When Dahlia was about 12 years old, she saw her little brother break his leg. He was climbing a huge slab of concrete that leaned against a pile of rocks and broken cinderblocks.
She'd known all along that it was evil. The shadow it cast was too dark and changed the appearance of the rocks below, which looked like teeth and daggers and the fragmented shells of deep-sea crustaceans. It's upper surface was no better, glittering obscenely, defiant of its role as a surface. There was no footing here. Nothing of this world could gain a footing. It was too smooth, too exact, like a line between life and death.
Her brother managed to walk all the way up this surface, but not due to any ability on his part -- only because it let him, it allowed him to reach the top.
Dahlia didn't notice him there until he had taken the final step. Her mouth opened wide but sheer horror silenced her. He returned her stare, cocking his head a little with a curious look, like he had never seen her before, like he had never seen evil before and had a million questions. Then he looked down at his feet like they were strangers.
For one taunting moment, everything was still -- just so she could see in full detail her helplessness -- and then Billy's estranged feet shot out from underneath him, in opposite directions so that in someone's cruel joke he looked like a wishbone. The fall itself was beautiful, the way he maintained his splayed position as if that were his shape. Like a falling leaf, he tumbled off the edge of the concrete. A short fall, he should have been able to shake it off, but somewhow the broken ground broke him. She could hear the bone in his leg crack. Every time a teacher smacked the chalk against the blackboard and a little powder flew up, she would hear it again, as if her life were a canyon for it to echo through forever.
His screams should have been more horrible to hear, but they were actually a relief. They triggered her to action, and she ran to him. One look at his left calf confirmed that it was broken, lying among the other broken pieces in the shadow of evil, and looking perfectly at home.
"Don't move, Billy. I'll get help."
Her first thought was her mother. She pictured herself bursting through the screen door, and there would be Mom, staring at the kitchen table, her finger circling the rim of her glass like some silent incantation were being performed. She ran instead to the nearest trailer and banged on the door. "Help!" she screamed. "Call the doctor!"
For the rest of her life she would remember the 22 steps of that run, the sound and pressure of each one. On the sixteenth she stepped on the edge of a big crack in the pavement and nearly fell.
"God," she thought, and kept on moving.