Melody Crumbley's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Melody stood in the churned dirt and knew the trail was dead. The coyote could be a mile away by now. Its jaws could have already crunched Mr. Boots's glass eye down its throat. Or the eye could be sitting in the dust between two shrubs, ten feet away, or a hundred. She could walk in circles forever and find nothing. Dexter tossed his second rock and caught it. "So where's your dumb coyote now?" Melody didn't answer. She squeezed the rabbit tight and looked at the ground near her sandals. If she couldn't follow the coyote, she would follow what fell from it. She dropped to her knees. "What are you doing?" "Looking." She crawled in a slow ring around the churned patch. Her knees pressed dents into the hot dirt. She pushed aside a dry tuft of grass. Nothing. She pushed aside another. A beetle. A pebble. A curl of foil from a candy wrapper. Dexter watched for a while. Then he squatted down beside her, because he was bored, and boredom always made him worse or better and she couldn't tell yet which. "If it ate it, it's gone," he said. "It's gonna come out its butt tomorrow." "Shut up." "I'm helping." He started flipping over rocks. "Coyotes puke stuff up. I saw it on TV. Bones and fur and stuff." Melody stopped. "They do?" "If it's too hard to eat." He shrugged. "Glass is hard." She crawled faster. She checked under a flat stone. Under a thornbush. Behind a fat cactus with a split down its side. Her fingers found a wet clump of matted grey hair, sticky at the middle, the size of a walnut. She poked it. Something inside clicked against her fingernail. She pulled the clump open. A black plastic disc sat in the middle. Mr. Boots's eye. Chewed at the edge. Dull with spit. Real. Melody sat back on her heels. Her mouth opened, then closed. She wasn't crying. She had forgotten how, for a second. "No way," Dexter said. "No way. Give it." "No." She closed her fist around it. She stood up. The scrub still stretched in every direction. She still didn't know the way back. But the eye was in her hand, warm and gross and hers, and Mr. Boots was under her arm with one empty socket waiting. Then, far off, she heard a car horn. Two short honks. Her father's honks. The tired, flat kind he used when he wanted them in the station wagon and didn't want to get out. Dexter's head snapped up. "Dad." Melody turned toward the sound. It came from somewhere past the scrub, thin and small. She started walking. She held the eye tight. She didn't look to see if Dexter followed. She only had to reach the horn before it stopped.