Dragonfly by Jaxn Hill

Torstein was carrying Sully on his shoulders. The kid was small. I’m guessing he was a crack baby, and he never got enough to eat, so he was slender and I’m guessing short for his age, too — though I don’t exactly know how old he was or how tall he ought to have been.

I was walking with my brother and Bruiser a little behind Maggie and Ferdy. Bruiser had tried to apologize to me and my brother about the protection money; he recognized Peter, my brother, from the fish market. We told him not to mention it, that our dad made more money than God from the fish market and we hadn’t done too badly on the sale, so everything evened out. Bruiser was kind of a nice guy when he wasn’t threatening you.

We could hear Ferdy asking Maggie, “Why’d you buy us these clothes?” He was always curious about any expenditure.

“Because I bought new clothes for Sully and didn’t want you guys to be jealous.”

“Why’d you buy them for Sully?”

“Because he looked like a kid nobody cares about,” she said.

“He is a kid nobody cares about,” Ferdy said.

“That’s not true!” Maggie said. “Torstein cares. And Angel.”

Ferdy just laughed at that. It made me want to laugh, too. If Angel had cared, she’d have been the one to get new clothes for Sully. Somehow.

The neighborhood along the shore was pretty tony, upscale shops and beach boutiques, then narrow streets of pricey condos and homes sandwiched onto long lots designed to make the most livable space close to the water. A few blocks later we were into a commercial area with seafood joints, nightclubs and more shopping. Ferdy grudgingly shelled out for fish tacos from a roadside stand — fresh fish we’d seen them carry in the back door: a big halibut the cook butchered and cleaned in about three minutes. My brother and I had grown up in the fish market and appreciated the skill and the preparation — just lemon and garlic butter, then right onto the grill. What could be better?

Fortified, we continued our march. The sun had set, and we had left the beach town behind. It wasn’t two miles later we were in a concrete-walled slum with a few old houses, that had once been genteel, stuck between tall new tenement projects. Lots of broken streetlights and slow-moving cars on the street with that deep base note booming behind tinted windows. We all sort of drew together, flanking Maggie like her old entourage, but the divine madman who led us seemed to sense no danger at all. From some pocket in his coat he had produced a bag of sunflower seeds and began offering them to the people who passed. There were no takers. We’d decided to stick to surface streets on our trek home because it would be easier and safer than walking alongside the highway, but right then I wondered if we hadn’t made a mistake.

Ahead of us, Torstein had just offered to carry a bag of groceries for a little old lady who’d been hurrying, as best she could, up the block. He was telling her, “I’ll carry these for you. Here, have some sunflower seeds.”

She smiled at him and said, “Are you all going to the church?” I don’t know if she thought we were all dressed alike because we were some kind of band or what.

“We may,” Torstein said. “But we’ll get you home first.” And we did. She lived in one of those tiny old houses that people actually used to raise 3 or 4 kids in 50 years ago. It had a little postage stamp of a lawn and a little front porch that could barely hold Bruiser, Torstein and Sully. The rest of us stood in the street as they walked her to the door and handed her groceries in.

“Thank you, dears,” she said, and gave them each a swift kiss on the cheek. “I hope I see you again.”

“You will,” Torstein said. “Some day soon, you’ll be seeing a lot of me.” That was the weird kind of thing he used to say to random people.

The little old lady set her bag of groceries down inside the house, then came back out on the porch and gave Torstein a long hug. “I’ll be waiting for that,” she said. “I’ll be waiting.”

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