The autumn air hit my face, cold and smelling of wet earth and dying leaves.
My pulse thudded hard against my ribs as I stood on the wooden porch, the white paper bag still clutched in my hand.
The gray water of the reservoir lapped against the concrete retaining wall, throwing up a faint smell of damp earth and rotting weeds. I sat in the driver’s seat of the sedan, my fingers clamped so hard on the steering wheel that the plastic grooves dug into my palms.
The engine was cold, the heater having died five minutes after I parked under the bare oak trees. Outside, dry leaves scraped across the gravel lot like paper sliding across a desk.
I tried to pull up the spring of my senior year at Indiana University, trying to piece together the exact sequence of a Tuesday afternoon in April.
The McKinley Fellowship application was due by five o’clock that day. It was a four-thousand-dollar grant that would have allowed me to write my first manuscript without working twenty hours a week at the campus bookstore.
