She popped the safety caps off her scripts, dry swallowed two yellow and green Prozac capsules and two baby blue Klonopin. Blew out all but the candle closest to her bed. For a moment, she stood naked in the dim yellow light, admiring her strong body, the full firmness of her breasts, the washboard-flat stomach, and the muscular line of her unshaven legs. The perfect tapestry of pain and ink covering her arms and shoulders.

Spyder lay down, covered herself with the mismatched sheets and her mother’s patchwork, and watched the tarantulas stalk their dinners until she fell asleep. Toward dawn the dreams found her, and she walked the blood streets under coal-black skies.

D aria knows that she’s dreaming, almost always knows, and so her dreams are like amusement park rides or tripping or movies of lives she might have led. And she knows that she is not seven, even though the world rushing past outside the Pontiac’s open windows is too fresh, the sunlight and colors of the Mississippi countryside much too brilliant, to have filtered through her twenty-four-year-old eyes. She knows that it’s November and not the week before her eighth birthday at the end of May.

The warm breeze through the windows smells like new hay and cow shit, a faint, syrupy hint of the honeysuckle tangled in the fences that divide pastureland from the henna ribbon of the unpaved road. Dust spins up off the tires and hangs like orange smoke in the morning air behind them; hard gravel nuggets pop and ping off the underbelly of the Pontiac.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she says, and her dad looks at her in the rearview mirror. “Not much farther. You don’t want to go in the ditch, do you?”

“I can wait,” she says, isn’t sure if she’s telling the truth, not after two strawberry Nehi’s from the styrofoam cooler in the backseat floorboard. She turns away from the window, back to the shoe box of crayola stumps and her big pad of manila drawing paper.

“Well, it’s your call,” he says from the front.

The paper is completely covered, crazy loops and swirls, figure eights and broad smears from crayons skinned and rubbed furiously sideways. Psychedelic, her mother would say if she were here, or abstract, she would say, or impressionistic. A rainbow gutted, turned inside out, and she looks at the back of her dad’s head, his hair dirty, almost to his shoulders now. There’s nothing on the radio but country music stations and preaching stations, and she doesn’t know the words to any of these songs.

“There are some trees up there you could go behind.”

“I said I can wait,” she says again and picks all the broken pieces of black crayon out of the box, arranging them neatly on the seat beside her. With the largest, she begins working across the page from the upper left corner, burying kaleidoscopic chaos beneath perfect, waxy black.

“I’m sorry,” her dad says, and she bears down so hard that the crayon breaks again, crumbles into oily bits that she rubs into the paper with her thumb. Both her hands are stained, the sides of her palms, the tips of her fingers, smudged ocher and sky blue and salmon. Her thumb is the indefinite color of a bruise.

“You don’t have to keep saying that,” she says, older, tireder Daria voice speaking over whatever the child might have said, and he’s staring at her from the rearview mirror, watching her through Keith Barry’s pebble-polished eyes.

The crayon smears on her skin melt and run together, mercuric, drip off and splash the black, and now she’ll have to use more black to hide them.

Something huge that coughs diesel smoke and hickory and rolls across the land on sinuous wheels like centipede legs rattles past the Pontiac, blocking out the sun for the instant before it’s gone, and she looks up, looks where it was, the shining stitches in the red, red earth, and “You go first,” Keith whispers, and uses the blade of his big pocketknife to pry away one of the rotten boards, weathered shimmery gray and splintery. The old wood mousesqueaks and pops free, rust-toothed nails flipped up to the cloudless spring sky.

Keith grins like a guilty weasel, folds his knife away, and the yawning dark slit where the board was sucks him inside the shack, the listing shack behind the store and gas station after she pissed, while her father talks nervous with the man who pumped their gas and wiped dead bugs from the windshield with his wet blue rag.

“C’mon,” her father shouts, and she hears glass and grit scrunching beneath his shoes and it sounds as if he’s being chewed alive in there, ground up like a mouthful of raw hamburger. Mort hesitates, and Maybe, she thinks, maybe he’s thinking about being eaten, too.

“Wait the hell up,” Mort says, and then he’s gone, leaving her alone in the sun and the sour stink of gasoline and the tall grass. More chewing footsteps, growing fainter, and she looks back, down Morris past the warehouses to the railroad, past the rusting water pump and the scrap metal heaped behind the gas station. She wants to call them back, call for her dad.

“Jesus Christ, Dar. Come the fuck on if you’re comin’.”

And then she squeezes herself through the gap in the wall, pushes between fear and the dry-rot pine, out of the hot morning and into the cool, dustsmelly gloom. And the darkness does swallow her, takes her inside the whispery solitude of its velvet guts, the shack, the empty warehouse, makes it seem like there might never have been anything else. Except that the way back, the space of a single slat, blazes like the door to Heaven.

“Mort?” she whispers loud, the way she speaks at the library or a funeral parlor, and “Keith?”

Drifting back, then, from nowhere, from everywhere at once, “Over here, Dar. Over here,” and it might be Keith or Mort or anyone else. The darkness plays ventriloquist, throwing voices, bending sound, stealing words for its own.

“Where? I can’t see you.”

A long silence and finally something taunting like laughter or summer thunder way off, and the voice shouts back, “Over here!”

Daria takes one uncertain step forward, crunching the gritty, invisible debris scattered across the floor beneath the rubber soles of her boots. Her eyes are beginning to adjust, slowest fade to fuzzy twilight, and she swallows, her throat dry, dry mouth, and tastes the stale dustbunny air. She remembers the big cooler sweating sweet condensation diamonds inside the Pontiac, the bottles of Coke and Nehi floating in its little arctic sea. And forces herself another step, two, three, moving haltingly now across a gray concrete plain littered with darker patches and the faint glint of broken glass. Streaky sunlight bleeds down through the roof, sieved through shadow, and by the time the dark finishes with it, it’s nothing more than the pale ghost of the morning.

“Hey, Dar! Look at this!”

“What? What is it?”

Up ahead of her, something falls over, startlingly loud, weighty metal crash and glass tinkle, and the sudden feathery rustle of wings high overhead.

“Holy fuck, Keith! Will you watch what the hell you’re doing?”

And that laughter again, and the rustling, just swallows or pigeons, or bats.

“God, Dar, sometimes you can be such a goddamn pussy,” Keith says, and now she knows the laughter is his, mean laugh, the way you laugh at sissies and fat kids and Carol Yancy when the school nurse found cooties in her hair.

Stop! she screams. Stop it! but just screaming inside her head, the words just loud thoughts trapped inside her the way this darkness is contained inside the warehouse walls, within the walls of the shack that had seemed so much smaller from the outside.

Something touches her cheek, a tickling wisp of her hair or a cobweb, and she slaps at it.