I duck into the alley. It's supposed to be a joke, like Now-You-See-Me-Now-You-Don't, but when I pop onto the street again, my husband is crying, and a crowd has gathered round.

"Honey," I say, pushing past everybody. "What happened?"

"Oh, thank God!" my husband wails. "Thank God, she's safe!"

"What?"

"I thought I lost her forever!" my husband bawls.

"Are you out of your mind?" I ask him. I address the crowd too, since they seem to think they deserve information. "I ducked into the alley," I explain. "It was a joke."

"A joke," an old man mutters, shaking his head.

"She just ducked into the alley," sneers a woman wearing a big baby in a sling.

"Come on," I say to my husband. "This is ridiculous. Tell them it was nothing. I do stuff like this all the time."

"Nice," says the sling woman. "She does this all the time."

"She disappeared!" my husband boo-hoos.

It's confusing. At this stage of our marriage, my husband doesn't even much like me. But here he is acting like his world fell apart with me gone.

"Look," I say, sweat pooling under my left arm. "I was gone for a minute, but now I'm here."

"She doesn't get it," the sling woman says.

The old man growls. "Let's teach her a lesson."

My husband weeps. "I was all alone!" He buries his face in his hands, but before he does, I catch a weird gleam in his eye.

Is he trying to make me look bad? Is this a mid-life crisis? Did a blood vessel burst in his brain? Earlier we were walking down King Street, my husband going on and on about the tone of an email from our department chair. Then he noticed his shoelace was untied. When he bent to knot it, I ducked into the alley, as a joke.

It's true the alley was dim, and the alley was cool, a relief from the glare of the street. Ducking into the alley was like slipping into a shadow. It was like dropping something heavy. It was like breaking the surface of the water to take a deep breath. And yes, it's true I may have dozed off for a moment in the alley. Asleep or not, it's true I had a quick dream. In the dream, a man walked into the alley, and shoved me against the wall of the alley, and there, in the alley, kissed me, hard. When he stepped back, we were both panting like dogs. "Thank you for your service," the man said.

But really, is that enough to warrant my husband's crazy behavior? No way. Who the hell is he?  

"It was an alley, not Alaska," I snap. "And I'm not your mother, I'm your wife."

That stops his tears. I'm smug for a second. But then he whispers, "Where's the kid?"

The crowd gasps. The kid! Our daughter, a little dancer and a full-blown skeptic. Whenever I spin her a story, she smirks and says, "That's not real."

I experience an odd emotion when I realize our daughter is missing, a giddiness overlaid with despair. I'm going to kill myself, I think, and the sentence echoes again and again in my head, a loop of penance and comfort, of promise and prayer.

My husband stares at me. I remember a time before we were married, a night when we heard tornado sirens and stepped out on the porch to a frightening green sky. We stood by as hail the size of baseballs dented the hood of our car. We didn't have a garage. What else could we do?

"Check the alley," someone in the crowd murmurs, and then everyone is chanting it—alley, alley, alley—in a horrible sing-song.

My husband takes off in that direction.

"Wait," I plead, "I'm coming," but through my sobs my husband probably can't understand me. Truth be told, I can't understand myself anymore.

The crowd hangs back as my husband and I approach the mouth of the alley. I pay close attention to each step I take, the intricacy of each foot's rise and fall.

In the alley, our daughter is having an imaginary cookout. Slashes of sun illuminate her sweet, perfect form. An upside-down crate is her campfire, and she holds a length of pipe in her fist, on which pretend marshmallows slowly burn.

I want to cry out, to let my daughter know how much suffering she's caused me. I want to make her afraid. But I've learned something, believe it or not. So for now I stay quiet, and step closer to my husband, and together, in the alley, we watch our girl play.


.

Malinda McCollum is the author of THE SURPRISING PLACE, winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review—which awarded her the Plimpton Prize—McSweeney's, Zyzzyva, Epoch, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Charleston, South Carolina.

Read her postcard.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of Tim Dennell.

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