Bad Glass by Richard E. Gropp

address— [email protected] —waslisted in the “to” field, and the subject line had been left blank. The sender was listed as [email protected] .
    There was no text in the body of the message, just a single picture. File name: sherman_today.jpg .
    The picture showed a woman standing on the corner of an abandoned city block. She was a black woman, at least forty years old, maybe forty-five. She had straight shoulder-length hair. Her body was turned away from the camera, but she was glancing back over her shoulder. It was a candid shot, and she looked distracted, worried. The street was shrouded in mist, disappearing into white oblivion a half block up. It looked like early morning, just before sunrise.
    There was a street sign on the corner. The pole was bent at a severe angle—at least thirty degrees off vertical—but it was still readable, its green reflective surface practically glowing in the early-morning haze. It was the brightest color in the whole frame: SHERMAN ST .
    Taylor reached out and touched the computer screen, gently tracing the length of the woman’s body. She glanced up. Her eyes were wide, darting from my face over to Amanda and Mac.
    “It’s Charlie’s mother,” she said. “She’s here. Downtown.”

Photograph. October 18, 01:50 P.M. Between the walls:
    It is a claustrophobic space. Very little light.
    The photograph is framed in the vertical—walls to the left and right, the camera pointed straight down. The space between the walls is no more than a foot wide. There is a source of light down below—a dim line of electric blue, extending from the top of the frame all the way to the bottom. A ruler-straight line of color, down where the walls end.
    A trickle of daylight illuminates the foreground; we can see bare wood studs and line after line of joists proceeding into the darkness. There are holes punched through these two imposing stretches of wall—splintered dents, like violent, gaping wounds. But they are distant, and they let in only tiny fingers of gray.
    The wood in the foreground is damp, glistening as if coated with a sheen of ice.
    There is a bulge in the left-hand wall, about five feet away—a dark half-moon with a blurry fuzz around its edge. It is off center, perched in the lower part of the frame. Slightly out of focus. After a moment of study, you can just make out pale flesh in the dim light, then a wide-open, terrified eye.
    Down there, lodged in the wall, is half a face. Half a
human
face—sexless—ringed in a nimbus of short, dark hair. It is angled inward, toward the wall, and its open mouth is bisected just to the left of the canine tooth, sheared away where flesh meets wood.
    The wide-open eye is not blurred. Not clouded. Not insensate.
    The eye is clear. And damp. And terrified.

We found the street sign on the corner of Second Avenue and Sherman Street. It was twisted like a bendy straw, just as we’d seen in Charlie’s photo.
    The corner was deserted. No Charlie. No mother.
    “It wasn’t like that before,” Taylor said, nodding toward the sign. “I walk this street three times a week, and I don’t remember seeing it bent like that. It must have happened in the last couple of days.”
    Amanda and Mac both nodded. Mac gave a single strong nod, while Amanda’s head just kept bouncing up and down, like a weight on a spring.
    I had my backpack slung over my shoulder—I’d grabbed it as we stormed out of the house—and on a whim, I took out my camera and tried to re-create the photo of Charlie’s mother. I found the correct angle about twenty feet up Second Avenue, then turned back toward the sign and raised the viewfinder to my eye. This is where the photographer had stood. I tried to remember the particulars of the shot. The light was completely different now, with sunshine and shadows instead of early-morning mist.
    My viewfinder showed Amanda, Mac, and Taylor clustered around the sign, surveying the surrounding buildings. I don’tknow if it was a