The rain in Schuylkill County didn’t wash things clean; it just made the coal dust stick to the siding of the houses a little harder. It was a Tuesday night in late October, the kind of night that felt like winter was already waiting around the corner with a baseball bat.
Inside the 911 dispatch center, the air was dry, recycled, and smelled faintly of stale coffee and ozone. Martha rubbed her temples. The fluorescent lights hummed with a frequency that seemed to drill directly into the base of her skull. At fifty-eight, Martha had been taking calls for thirty years. She had the “dispatcher’s ear”—the ability to hear the panic behind a silence, the truth behind a lie, and the ragged breath of someone who knew they were about to die.
She looked at the digital clock on her console: 11:42 PM. Three days. She had three days left until retirement. The cake was already ordered—sheet cake from the grocery store, vanilla with buttercream frosting. The younger dispatchers, kids in their twenties who still had hope in their eyes, had bought her a card. She knew they were betting on how long it would take before she snapped at someone one last time.
