Excerpt: Like A Bad Penny

It happened on a day in August when the sun burned hot enough on the desert that with every crunch of the sand under Timothy Johnson's feet, Timothy expected to find himself walking on glass. He was walking home, so he had time. Often he jogged the two miles along the gully, but today he already felt as though he'd melt without raising his core temperature through intemperate activity.

The weather had been all anyone could talk about. There were enough customers who prefered to use cash, or who paid inside with credit card in pursuit of the inadvisable small-town sport of Getting To Know Your Neighbor, that Timothy got talked at by pretty much everyone who bought gas on this side of town. And every one of them, without an exception, had begun with a variant on the theme of "Hot enough for you out there?"

What the fuck was Timothy supposed to say to that? "No, it's not fucking hot enough for me. I'd fucking love to see a real heat wave." One hundred and two degrees over North Taos, anyone have the fucking stupidity to ask "Hot enough for you?" should not be fucking allowed to drive. And that, in a nutshell, was the kind of day Timothy was having.

The walk home renewed his patience with the world, but then, it would, since there was no one along the way to try his patience. He caught sight of a rattler well out of his path; other than that, there was no sign of life in the gully. He crunched along, looking at his feet from time to time, and listened to the silence of the desert.

He caught sight of the coin while it was still well ahead of him. The glint at the far edge of his vision caught his attention and held it. He kept an eye on it as he continued walking, and his curiousity engaged further when he realized it wasn't going away.

He looked at it a long time before he touched it. It was of no U.S. denomination, although it reminded him of the silver pennies that coin aficionados treasure. Part of the nation's history! Timothy himself had never managed the enthusiasm for this or any other form of collecting, unless you consider two walls of paperback novels in his living room collecting--he didn't, not when he read and reread them until their spines cracked--but he'd had acquaintances who did and wouldn't shut up about it. This coin was nothing any of them would recognize. The side facing the sky now was a series of concentric circles; he counted four. It was exceedingly shiny, not tarnished as he'd expect anything silver left alone in wild to become. But he hadn't seen it yesterday. It must have been dropped recently. He'd have to take out an ad in the newspaper or even mention it to people at the gas station in order to find its rightful owner.

He sighed, thinking about the hassles involved, about the reluctant necessity of interacting with neighbors over this, and bent to pick up the coin.

The moment his skin touched silver, the world changed.

It hurt. It was like sticking his tongue in an electrical socket, only ten times as painful and disorienting. He yelped, wordlessly, and then realized the pain continued. This was no momentary static shock. This was holding onto a live wire and not letting go. "Fuck!" he yelled, and shoved the thing in his pocket.

(Why didn't he just drop it? He'd ask himself that repeatedly over the next few days. It didn't make sense. But he hadn't told his arm what to do beyond let the fuck go and it had pushed a hand into his left shorts pocket.)

He stood blinking in the sudden cessation of pain, and realized he stood across the street from his house without any awareness of having walked the remaining half mile from the where he'd found the coin.

But there was no time to contemplate a missing patch from his memory. The man standing beside the car parked outside his door gave him no time at all.

"You will pack your necessities as quickly as you can. Then you will get in the car," said the man.