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Seeds and Black Suits

There’s a man at the door. He’s dressed in too many layers of black for the warm summer evening, and his sunglasses are thick, almost plated. Clark can’t see any eyes behind them. Just the black spots looking down. 


There is a car, idling on the road, a sparkling black. It’s undeniably new with the way everything shines, all that unmolested leather looking so clean that Clark can practically smell it. It seems, Clark thinks to himself, like it’s freshly rolled off from the factory floor, and he imagines that’s exactly how that model would’ve looked thirty years ago, when they were indeed so freshly born. Clark does not know how he knows the inside is clean bordering on clean-from-lack-of-use because the windows are tinted to be almost as black as the suit the man is wearing. Neither can he see whoever else is sitting in the car, but the boy can sense them, looking back. 


“I know you”, says the man at the door. 


Clark says nothing. He looks up into his own reflection in the glasses, looking lonely and unfamiliar against a sea of glossy dark. 


The man has an uncomfortably long neck, he seems very close even as far away as he is and his face peers down with a tilt that is eerie. Clark pictures an odd, dark-eyed dog in that tilt, an animalistic unpredictability buried beneath a mundane facade. He can’t see any eyes behind the man’s glasses, but he can see that well enough. 


“I know you”, says the man again, “from the Lot.” 


Clark knows the Lot. The small patch of grass and puddles and stubborn trees growing by the old Munitions Store. The Lot that somehow takes Clark nearly two hours to cross despite its seeming small size. Clark goes there almost every day now. Clark dreams about the Lot. 


Something like insight comes, quietly. The man is pressing something into the boy’s hand, something metallic and unnaturally cold, a sliver of pure winter that stings against his skin. 


“Take it the Lot”, says the man at the door. “Put it in the ground.” 


Clark says nothing. Words are unnecessary, he feels down inside, the cold casting them away. 


The man walks backward one step, standing tall and unmoved, as if nothing at all had transpired. Clark and the man are silent, and time passes over them. This, the silence, is the last part of the exchange. When it ends, the man turns away completely, and takes nine measured strides back into the car. Even when the door opens, Clark sees nothing inside but the dark and feels nothing more than the sense of someone inside, looking out back at him. 


In silence, the car glides away.

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