The Tangled Woods (Dark Corners Collection, #5)

by Emily Raboteau

Once she’d been radical; her Angela Davis/street/door knocker–earring vibe had appealed to his light-skinned insecurities so that having her at his side had authenticated his questionable blackness. That initial attraction felt flimsy to him now that they were middle-aged, altered by parenthood and property taxes. He felt hoodwinked, entrapped in a predictably bourgeois life, heading on a holiday that lacked imagination, wonder, and risk.

Nobody had a sense of direction anymore, including himself. They were too dependent on screens.

“We’re in Trump country now,” she remarked. “If this was our grandparents’ time, we’d be traveling with the Green Book so we’d know where it was safe for black folks to stop along the way.”

The wind grabbed the reproach from her mouth and flung it out the window like a used cup.

The officer seemed in no way threatened by him. Was he that lacking in virility?

The place put Reginald in mind of a homier, cheaper version of the Overlook Hotel.

You have found the shadow moss, a deep baritone like Morgan Freeman’s repeated at odd intervals, sounding like the canned voice of God.

The halls were filled with men on the verge of hitting their children. The mothers were nags. The children were feral. They provoked their siblings. They scrambled away from their parents. They demanded sugar. They taunted, littered, and talked back. The bickering clans overlapped, cursed souls clawing like crabs in a barrel.

Dumb slaves to their smartphones, they traded living in the moment for taking pictures of the moment.

The man in black stood level with Reginald, almost close enough to kiss. Slow as a mime, he raised his gloved hand and hooked his trigger finger under the ski mask, making as if to remove it. Reginald recognized him then. Who else could it be? The gunman lifted the mask, revealing Reginald’s own face.