The Disposition

Every animal that has ever passed through the wildlife facility at Green Point has received one word in a green ledger: Released. Transferred. Placed. Escaped. Died. Euthanized. Four thousand one hundred and six ruled lines across twenty-two years, one word each, and one line still blank. Eleven of those lines belong to children.

At eight o'clock tomorrow morning the Inspector will drive up the gravel with a form a statute obliges her to serve, and she will be polite, and she will take the records. Tonight, in the office, under the owl, a woman tells a single listener the whole of it: how a permit for injured animals became the place a county brought the children it could not put anywhere else, and what happened to each of the eleven.

Nobody in this story is lying. Nobody in it does anything wrong. The Neighbor looked out a window. A man answered a question. The Inspector will serve her form at the correct speed. And still a child died, and still one line in a government record is false, and the woman holding the pen has ten hours to explain how both of those things are true.

The Disposition is a novel about the words we file people under. Told in one voice across one night, ten in the evening to eight the next morning. The eleventh Fractional Fiction novel; it stands alone.