Size Seven

5:58 p.m. Two hours to go

Barb Novak sets two plastic jack-o'-lanterns with battery lights on the front desk, because open flame isn't allowed in a medical facility. Next to them she props the sign that Taylor, the receptionist, printed out that afternoon: free Halloween candy X-rays, six to eight, bring your bags. Out in the parking lot the streetlights have already come on. Along Main Street, past the glass doors of Valley Express Care, the first kids in costume go by: princesses, skeletons, a toddler in a green dinosaur suit whose father has him on a safety harness.

Barb is a radiology tech. She has been X-raying people for twenty-nine years and candy for nine, ever since the parent company decided it was good publicity. Every year Barb tells herself this is the last time, and every year she signs up for the shift herself. Her grown son in Pittsburgh calls it Mom's little county fair. She likes it when the kids look at the monitor, see right through their candy, gray and transparent, and ask if the chocolate shows. Every time, Barb tells them the X-ray doesn't care about chocolate, it only cares about metal. That's true. Poison and pills don't show up on an X-ray, and those are what the parents really fear, and still Barb stands at this table for two hours every year.

Priya Raman, the nurse practitioner in charge tonight, walks past with her coffee. She says that last year, in the whole evening, they found one paper clip and one baby tooth in a caramel apple. The tooth belonged to the same little girl who brought the bag in: it came out while she was biting the apple. Priya is in a hurry, her two kids are waiting at home in bee costumes, and at eight she is taking them trick-or-treating. Barb says she knows the story; she took that X-ray herself.

6:20 p.m. An hour and forty minutes left

The line runs from the door to the water cooler. Barb takes a bag from a girl in a bee costume, six years old, with antennae on a headband, and lays it flat on the table. She smooths it with her palm so the candy isn't two layers deep, because two layers make mush on the image, and steps behind the lead screen. A click, and a second later the monitor shows a gray scatter: candy bars, lollipops, gummy bears in their wrappers, white rectangles of foil. In a candy bar near the left edge lies a needle.

Thin, bright, about an inch and a half long, with an eye at one end, the needle shows so clearly that at first Barb thinks it's a scratch on the detector. She tells the girl and her mother she'll take a closer look, comes out to the table, picks up the candy bar with gloved hands and slits it lengthwise with a scalpel. Nougat, peanuts, chocolate, nothing else. Barb cuts the bar crosswise into five pieces and rolls each one flat with her finger. There is no needle.

She X-rays the bag a second time, without the candy bar. Now the needle lies in a different piece, a foil-wrapped chocolate egg near the right edge, eye up.

Barb stands staring at the monitor until the girl's mother says her name off the badge. Barb tells her the machine is acting up tonight, it's an artifact, it happens when the detector overheats, and hands the bag back. Then she asks where they went for candy, just so she knows, and her voice comes out level, her work voice. The girl says Ridge Street, because they give out full-size bars there.

6:44 p.m. An hour and sixteen minutes left

There is only one Ridge Street in Mercer Bridge. It climbs the hill from St. Hedwig's and dead-ends at the old garages. Barb grew up on that street, at number eleven, which her mother sold in 1990. Barb hasn't been on Ridge Street in twenty years, and she drives around it on Miller Avenue, though that way is longer. She stopped asking herself why a long time ago.

Her mother's pincushion is still at Barb's house, in the drawer of the sewing table, which she hasn't pulled open since the funeral. The pincushion is a tomato made of red wool felt faded to pink, with a green felt stem, and in it are needles her mother stuck in neatly, by size.

Barb X-rays the next bag, and the next, and eight more, and they're all clean. Then a boy in a hockey goalie mask sets a pillowcase on the table, half full of candy. On the image the needle lies in a lollipop, inside the hard candy ball, where it cannot possibly be. Barb asks where he went, and the boy says he started on Ridge Street, because the houses are close together there and you can do them fast.

This time Barb doesn't cut the lollipop open. She turns the tray ninety degrees, so the pillowcase lies crosswise, and shoots it again. Now the needle is in a piece of taffy. Barb turns the tray again, and the needle moves into a gummy. Then she dumps the pillowcase out on the table and asks the boy which house gave him what. He doesn't remember everything, but he remembers the lollipop, the taffy and the gummy. They all came from one house, at the very top of the street, where the pumpkin on the porch is wrapped in a string of lights. Barb knows that house.

7:05 p.m. Fifty-five minutes left

By seven she has six bags out of forty with a needle, and in every one the needle is in something handed out at the top of Ridge Street. Taylor, the nineteen-year-old receptionist with a ring in her eyebrow, runs the clinic's posts in the Mercer Bridge parents' group, and every half hour she posts that everything's clean, come on down, we're waiting. She's bored, and she reads the comments out loud to Barb, because she thinks Barb will find them funny.

Somebody writes that they heard the clinic on Main found something. Somebody asks what street. Somebody writes that their mom told them how back in '82 an old lady on Ridge Street put needles in popcorn, and it was in the paper. Somebody asks which house she lived in, and somebody gives the number: eighteen. Taylor says that's the Kowalczyks' house, she thinks, they've got a baby, and she went to school with their older girl.

"Don't post anything about the clinic except the hours," Barb says.

"I'm not," Taylor says, offended.

Barb remembers 1982 better than last week. That September somebody in Chicago had poisoned pills on drugstore shelves, and all fall the TV said children were going to die on Halloween. Her eighth-grade teacher showed the class a photo of a razor blade in an apple. Barb was thirteen. At the very top of Ridge Street, at number eighteen, lived Mrs. Dombrowski, a widow living alone, who wore a long wool coat in any weather and a scarf over her head. Every year she made popcorn balls for the kids herself and wrapped them in wax paper. Barb's mother didn't like Mrs. Dombrowski, because the widow never went to St. Hedwig's.

On Halloween of 1982 Barb pulled one needle out of her mother's tomato, pushed it into the popcorn ball Mrs. Dombrowski had given her and screamed at the dinner table that she'd been stuck. After that came a policeman in the kitchen, a photo in the paper of Barb holding up the popcorn ball, and the teacher who stood her in front of the class. Mrs. Dombrowski's windows got egged, and nobody ever went up to her gate again. She died in 1993, and they didn't find her right away.

7:23 p.m. Thirty-seven minutes left

Priya looks behind the screen and asks what's wrong with the machine and why the line is out the door. Barb shows her the image. Priya looks for a long time and says it looks like a detector defect, dead pixels in a line. It happens, they'll put in a service call tomorrow, and the bags have to go back anyway, since there's nothing in the candy itself; Barb cut it open.

"Look at the eye," Barb says.

Priya asks what eye: all she sees on the image is a bright line. Barb sees the eye on every image, a small dark oval at one end, like the needles her mother threaded by the window, squinting, the end of the thread between her teeth.

The line moves. Barb shoots, hands back, shoots. The bee girl comes back a second time, with the same bag and with her mother, who sets the bag on the table and says only, "Do it again, please." Barb does. The needle lies near the right edge, in a gummy worm, and through its eye runs a thread that wasn't there the first time.

7:40 p.m. Twenty minutes left

A smell of caramel drifts down the hall: one of the parents brought the nurses caramel apples from the fair. Barb shoots the bag of a boy in an astronaut suit, clean, then the bag of twin boys in matching capes, also clean. Her shoulders ache the way they ached her first year on the job, before she learned how to stand at the table. In the line stands a woman with no child and no bag, in a long wool coat too warm for the weather, gray hair tucked under a scarf. Barb figures she's somebody's grandmother waiting for the grandkids.

Barb brings up the twins' image, zooms in and searches. Clean. Then she notices the woman in the coat is standing behind her shoulder, looking at the monitor, though nobody is allowed behind the screen. The coat smells of mothballs and popcorn. Barb opens her mouth to ask her to step out, but the woman is already leaving. Barb turns back to the monitor to close the image, and between two white rectangles of foil, where nothing lies on the tray, she sees a thin dark channel.

It is straight, about an inch and a half long, with an oval widening at one end, where a needle has its eye. On an X-ray, everything lying on the tray shows lighter than empty space. This channel is darker than empty space. That can't happen, Barb has known it since her first year. A foil edge can throw a dark halo, a thin rim that traces the foil's outline. This channel is straight, with an eye, and lies between the two rectangles without touching either one. Barb goes out to the table anyway. She moves the bag and runs a gloved finger along the spot where the channel showed. The plastic is smooth and whole. Barb shoots the empty tray, and the image is flat gray. She puts the bag back the way it lay, shoots again, and the channel is there between the foil, in the same place.

That's the channel a needle leaves in a tightly stuffed pincushion when you pull it out. That night in 1982 Barb took a size seven needle out of the tomato. Her mother kept those right by the stem, because she sewed with them most, and Barb knows their length better than the length of her own fingers. The twins are waiting at the table, and when she asks, one of them says they only went down Pulaski Street, because their mom wouldn't let them go on Ridge tonight. Pulaski Street is where Barb lives.

Barb walks past the line to the glass doors and looks up and down Main Street. Skeletons, princesses, a father with a stroller wrapped in lights, two teenagers in matching masks. No woman in a long coat. Taylor says she doesn't remember anybody like that, there were two hundred people through here tonight, and asks if maybe it was somebody's grandma.

7:52 p.m. Eight minutes left

Five bags are left. Barb shoots the first three, and all three have needles, all threaded, all in candy from number eighteen on Ridge Street, where the Kowalczyks live now with their baby. Taylor reads aloud that somebody in the group wants to go over there after eight and see what kind of people they are. Somebody else answers that Weis sells eggs till eleven.

Barb comes out from behind the screen. Priya is packing her bag, Taylor is shutting down the computer at the desk. Barb speaks loudly, loud enough for the last mother in line to hear, the one with a little boy in a frog costume:

"In '82 I put the needle in that popcorn ball. I was thirteen. Mrs. Dombrowski had nothing to do with it, there was never any old lady with needles on Ridge Street, and the Kowalczyks have nothing to do with it either. Taylor, post that in the group. Now, from the clinic, with my last name on it."

Taylor looks at Priya, and Priya nods without a word. Taylor turns the computer back on and types, slowly, asking how to spell Dombrowski, and Barb spells it for her letter by letter. The mother in line takes her little frog by the hand and walks out without waiting for her X-ray. All at once Barb's shoulders, neck and back let go, so much that she has to lean on the desk. Only one finger keeps aching, the index finger, from the pad to the middle knuckle.

The last two bags are clean. Barb shoots each one three times, turning the tray, and the images show only a gray scatter, foil and wrappers, not a single bright line. She leaves the last image up a long time, zooming in candy by candy, and there's nothing there.

8:00 p.m. Closing time

Priya turns off the light in the X-ray room and puts an arm around Barb's shoulders. "See? The machine cooled down," she says. "We'll sort out the rest on Monday. You did good. I won't say a word to management." She runs off to her bees. Taylor says there are already forty comments under the post and asks if she should read them. Barb says no and sends her home. She'll lock up the room herself.

8:15 p.m.

Barb turns the light in the X-ray room back on. Her phone buzzes in her purse, and she takes it out. Taylor has texted her directly: "Barb, don't read the group. People are saying you made it all up back then and made it up tonight too. I deleted the post but it already got screenshotted. I'm so sorry." Barb lays the phone face down on the desk.

Every night before she shuts the machine off, she shoots the empty tray, and tonight the image is flat gray too. Her finger still aches. You never X-ray yourself, they teach you that the first day, and in twenty-nine years Barb never has. She peels off one glove, lays that hand flat on the tray and spreads her fingers. She stays at the table, out in the open, and presses the button on the cord with her other hand.

On the monitor is her hand, gray, the bones lighter than the soft tissue around them. In the index finger, along the bone, lies a needle, bright and straight, its eye right at the fingertip. About an inch and a half. A size seven. Barb presses the pad of the finger with her thumb. The skin is warm and whole, and she can't feel a thing under it.

She bends the finger, lays her hand back on the tray and shoots again. On the new image the finger is bent. The needle in it lies straight, right across the bend.