Flannery by Lisa Moore

crisscrossing my arms over my head. Hey, hey, I’m yelling.
    His arm is raised with the paint can. He’s spraying in the Snow Queen’s left nostril.
    Another car goes past, and another. His shadow stretches up high and sinks back down, the stallions rear, the whites of their eyes show, the dragon’s claws sparkle. The mural is like a living thing, teeming with action and life.
    Now a car slows on my side of the road and pulls to a stop beside me. Its engine is idling. Two burly men sit inside, one with a shiny film of short gray hair that glows in the streetlight. The other man has a black moustache and is so tall his head touches the roof of the car.
    I freeze, mid-jumping jack.
    The men are staring at me. What do they see? A sixteen-year-old freckled, buxom, near frostbitten, gangly kid doing jumping jacks in a desolate part of downtown, and she’s jumping up and down to gain the attention of . . . ? Who?
    Their heads both turn in unison to look across the street and they spot the graffiti.
    Tyrone is making the Snow Queen’s nostril flare just like Miranda’s, actually, when she’s cleaning the fridge and she finds a package of liquefied asparagus. It’s liquefied because who has time to clean out the fridge when you’re busy carving life-sized polar bears out of ice to protest global warming?
    Or like when the pipes freeze and she has to go down in the basement with a blowtorch.
    In those moments, Miranda’s nostrils do their thing. They go flat and wide and quiver with flibbertigibbet determination.
    Speaking of mothers, Tyrone’s spray-painted Snow Queen looks a lot like his own mother, in fact, except that so far the Snow Queen has only one perfectly flared nostril instead of two.
    I hear Tyrone shake the paint can again. The wind has died down a little and I really can hear it from all the way across the four lanes, a traffic island and a few skinny trees. I can even hear the hiss, the spraying of silver.
    The one nostril makes the Snow Queen look like she has been waiting for that other nostril all her life. A lot is on the line for her. Her eyes are nearly bulging out from her dramatic cheekbones.
    Tyrone is wearing a black hoodie and black jeans and a mask — like a gas mask, so he doesn’t breathe in the fumes, and goggles, so the paint doesn’t get in his eyes. He looks like E.T. or a cricket.
    The silver-haired man on the passenger side of the car reaches down around his feet for something and slaps a siren on the dash and it whoop-whoops and throws out an arm of red light and blue light and they screech away to pull a U-ey farther up the road.
    I yell, Run, it’s the cops. Run!
    Tyrone turns and sees me and sees the cops and he bends and sweeps up his knapsack full of paint cans and takes off around the corner of the construction site.
    They saw him because of me.
    Because I was jumping around and waving like an idiot. It’s my fault.
    Behind the construction site there’s the Waterford River and Symes Bridge. Tyrone’s already sprinting over the bridge by the time the cops get their car pulled around the traffic island that divides the road. Now Tyrone is racing up through the forest on the Southside Hills, and I keep losing sight of him, but then I can see the tree branches swaying all their orange leaves as he climbs along the overgrown path that leads through the woods.
    The cop car has skidded to a stop on the other side of the road and they’ve jumped out of the car and they’re on foot, running up the same path behind the construction site. They’re closing the distance between themselves and Tyrone pretty fast.
    Then there’s an engine revving up. I see the fan of a single headlight blinking as it passes through the tree trunks.
    He’s got his motorcycle! After a moment the cops come running back down around the building site and they get in the car and pull another U-ey, the siren going, and