“What She Is” by Emilie Beck (Fiction ’17)

A story by Emilie Beck (Fiction ’17) appears in the Colorado Review.  Here’s an excerpt:

WHAT SHE IS

Long white-blonde hair in front of the white clapboard chapel. Her body almost invisible in the afternoon sun except for tan  legs, bare feet, the straps of sandals held in one hand like an invitation. A small valise at her feet, weathered, blue, hardly big enough for a change of clothing. He noticed her before he saw her thumb, out of place the way she was in front of Phillips Chapel. One thing for a white man who had business there, but a white girl with white hair standing on that corner in front of the church, white in the daylight, he wasn’t wrong to pause, to question, just for a moment, before deciding the answer wasn’t important. Her thumb pointing the opposite direction of the way he was driving. His foot on the brake before his mind made the decision. No harm in it.

He regarded her from across the road. The green patterned fabric of her dress met itself in seams, draping her hips. Her lips were red, but not from lipstick. He’d been on the road for two weeks. It was July already, and he had a few hours’ drive ahead of him. Years later Jim Flessroy would reassure himself that anyone would have stopped for the girl, that she seemed an innocent, that she seemed in need of rescue.

Read the rest of the story at the Colorado Review website:  WHAT SHE IS