Marcie Safe and Sound
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
by Natalie Paris
Later investigation of the security footage would reveal that the car sat unmoving in the lot for almost four weeks after Marcie North died. Going further back in the lot’s records, the police would see that she used the lot daily, leaving in the morning and returning in the evening, long after most of the commuters had gone, so that she could nestle her car among night-shift parking for the nearby hospital, the one that ran a shuttle to the lot every half hour. Although there were plenty of free lots in the city, this one was far enough out from the urban center that security was lax, and no guards walked around at night shining their flashlights into the parked cars to be sure there was no one sleeping inside.
At least, there wasn’t much security before Marcie North died. After, the one other man who shared her routine would find himself rudely awakened by a cop pounding on his window and demanding he leave, yelling that the parking lot is not a place to sleep. Where he would drive off to after that, there would be no record.
Marcie’s car is a Kia: nondescript, small, and grey. After the investigation, it would be towed to the U-Pick-It and picked over for everything but the passenger’s seat and the floor beneath.
The registration on the car is in-state and valid, though linked to an address from which Marcie had been evicted almost nine months prior. She still listed that as her place on every form that asked for it and hoped that no one ever tried to mail her anything. The new tenant in the apartment bored of marking the mail as undeliverable and started leaving it in a pile on the windowsill in the foyer, until the landlord found the pile and threw it out. Marcie never received the coupons for diabetic socks, the summons to jury duty, or the incessant threats about a delinquent medical bill.
When questioned, Marcie’s manager at the grocery store would hardly remember her and certainly wouldn’t know where she lived. He wouldn’t be surprised when she failed to show up for work one day. He would strike her from the employee rolls with a zero-tolerance swiftness and think no more about her. The police would only know where she worked because of her uniform laid out—it is the only neat thing in the car, draped across the driver’s seat to stop it from getting quite so wrinkled, to give it a chance to air. She always found it so difficult to get to the laundromat.
The police would rope off her car to investigate and find in it a driver's license four months expired, a heavily used makeup compact and mirror, clothing dirty and clean crumpled across the backseat, a sleeping bag, potato chips and hamburger wrappers on the floor, and an overdue dog-eared library romance novel that the library would not want returned any longer.
The book is on the dashboard, with a receipt marking her place three-quarters of the way through. She probably could have guessed the ending, and might have gone to sleep dreaming about it, or any of a million other couples, all alike. The nice thing about a romance like that, Marcie thought, was that she could imagine it taking place right next to her. Maybe not in the beat up Chevvy thirty years old, but in the red Subaru, or the blue Jeep that she knew a nurse drove. She heard the nurse’s phone calls to a friend—the nurse always called a friend before she got on her shift—walking past the nose of Marcie’s car, the windows cracked just enough for her to breathe and to hear the nurse say, “Chris is still mad at me for going back to nights. Yeah, dump him? I’ll find somebody else who’s here this time of day.”
For a long while, no one would notice her car in the ocean of cars, stretching out towards the horizon—north, south, east, and west—and that was just the way that Marcie would have wanted it. Her car could be anyone’s. No one would bother her.
She would be scared if she saw the way that dogs would start yapping and snapping at the air while passing by the car in the daytime, straining towards it. One overeager hound on an extendable leash would be faster than his owner and would leap on the window, rattling the car enough that the silvery reflective sun screen on the passenger-side window would flop down.
The coroner’s report would be as thorough as it could be after such a long time. He would inspect every inch and determine there was no foul play, or no signs of it.
It was always terrible to be seen, always-ever-only seen wanting and dirty. If she were there when they found her, Marcie would cover her face and turn away or try to hide. But she was long gone by then, and when she went to sleep it was with the comfort of familiarity and habit that assured her that she would be anonymous in the night, safe enough to curl one arm under her head and rest stretched out in the soft passenger’s seat, to hope the dizziness and fatigue that plagued her for two or three days was just a passing spell and not a flu coming on, to dream of walking through the parking lot in the daylight, the sun searing all the mirrors and chrome, and meeting someone who would want to see her.
Natalie Paris's short fiction has previously appeared in Litro Magazine, and they were the Providence Public Library's 2024 Creative Fellow. They live in Massachusetts and work as a mechanical engineer in the green energy industry.
