece of paper. No, there was a qvc code printed on one side, blank on the other. Just a plain piece of copy paper with that…what was that thing anyway, like a bar code? “I have no idea what to do with this thing,” she thought. It made her shiver a little to think of someone putting that on her car. A bread crumb, a sign post to what? Why her.
She crumpled the paper and threw it on the floor of the passenger side.
And then in a change of mind, she reached over to grab the paper and smoothed it open on the seat. Smoothed it and folded it, putting in her purse. She would ask her son what that symbol was, he was a millienial and knew about stuff like this. And how to use it.
this is the 5th installment in a 5 part series
CELLOPHANE 