Sorrow's crown

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Panecraft had its own history, entwined with the secrets and sorrows of those towns surrounding it. Back in the early 'seventies, the mental hospital had housed eleven thousand patients, such a high volume due to the returned vets and end of the hippie movement, when the serious dealers got into the game and brought a trembling house of cards down even faster, leaving runaways without a Haight-Ashbury to head for anymore. Now there were fewer than two thousand faces up there behind the leveled rows of cube windows rimed with ice.

On certain nights, you could head down the back roads surrounding Panecraft and watch how the twining shadows of the complex cut into the skyline and carved down alongside the moon. High school kids performed primitive ceremonies of passage, knocking down barbed-wire fences in pick-up trucks. My ex-wife Michelle and I had made love back there a few times, right before I started noticing hickeys on her throat that I hadn't given her. Echoes rang from the highway, and she liked the noise of the big trucks and the biker packs that roamed up and down the county line in the darkness.

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