Hugo & Rose by Bridget Foley Page B

the blade. It was wedged in the ugly shell of its leg. She wrapped both hands around it—
    Something whisker soft brushed the underside of her arms.
    And then suddenly she was in the air, sword in her hand, pulled out like a splinter—and she the tweezers. The hairs of the Spider’s pedipalps jutted through the soft cotton of her blouse, a secure hold about her waist.
    The beast was still shrieking, a river of blue-green blood gushing from the rent in its leg. It shook Rose, whipping her about—
    *   *   *
    â€”giving her a view of Hugo, running toward them. A blinding edge of light in his wake.
    And then the beams hit the area beneath his feet … and he was flying. Forward motion launching him from the glowing sand directly into the Spider’s thorax, driving it backward. Rose was thrown from its grip, the sword flying from her sweat-drenched palm.
    Hugo clung to the beast’s carapace, his hands catching hold of its piebald layer of hair. The creature shrieked as he braced himself on the edges of its joints. Out of reach and climbing.
    Rose hit the sand solid on her back, all the air in her lungs rushing out at once. She gasped, stunned by the impact.
    â€œRose! The sword!”
    Hugo had crested the Spider’s back and was clinging as it whipped around wildly, trying to throw him off.
    Rose rolled to her knees. She felt like she could barely see. Still, she had been holding the sword only a minute ago. Where had it gone?
    The Spider’s shrieking rocketed up an octave as Hugo saddled himself on the bony ridge above its eye.
    A glint under the sand. A few feet away. Rose crawled to it, frantic, her hands sweeping …
    A pair of bright cartoon eyes winked up at her beneath the pink silt.
    Rose felt her brows crease.
    It was the Orange Tastee. The sun-faded fiberglass speaker from the drive-through. She brushed at the sand, pink particles escaping into the battered grille of its mouth. What is this doing here?
    â€œRose! There.”
    She looked up. The Spider was thrashing, its legs unable to reach the pest on its back. Its motion had carried them farther down the shoreline. Hugo was pointing away from Rose. Her eyes followed the line of his hand.
    The sword gleamed bare in a mound of coral sand. Like Excalibur, only waiting to be pulled.
    Rose raced toward it, the mystery of the Orange forgotten. She wrapped her hand around its handle and winged it, throwing it end over end toward Hugo.
    He caught it in the air and drove it two-handed into the beast’s flat black eye. The Spider collapsed to the ground, a pulsing hemorrhage of oily blood spilling down its body.
    Atop its corpse, Hugo laughed and brushed his hair out of his eyes. He smiled down at Rose on the sand.
    *   *   *
    His car had not been at the Orange Tastee when she arrived, an hour and fifteen minutes after kissing the boys good-bye and watching them find their seats on the school bus.
    Maybe it was his day off.
    She searched for his house by instinct, lefts and rights by feel, not remembering the dark path she had followed him on that night. Though the town was small, daylight revealed a sad sameness to the dwellings of its citizens. Each street was identical in its shabbiness. She drove through its tired little neighborhoods, turning onto streets labeled “Oak” and “Sycamore” that showed no growth of either of those noble species. Her heart raced, convinced she would never find the place where the Man Who Was Not Hugo lived.
    It was the coil of garden hose that finally let her know she had found it. Its neatness, a tidy stack, unique in this ugly, fallow place. And then she saw his car in the driveway, two cement strips separated by a patch of dying grass.
    Rose noticed that the Man Who Was Not Hugo’s license plate read 349SXY. She presumed it wasn’t intentional and was instead one of those accidental DMV abbreviations people were sometimes saddled