CROSS

fiction by Rebecca Makkai There was garbage on the lawn, or maybe a construction sign, or (now that she was close enough to notice the flowers and ribbons) detritus from a prom. But it was late August, not spring. And no, it wasn’t prom garbage, but a small cross. Celine had formed a cocoon of the summer’s clothes around her cello case in the back of the little red Saab, and driven no faster than fifty all the way from Vermont past Albany to home. Now that she was finally on these cracked and narrow streets she was crawling so slowly she didn’t need to brake to see the display. A white wooden cross, already weathered and tilting into more of an X than anything perpendicular. A sash across it: “Our Angel.” Red artificial flowers; crumbling brown organic ones. Stuffed animals around the base. A red ribbon at the top, the kind intended for oversized Christmas gifts, already frayed and faded from weeks of rain and sun. Her first reactions were horror and empathy—cut, of course, with that strange exhilaration she’d learned not to feel guilty about when passing car wrecks on the highway. That fall, when she became fairly sure she was a terrible person, she at least had this to hang onto: she did feel sorry. For those first few moments, she knew she was sorry.