In winter strangers wander into me thinking I’m part of the hotel.
Some strangers think I’m not a stranger. I’m much stranger than they are. Only they don’t know. Not yet. They might not ever. I’m so strange they don’t recognize me.
#
There is a child in the field. It wails like the wind. The child is a secret the night keeps from the trees and the sky. The night is a good secret keeper, but the sky has eyes and likes to gossip about the living and the dead.
Don’t listen to the sky. It sees too much. The sky can’t be trusted because it doesn’t know the difference between good and evil or the living and the dead. It has no judgment for the man who steals children.
#
We are all dead. Especially those still alive.
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In 1979, a child is carried across the field. Don’t look. It’s not fair. She wouldn’t want you to see her this way, naked and shivering and bleeding and mangled in the box in his arms. In the box, she can’t see the sky. She sees Diana Ross.
#
In 1979 Diana Ross is a queen. Diana Ross is etched into the child’s eyes. A girl of the disco haunts in delicious ways like a good shiver. She thrills because she is so pretty, so skinny, such a lady even as a man begins to turn her. Inside out. Diana turns the girl upside down. With elegance, her doe eyes light like stars above the field at night.
#
No one in the hotel knows about the child in the field in the box. If no one knows the child is there, does anyone stop to wonder what that smell is? Some guests recognize that smell. No one thinks it’s a child. Except the man who keeps coming back for days and brings gasoline and matches.
The child is a girl. With my name. She is a child of 1979. Like me. Maybe she is me. Maybe that’s why I’m still in 1979, that box closing on me, the lid, the sky of stars. Maybe that’s why I’m stuck on Diana Ross. She was the one I thought of when the lid closed.
#
She saved me. I want to kiss her with open mouths when the box is burning.
When the box is burning, I turn on the radio in the hotel. When the box is burning, Diana Ross sings into me like blood from the wounds on the man’s face. Like blood from the child no one sees bleeding in the box, her voice fills the box in the field. No one thinks the box is anything but trash in winter.
#
No one talks about Diana Ross anymore. That really bothers me because in 1979 she was everywhere.
Don’t tell me it’s not 1979 anymore. It is still 1979 and has been for decades.
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1979: When the box is burning at night, strangers see its light from far away. As they drive the dark highway to the hotel, the burning box is a dot of fire flickering. The fields are so far away no one strops to find out what is burning.
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Don’t worry. It’s never too late to save me.
#
When strangers in the hotel parking lot see my burning box, gorgeous flickers of incidents so terrible, they can’t even begin to realize what they are seeing. They are looking right at it. They don’t want to see what they are seeing, so they see something else.
My face is not my face. Nor is the rope in the man’s hands or the knife dull silver like fish. I still can’t see his face. I never saw his hands reaching out to me, never saw his burley chin above my nose, pressing down. I never smelled the beer of his breath.
#
I only saw her.
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In the metallic scent of blood something inside me rips me apart. Diana Ross is here with me. And inside the box, I’m not alone. She’s singing, and the next thing I know we’re dancing. The darkness in the box turns to light.
We’re holding each other.
Me and my guardian angel, Diana Ross.
#
Don’t laugh. I have something to tell you: We all make angels in our minds, but we have to find a way to allow them to rescue us. I never suffered because I knew how to call my angel, when to call her, and how to let her inside my box. I didn’t wait too long. I called. She came.
Aimee Parkison is the author of the novel The Petals of Your Eyes (Starcherone/Dzanc 2014) and two story collections, Woman with Dark Horses (Starcherone 2004) and The Innocent Party, (BOA Editions, Ltd., American Reader Series 2012). Parkison’s fiction has won numerous awards and fellowships, including a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review, the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, the Jack Dyer Prize from Crab Orchard Review, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Fellowship, and an American Antiquarian Society William Randolph Hearst Creative Artists Fellowship. Residing in a house full of books, surrounded by owls and trees in beautiful Stillwater, Oklahoma, Parkison is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Oklahoma State University, where she teaches fiction writing.