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Unknown Number: Hello, Ms. Raith. Thank you for inquiring about the position. Are you available for an in-person interview tomorrow at 2pm?

That was . . . suspiciously quick.

Sonny Mac Raith: Mac Raith. Yes, I can be there. What’s the address?

Unknown Number: 1533 Church Street. The interview is a formality. You are more than qualified for the position.

A little itch started in the back of my brain. I ignored it when I flipped to the job listing.

No experience necessary. $29 an hour. Must have driver’s license, health panel, and library card. Elder care.

Didn’t it say nineteen? It didn’t change anything, but this job could change a lot for me and Cricket.

Sonny Mac Raith: Sounds great. Who should I ask for?

I waited for two hours, and there was no response. When I woke up the next day and checked, still no response. That little itch in the back of my head turned into a rabbit kicking at my skull. I kept ignoring it as I showered and got dressed in my favorite interview outfit.

“Well, Cricket, you know the drill. I’m leaving the top off. Mommy’s either going to get murdered by some weirdo, or I’ll be back in a few hours. Either way, if you’re here, great. If not, you’re an ungrateful bitch, and I hope you get scale mites.” We stared at each other while I finished pulling my dark-russet hair up into a ponytail.

Cricket never talked back. She was a snake, after all, but talking to her filled that dreadful looming silence of the apartment and made the walls feel less like they were inching closer and closer. Every time I left the house, it felt normal to tell someone I was leaving and when I’d be home. It was a little slice of that American dream we were all shilled, to have someone waiting for me to come home, even if that someone was a ball python in a tank that took up more room in my apartment than I did.

I had started the routine of leaving her enclosure open when I was . . . delayed the first time. The woman from the ride share app seemed normal enough until she started going into the industrial area instead of into the suburbs, like I had asked her to.

The only thing I could think of was, Who’s going to feed Cricket? The idea of my poor slithery baby curled up under her heat lamp, staring at the top of the enclosure, waiting for a rat to come wriggling down and no one there to feed her, not even a way for her to get out and survive, with her pudgy, tubey body withering away in the tank made me figure out how to get home.

Even the best-made cars have a weak point at the latch of the door. If you kick it just right while pulling up on the handle, even if it’s locked, it’ll pop free.

No one tells you in action movies, where the stars jump from moving vehicles, that the pavement is a lot harder than you’d think. And there’s no time to tuck and roll. Or at least, if there is, I wasn’t quick enough. I’d broken my nose and fractured the bone around my eye that day. The medical bills alone would have killed me, but that was Shona Richards’s problem.

Who’s Shona Richards? No clue. That’s between her and Detroit Community Health—none of my business.

The air in the apartment felt stale, heavy, and oppressive, like the thing that lived in the silence was holding its breath, waiting for something. Waiting for some sort of cue. I didn’t want to find out what the thing was waiting for. I had places to be—hell, I could be planning nothing more than to sit and watch TV for the evening, and I’d still find somewhere other than here to be. I didn’t want to find out what it was waiting for nor what it would do when it finally got the signal.

I shivered under its imagined glare and set Cricket’s top to the side before collecting what I would need for the interview, then crept out of the apartment.

The bus ride to Church Street was longer than I wanted, mentally checking off the speed and time it should take so I knew what my commute would be like. Getting a job had never been the hard part, but keeping it was a totally different skill. I could charm the pants off anyone I needed to when given half the chance—it was the keeping it that was the hard part. That took an entirely different set of muscles I was not built with. I was built for losing jobs, making bad decisions, and figuring it out when I got there.

The address was three blocks from the bus stop, nothing too bad. The problem wasn’t the long bus ride nor the walk. The problem was, the GPS on my phone was saying the address was for another one of Detroit’s empty lots. The two-story Craftsman-style home in front of me sat at odds with the cracked blacktop and boarded-up brick buildings that surrounded it, like a big cane toad amid the shelves of a library.

A shiver scratched and clawed its way up my blouse-covered spine, and the hairs on the back of my neck began to, one by one, prick up. Something was off here. Every instinct in my finely tuned system was saying to beat feet. But I kept thinking about what twenty-nine whole dollars an hour could do for Crick and me. She could get a bigger tank and better meals. I could get out of the dump of an apartment not big enough to house a toothbrush let alone a twenty-seven-year-old woman and her five-foot python. I could even start a little savings account if I survived long enough.

A woman about my age with eyes too large for her face and a medical mask over her nose and mouth stepped out of the That-Should-Not-Be-There house. A hidden smile crinkled at the edges of her too-pale sky-blue eyes as I climbed the three steps to the porch like a moth drawn in by the flame of her presence.

“You must be Sóna.”

A slight accent curled loving fingers around her vowels, one I couldn’t quite place.

“Sonny. Everyone calls me Sonny.” I smiled back to her and tapped my cheek, indicating her medical mask. “Sorry, I didn’t bring one.”

“Oh, that’s okay, Sóna—Sonny. It’s for your comfort, really.” Her eyes crinkled again as she shook my hand. “Now, if you don’t mind, Mr. Ben is waiting for you in the parlor.” She gestured to the closed French double doors inside the foyer.

Sunlight danced over the polished hardwood floors. The inside of the That-Should-Not-Be-There house was the exact opposite of my too-small studio. The air inside was cool, refreshing even, but most of all, it felt clean and open. I stepped over the threshold and into a puddle of golden sun falling in over the pristine white bars of a paneled window across the space from the front door. This house was like every fever dream I’d ever had while huddled in a corner of some shitty foster home with a threadbare sheet for a blanket. It reminded me of the houses I had seen on one of the PBS shows, maybe Anne of Green Gables.

A soft, wistful smile whispered over my balm-tinted lips as I gently knocked on the curtain-covered glass doors. I didn’t wait for the command to enter, letting myself in as the older gentleman rose and tilted his head.

“You must be Sóna Mac Raith.”

He spoke with a similar accent to the woman who had let me in, but his was thicker and just as unplaceable.