King

King works in a little garage on the outside of town. Just where nothing turns into even more of nothing. So I walked there, but as I got closer I knew that I didn’t want to talk to King. I just wanted to know that he was in the world on a day like this, just to make things perfect for me.

Hoping to erase her unhappy old life, Hazel jumped inher beat-up old car and sped away, finding herself in the Evening and Morning Star Trailer Park. When the dust settled, so did she.

At the centre of this new life is King, a motorcycle-riding, hard-drinking, guitar-playing kind of guy. Hazel loves him to death. He spends his days fixing cars, Hazel spends hers working at the town’s thrift shop. Evenings they spend with Spiney and Sissy, playing cards or drinking at Old Joe’s. It’s a clear kind of life, pure as water in the old quarry. Isn’t it?

As Hazel settles into the trailer park, she begins to settle into her new life too. She covers the trailer’s yard with wildflowers. She makes new friends, like Egbert (Egg), who helps her create elaborate tableaux in the thrift-shop window. She might even learn how to cook.

But when King’s repeated brushes with the lawbring him a spell in jail, things begin, slowly and surely,to unravel. Maybe Hazel hasn’t outrun herself after all, maybe year-round Christmas lights and thrift-shop glamour can’t outshine honesty, and maybe Hazel can’t make her world perfect by willing it so.

Fun and sad and true, King feels like a slumber party: just you and your best friend in sleeping bags whispering through the long night. And when you wake up in the morning, you’ll blink, shake your head, and for a second, just a second, the world will seem like a more magical place.