THE KEY SLID IN SMOOTHLY and I paused, looking at the abandoned drive-in theater: at the rusted, canted speaker posts (the speakers themselves had long since been stolen) and the weeds bursting through the concrete berms; at the dilapidated concessions bar and the partially-collapsed steel fence. Do it, I told myself, and turned the key, hearing sirens in the distance as the trunk popped open, trying not to think about the kid. As it turned out, it wasn’t that difficult, considering what I found myself looking at.
They were arthropods, of course, and so appeared in death much as they’d appeared in life, although their eyes had long since rotted out and their shells had become gray as tombstones. But that’s not what interested me so much as what was beneath them—which, having shoved them a
