“I’ve told the story so many times it’s starting to sound untrue,” stated the dark haired woman seated in the stiff plastic chair. She shifted and crossed her long legs. The frayed hem of a tattered denim skirt covered her knees and hung like a curtain toward the tiled floor. Buttons were missing from the white blouse that might have been quite expensive at one time but was now held together with inexpert stitching and safety pins. Her skeletal fingers stopped fidgeting with a small hole in the material and folded in her lap. The white walls stole the glare from the fluorescent bulbs and threw it into her face, but she didn’t see it. The man seated behind the desk across from her asked her to continue.

“I learned to drive when I was 23. I know I was a little older than most people, but growing up in foster homes, I didn’t really have anyone willing to pay for lessons and insurance, much less something to drive. So, as soon as I could, I bought a car and got a friend to teach me to drive. It was a piece of crap Mazda 323 (I don’t even think they make them anymore) with 180,000 miles on it. I knew it probably wouldn’t last long, but I just needed something that could get me to work and home.

“Getting my license was like buying my freedom. I finally felt like a real adult. I mean, I had an apartment and a job, yeah. But, I finally had TRANSPORTATION. That was such a big deal. I could go anywhere I wanted to anytime I wanted to. I had never had that before. I was always limited by the schedules and availability of others.” There was a pause that stretched over what could have been somewhere between 3 minutes and an eternity. The woman faced the gray metal desk but didn’t look at the man.

The man made a note on the canary legal pad before him and watched her expression change from a gentle smile to something less definable. “Then what happened, Emily?”

She sighed and passed a hand through her hair, finding a knot to distract her. She began to detangle it slowly, twisting the strands through her fingers gently.

“Emily, can you go on?” The man pushed his chair a little way from the desk, about to get up, but was stopped by her quiet, unsteady voice.

“After a couple of months, I decided to take a drive out to my brother’s house in Santa Rosa. It was my first long drive since getting my license. I guess it was about an hour from my place to his. It was actually kind of fun to drive past Marine World and see all the people on the roller coasters. The only tough part was Highway 37. I don’t know if you know 37.” Emily didn’t see the man nod his head and make a note. “Well, it’s this pain in the ass two lane highway that goes across San Pablo Bay between Vallejo and Sears Point, where they have that motorcycle raceway. It’s just one tiny lane on each side of a cement divider, bounded by water. The speed limit is 50, but no one goes slower than 75.

“I drove really carefully. I remember feeling my hands go numb at one point from gripping the wheel so hard. My crappy Mazda didn’t like to go straight for very long so I kept drifting off to the right, where the road was covered with ridges that made the whole car vibrate. Finally, I got to the main freeway again and relaxed a little.”

The man jotted down the number 37 and glanced at Emily. “Do you get along with your brother?”

“Yeah, I love him a lot. He’s older by a couple of years and had moved away before I started having problems and was sent to my first foster home, but he always tried to visit.” Emily was toying with her hair again, distractedly.

“Go on.” He said.

“You’re going to think I’m crazy. You probably already do.” Her face turned toward her lap. Her hands fell back to her skirt, the left index finger plucking at the broken nail on her right thumb.

“I don’t like that word, Emily. I don’t believe that there is really such a thing as crazy.” His fingers rose to the side of his face to illustrate the quotation marks around “crazy.” The action was lost on his audience. He quickly put his hands back on the desktop. “I think people just have bad experiences that make them react a certain way.”

Emily’s face turned toward him again. Her mouth was set in a stern line but her voice no longer wavered.

“I left for home around 10 o’clock. It was cold but there was no fog, which was surprising for that area. There weren’t too many cars on the road. I turned my heater all the way up to keep the cold out and blasted the stereo to keep myself awake. The only music I had in the car was an old Duran Duran tape, and I knew every word by heart. I sang along as I drove down the freeway with only the white headlights and the blue dash lights to keep away the chilling darkness.

“Entering the narrow eastbound lane of Highway 37, I slowed to sixty and lowered the music volume. There were no other vehicles on this stretch of my route. The only light was the pool that rode slightly ahead of me, illuminating the spiky bushes and tall grasses bordering the roadway. I stared straight ahead and gripped the wheel. That’s when I saw the first one.

“He was tall and dressed in dark clothes. He just stepped out from behind a bush and stood at the side of the road. I drove past, not even considering stopping for a stranger in the middle of the night. A mile or so further, there was another one. He was dressed in a tee shirt and dark jeans. He waved as I drove past. I didn’t turn to look at him. I kept my eyes focused forward. Then there was another and another. Dozens of people just standing out there, coming out of bushes or the bay itself. Men and women. I think I saw a child. They all watched, seemed to be waiting for something. My car drifted to the right and bounced on the graded pavement. My teeth rattled in my head and I jerked my car back to the left just before a man with a cowboy hat stepped out of the brush just a few feet from my car. I swerved and almost hit the divider. I never turned my head. I kept looking forward. I accelerated and found my car flying along at nearly 90 miles an hour. I stopped on the other side of the big bridge that ends in Vallejo.

“I was surrounded by pavement and streetlights. There were no people, no cars. My heart felt like it was going to burst through the thin walls of my ribcage and my hands were slick with cold sweat. A small sound found its way out of my throat and I hardly recognized it as one I had made. My face was wet from tears I didn’t know I had cried.

“I slowly turned my head to look through my rear view mirror. There was nothing behind me but unbroken darkness. I turned back to the road before me and prepared to finish my drive home. Out of the corner of my right eye, I saw a man standing at my door. I screamed and slammed my foot on the gas, but I had forgotten that the car was in park. I went nowhere. I grabbed at the gearshift. It wouldn’t move. The man was still there, in the corner of my eye. I turned to look at him, hoping to get a description for the police when I finally calmed down enough to call them. But when I faced the passenger window, he was gone. He wasn’t behind the car. I felt like I was going crazy. I looked everywhere but he didn’t return to my vision. Until I looked straight ahead. There, again, through the edge of my eyesight I could see the tall, thin man, shaded in gray and black. He didn’t move. He just stood there, grinning.

“And I remembered him. He visited me before, before I was sent away. He had never allowed himself to be seen straight on. He lived in the corner of my eye. And now I knew that there were so many more than just him. Maybe hundreds or thousands of these corner dwellers.

“I slowly felt for my purse lying in the seat next to me, opened it and grabbed the nail file with the pink handle. And that’s when I did it.

The man gathered his white coat around him, stood with a file and the yellow pad of paper in the crook of his arm, and studied the blood caked wounds in Emily’s otherwise beautiful face. “That’s when you cut out your eyes.”