Friendswood Read Online Free PDF Page B

dirt where the weeds had died. A cow wandered over and stood munching grass by the gate. It had brown and white spots, and looked over at her dumbly. She remembered that cow now because it had disappeared when she looked again later, as if it had fled.
    About a foot away from the knotted root of a tree, she spotted something black and shiny in the grass that was piled up in a coil, and crosshatched with pink and brown diamonds. She thought it hissed. She moved closer, ready to jump away if it was a copperhead. But when she got near enough, she could see the thing was dead. It was curled there against the first bright spring grass, slick and oily, weird perfect coils. She bent down to look, and then she saw there wasn’t a head. It smelled rank and vaguely of petroleum, and when she put her finger against the slime just at the blackest part, her skin came back red and stinging. She crouched there in the grass, looked to the other side of the yard, and saw the sludge had squirmed up in other places too, near the hammock, and out at the edge of their yard, next to a lone dandelion. As the breeze lifted and rocked the bird feeder hanging above, she felt an uncertain dread. In the other direction near the garden hose, there were three blue-black coils lying there in a triangle, as if by design. They seemed to writhe and sputter in the bright sunlight. She kicked at the black coil beneath her, and stomped on it until it was flat and crushed, then she wiped off the sole of her shoe in the grass. As she watched her movements, she began to understand that the sludge had pushed right up out of the ground, some greasy offal that had sprouted everywhere, as if it had been purposefully planted. She went inside, and locked the door, pressed the mat against the seam at the bottom, as if the stuff might be able to slither its way inside under the doorjambs.
    She went into the kitchen, where Jess sat at the kitchen table with her books. “There you are,” Jess said. “You were gone awhile.” The book was opened to diagrams and graphs, and an empty glass sat next to it. Jess bent closer to her work and chewed on her lip, barely looking up from her writing.
    â€œDon’t go outside. Stay in here.” Lee went to the sink and stood washing her trembling hands. “There’s some bad stuff out there.”
    When Jack spoke to the Turners to see if they’d seen the same sludge in their yard, Sy said, “Yeah, it’s some runoff from the oil refinery, but Ichecked with the city—the EPA says it’s such a small concentration of stuff, it can’t hurt anything.”
    Now, years later, almost no one remembered or cared, but the sludge came up out of the ground for months. It appeared under downstairs windows, lay along the seams of sidewalks, and a few of Lee’s neighbors mistook it for dog shit. Sometimes it looked like worms or a mass of crushed coffee beans. People who touched it got rashes or sores on their skin. All over Rosemont, the sludge wriggled into rose gardens, around the bases of birdbaths, and lay in piles under hammocks. People worried, but were reassured that the EPA had tested the soil and declared it safe. Then one day, the sludge appeared, thick and oozing and with a streak of fluorescent green, under the swing set of the school playground. A mother found her little boy playing with the black coils, petroleum and dirt in war paint across his face.

    W HEN L E E LOOKED NOW at the photos she’d taken of the escaped container, she was disappointed. The pictures were dim and indistinct because it had been dusk. You could see the rectangular outline in the mud and the big pink stain—but without anything around it to put to scale, it was hard to see how big the thing was or how clearly it was plastic, not wood or metal. She watched the photos slide out from the printer, each time hoping the next image would be more clear.
    Outside the kitchen window, a cat slinked through