This is the first episode in the 9-part serial story “An Object in Orbit,” which originally appeared in Boulevard in 2019.
This is a body in the woods. This is a body by the riverbank. This is a body on the roadside. This is a body behind the factory that once made cars and now makes boxes.
We made of it a children’s rhyme, clapping hands as we chanted. How could we not? We were, after all, children.
Elizabeth is running, sneakers pounding the gravel. One mile, two miles, three. At the six-mile mark, her legs burn, but she keeps going. “All runners are running from something,” her husband used to say. Said just yesterday, in fact, before he boarded the bus.
No, that’s not right, she thinks. Running toward something. If she just goes fast enough, she will get there.
“A new body has been found,” the adults used to say. Because no one wanted to say, “They have found a mother, and she has left her children behind, and she has left her husband behind, and she is not coming back.”
It was obvious to them—police, reporters, teachers—that the mothers were not coming back. To the younger children, not so obvious. It seems they simply forgot to tell us the new fact of our lives, our unenviable condition, what we had become: motherless.
Continue to Part 2, which involves billionaires behaving badly.
Thank you for reading my author newsletter. “An Object in Orbit” originally appeared in Boulevard in 2019.