Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
EIGHT DAYS GONE
I
am wet from the bumper boats; we got more than five
dollars’ worth of time because the two sun-stunned teenage
girls would rather flip through gossip magazines and smoke
cigarettes than try to herd us off the water. So we spent a
good thirty minutes on our lawn-mower-motor-propelled
ships, ramming each other and turning wild twists, and then
we got bored and left of our own accord.
Greta, Jeff, and I, an odd crew in a strange place.
Greta and Jeff have become good friends in just a day,
which is how people do it here, where there’s nothing else
to do. I think Greta is deciding whether she’ll make Jeff
another of her disastrous mating choices. Jeff would like it.
He prefers her. She is much prettier than I am, right now, in
this place. Cheap pretty. She is wearing a bikini top and
jean shorts, with a spare shirt tucked into the back pocket
for when she wants to enter a store (T-shirts, wood
carvings, decorative rocks) or restaurant (burger,
barbecue, taffy). She wants us to get Old West photos
taken, but that’s not going to happen for reasons aside
from the fact that I don’t want redneck-lake-person lice.
We end up settling for a few rounds on a decrepit
miniature golf course. The fake grass is torn off in patches,
the alligators and windmills that once moved mechanically

---

are still. Jeff does the honors instead, twirling the windmill,
snapping open and shut the gator jaws. Some holes are
simply unplayable – the grass rolled up like carpeting, the
farmhouse with its beckoning mousehole collapsed in on
itself. So we roam between courses in no particular order.
No one is even keeping score.
This would have annoyed Old Amy no end: the
haphazardness of it all, the pointlessness. But I’m learning
to drift, and I do it quite well. I am overachieving at
aimlessness, I am a type-A, alpha-girl lollygagger, the
leader of a gang of heartbroken kids, running wild across
this lonely strip of amusements, each of us smarting from
the betrayals of a loved one. I catch Jeff (cuckolded,
divorced, complicated custody arrangement) furrowing his
brow as we pass a Love Tester: Squeeze the metal grip
and watch the temperature rise from ‘just a fling’ to
‘soulmate.’ The odd equation – a crushing clutch means
true love – reminds me of poor smacked-around Greta,
who often places her thumb over the bruise on her chest
like it’s a button she can push.
‘You’re up,’ Greta says to me. She’s drying her ball off
on her shorts – twice she’s gone into the cesspool of dirty
water.
I get in position, wiggle once or twice, and putt my
bright red ball straight into the birdhouse opening. It
disappears for a second, then reappears out a chute and
into the hole. Disappear, reappear. I feel a wave of anxiety
– everything reappears at some point, even me. I am
anxious because I think my plans have changed.
I have changed plans only twice so far. The first was
the gun. I was going to get a gun and then, on the morning I

---

disappeared, I was going to shoot myself. Nowhere
dangerous: through a calf or a wrist. I would leave behind a
bullet with my flesh and blood on it. A struggle occurred!
Amy was shot! But then I realized this was a little too macho
even for me. It would hurt for weeks, and I don’t love pain
(my sliced arm feels better now, thank you very much). But I
still liked the idea of a gun. It made for a nice MacGuffin.
Not 
Amy was shot
but 
Amy was scared
. So I dolled myself
up and went to the mall on Valentine’s Day, so I’d be
remembered. I couldn’t get one, but it’s not a big deal as far
as changed plans go.
The other one is considerably more extreme. I have
decided I’m not going to die.
I have the discipline to kill myself, but can’t stomach the
injustice. It’s not fair that I have to die. Not 
really
die. I don’t
want to. I’m not the one who did anything wrong.
The problem now though, is money. It’s so ludicrous,
that of all things it’s money that should be an issue for me.
But I have only a finite amount – $9,132 at this point. I will
need more. This morning I went to chat with Dorothy; as
always, holding a handkerchief so as not to leave
fingerprints (I told her it was my grandmother’s – I try to give
her a vague impression of southern wealth gone to
squander, very Blanche DuBois). I leaned against her desk
as she told me, in great bureaucratic detail, about a blood
thinner she can’t afford – the woman is an encyclopedia of
denied pharmaceuticals – and then I said, just to test the
situation: ‘I know what you mean. I’m not sure where I’m
going to get rent for my cabin after another week or two.’
She blinked at me, and blinked back toward the TV
set, a game show where people screamed and cried a lot.

---

She took a grandmotherly interest in me, she’d certainly let
me stay on, indefinitely: The cabins were half empty, no
harm.
‘You better get a job, then,’ Dorothy said, not turning
away from the TV. A contestant made a bad choice, the
prize was lost, a wuhwaaahhh sound effect voiced her pain.
‘A job like what? What kind of job can I get around
here?’
‘Cleaning, babysitting.’
Basically, I was supposed to be a housewife for pay.
Irony enough for a million