Excerpt

MAUD

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world

RICHARD II

The sky was still dark when Maud closed the motel door behind her. Shivering, she crossed the street to the twenty-four-hour restaurant and bought a cup of coffee from a yawning waitress. She'd left the freeway late the day before, turning east onto a two-lane highway. Now it unfurled ahead of her headlights, which she kept on high beam except for the rare times a truck or car approached. She thought how like eyes the bright lights coming at her were, and how easy it would be to swerve into their oncoming glare.

An hour after dawn, a small town rose like a mirage out of the Arizona desert. Maud passed the flickering sign of a burger stand, a gas station, a battered motel before pulling in at Maria's Trading Post, whose attractions—GAS! MUTTON! NAILS! FLOUR!—were advertised on a hand-lettered sandwich board at the edge of the road.

The gas tanks were round-topped, old-fashioned. There seemed to be no expectation that she pay before pumping the gas. The latch on the trigger was broken. As Maud leaned against her car, holding the nozzle in the fill hole, she had another wince of memory. Actually, it was more than a wince, the rearranging of her shoulders she'd had to do when images of the Cheesios audition, of Miles, of Nikos' acting class leered towards her as she drove. A fragment of one of the days she'd worked on Tucker's Larks pushed at her. When she'd filmed her short though vital scene with Tucker, the actor hadn't actually been present. He was in Chicago playing