Evergreen Review

Track Nine of Albino Album

It was fifteen minutes riding to Monsanto. She figured she’d watched Jules go over the plan enough, she knew it as well as she needed. Mya tied Aryan inside the thick strip of woods that lined the field behind the plant. She pulled a blanket from her bag and cloaked herself, fully covering her head and body. The security cameras would only detect the dark silhouette of a small, monk-like figure. She made her way through the field, stopping to open the suitcase. Taking out the flashlight, she inspected the contents. It looked like a perfect cartoon bomb, set up with innumerable wires and a ticking clock face. She took the remote out and placed it like a gun in her waistband, then flipped the switch on the side of the primary device. A small blue light on the side of the bomb lit up.

She rummaged in the pocket of the suitcase, searching for what was, to her, the most important piece of information, the phone numbers. She found the paper folded in the pocket, closed the suitcase, and continued on.

When she reached the lit parking lot, she spotted the payphone on the far west side. She crept up to the building, sat the suitcase against the wall, opened the jar of kerosene in her bag and began lining the side of the building with gas. The smell filled her nose, causing her to sneeze. Once the jar was empty, she scurried over to the payphone and uncrumpled the paper. She dropped in fifty-cents and dialed the first number with trembling fingers. To her dismay, there was no answer. When she deposited the phone back to the receiver, the machine released her coins. She sighed heavily and tried to calm herself. It was well after one in the morning. Even the highway was empty. Not one car had passed since she had arrived. She took the remote out of her waistband and held it carefully in her hand. It only had one button, large and orange in the center. She re-deposited the coins and dialed the second number on the paper. It rang four times and she was about to hang up when she heard the deep bass of a man’s voice intone, in a slow, Southernish drawl, “Hullo.”

“Hello, yeah, um, how many people in there?”

“Excuse me?” he asked, slowly. “Who, well now, who this be?”

“It don’t matter none who this be. Y’all in Monsanto, right?”

“Ummm, yeah. That’s right.” He said it casually, too slowly for the situation as if perhaps they were two happy strangers meeting at a diner.

“Well, you need to get out now. There’s a bomb in the building and you got about thirty seconds to get out or get blown.”

“What you talking about now?”

Mya stomped her foot. Why did the security guard have to be her slow uncle? She could tell just from the few sentences exchanged that he was a person who was gonna take his time to get where he needed to go, even if his life depended on him getting on someone else’s time. She tried to keep it simple and emphatic.

“How many people in that building right now?”

“Well now—” she could almost hear the molasses creeping as he thought about it, “there’s just me in this here building right now.”

“You sure bout that?”

“Yes ma’am, I’m sure.”

She turned her head away and cleared her throat. “Listen, I am telling you I am about to blow this building sky high, and if you wanna wake to smell the pretty flowers tomorrow, you will get out of this building RIGHT NOW!”

“Well hell! Are you serious?” He had finally begun to sound concerned.

“I am dead serious! I got no beef with you. It’s that damned building I want to blow, so get your sorry ass out on the street or I guess I’m gonna have to take you with it!” She heard a series of muffled noises, and after about thirty seconds, she saw the burly

security guard stumbling out of the front door, the cordless phone still held against his ear, looking about him unsuccessfully for the source of the perpetration. “Can you still hear me?” Mya asked.

“Yes I can, but where are you?”

“That don’t matter. But you still too close, now get on back.” He took a few stumbling steps back, still looking around him. There was an entire parking lot between them.

“Where you at?” He seemed to be expecting her to show up right at his side.

“Nope, that’s not good enough. Get on all the way across the street,” she told him. He was going away, but not fast enough. “We got ten, nine, eight,” she began counting down, which worked finally to light the fire under his ass. He began imitating a run the best he could until he was across the highway and making his way waddlingly into the opposite field. Mya nodded, hung up the receiver, and took a few steps back. She held the remote up over her head and pressed the thick orange button, the only button.

She did not know exactly how the bomb worked, that the levers ticked one diabolical domino into another within the contraption, like the events leading up to this moment, releasing a liquid into a potent powder until the volatile pressure could no longer be contained. She did not wince as the BANG! rang out through the air, sending up debris from the wall in a cacophony of smoke and flame. She was relieved at the sight of it. The destruction of the bomb served to release an anger and sadness in her that had also become too hot for tears.

The burly guard shouted and fell back onto the ground, startled at the sight, his hands above his head shaking frantically in the air. The bomb had only taken out a portion of the side wall. The flames were catching the kerosene and licking at the remainder of the wall. She guessed it didn’t matter that it hadn’t taken the whole building. Christie was always saying how the symbol of the act is more important than the consequence of the action. She wasn’t sure if Jules would agree, but she knew, wherever Jules was, over the next few days she would hear about this, and it would at least give her some satisfaction in that cold place where she was probably going to be waiting for a long, long time.

As the small fire took over, Mya turned her hooded figure and made a mad dash back through the field. Beyond it, Aryan stood shaded in the thickness of the strip of woods.

She untied her from the tree, mounted the white horse and took off into the night, the fire receding into the distance. They made their way through the field and down, beside a long strip of trees that ran for miles along the railroad tracks and the all but abandoned between spaces connecting America to America, carrying its cargo in decadent freights, as if flickers of the past appearing along cross-sections of subconscious paths. These invisible roads would carry her, mounted on Aryan, into her strange and unforeseeable future.

Chavisa Woods novel, The Albino Album, was just published by Seven Stories Press. Her debut collection of short stories, Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind was a Lambda Literary Award finalist for Debut Fiction. Chavisa Woods has featured as a reader with a number of renowned institutions and festivals, including a performance series, which ran for five days at The Whitney Museum in New York City. Woods’ poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Quarterly, Sensitive Skin, Matador among other publications.