Her mother’s voice echoed tinny from the phone, which she’d hurled across the deck, now splayed ten feet away. Hazel stared at a spiderweb on the leg of the porch chair, grasping; the web was silky and translucent, a single fly swaddled motionless in the center. Time warped. It stretched, faded. Morning churned into afternoon, stammering spurts of surreal minutes that constricted in Hazel’s throat like balloons. The body, Luis was saying on the phone with her father. An arrest. The hours passed, shell-shocked, incoherent. The only person Hazel wished to call with the news was Jenny herself.
