By Adam Kaz
The crime scene was a two-story home in a wide glade surrounded by white oak, hickory, and other trees native to my home state Illinois but which I had never seen here, in a different state entirely. I surveyed the house while my partner Detective Phil drove our police cruiser down a long dirt driveway and parked it beside the front entrance. It was midday.
“My aunt in Oregon had a house just like this,” I said exiting the car. “She had the same turret and black garage door.”
“Hrm.” Detective Phil ate a cigarette.
We ducked under police tape and entered a living room near-identical to the one in my grandfather’s New York City apartment, which I last visited three years ago. The same green shag carpet, the same brown reclining chair. My grandfather’s many bowling trophies made a miniature bending army on a wall shelf that spanned the room’s length. The only real difference, so far as I could tell, was the headless person on his back in front of the TV, which played gray static so loud it sounded like screams. No blood, though, which was a change, refreshing.
I knelt to examine the headless person. “I think he’s dead,” I said and turned off the TV.
“Hrm. Let’s look for clues upstairs.”
Upstairs we found my childhood bedroom, which was entirely devoid of clues. Instead there was a desk where my toy cars lay organized in a row. Outside a picture window in the front yard my father mowed the lawn. Impulse told me to open it and call for him, but, having turned into a child, I couldn’t release the latch. So I occupied myself looking at my old bookshelf, for how long I’m not sure.
Detective Phil stood in the doorway, unable to enter the room. When he had enough he said, “It’s time to go.”
He held my hand down the stairs. The headless person had gotten up, turned the TV back to static, and was sitting comfortably in the reclining chair. Which was a big relief, him being alive, because this investigation was going nowhere. When we left the house it was morning, bright enough to blind, and I was a man once again. We got into the car.
“We should get Tex Mex.” Detective Phil let go of my hand.
“Sure. But I might be a snob about it. I grew up in Texas. San Antonio.”
“Me too,” he said. “We were brothers.”
“Huh, small world.”
Adam Kaz is a Chicago-based writer, editor, and marketing professional. He is the Editor in Chief of The Ground Is Uneven, a literary journal. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, Fabula Argentea, literally stories, The Milwaukee Avenue Messenger, The Ground Is Uneven and Poetries in English Magazine. His reviews and articles have appeared in Third Coast Review, Chicago Review of Books, and Digital Huddle.
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