Free Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig Page A

It's already on the books. It's already been written. We feel like we have control over it, but we don't. Free will is bunk, bupkiss, bull-puckey. You think that you go buy a coffee, you kiss your girlfriend, you drive a school bus full of nuns into a fireworks factory, that's your choice. You did that . You made that decision and acted upon it, right? Bzzt. Wrongo. All of our lives are just a series of events carefully orchestrated to culminate in whatever death fate has planned for us. Every moment. Every act. Every loving whisper and hateful gesture – all just another tiny cog in the clockwork ready to ring the alarm for our ultimate hour."
      Paul says nothing. He just stares, wide-eyed. He tries to say something, then didn't.
      "What?" she asks.
      "That's… dark."
      "No kidding."
      He shifts uncomfortably. "So you've tried to change things."
      "Yup. For the first couple years, I tried a lot. Let's just say it never worked out."
      "And then one day you just stopped trying?"
      "No. One day I met a little boy with a red balloon."

 
 
TWELVE
    The Proposal
     
    The bathroom is unisex, and the place only has one. Someone's rattling the doorknob. She mumbles for them to piss off, but she doesn't have the heart to say it loud enough for anybody to hear; a rare moment.
      It's like a closet in here. Tight. Bright. Blue. Everything is blue. Robin's egg blue. Sky blue. Picasso's blue period. The blue of someone choking on a meatball and dying blue.
      She hears the distant clang of a red snow shovel. She feels its heavy weight on her back.
      In the mirror, she sees a glimpse of ghosts from future and past: Del Amico, his throat almost comically swollen with his own tongue; Ben Hodges, the back of his head blown out like a juiced pomegranate; the old man, Craig Benson, stroking his bent erection with hands curled into arthritic claws; Louis, an electrical tape X over each eye, mouthing her name again and again. A shiny balloon floats up, and for a moment, it seems to blot out the light above her head, even though she knows it's not real…
      The door rattles again. The ghosts are gone. Miriam pushes her way out of the bathroom, past some blonde country yuppie in pink.
      The waitress approaches, carrying an almost-impossible armload of plates.
      "Your friend said you were done eating?" she asks Miriam, gesturing to the plates with her chin.
      "Uh. Yeah. Yes, thanks." She pauses. The words come out of her mouth before she even thinks to speak them: "Do you have a Honda? A Honda hatchback?"
      "No," she says, and Miriam's heart leaps like a bullfrog with a dart stuck in his ass. A tiny glimmer of hope grows wings and starts banging against her insides, a bee against a window. "But, you know what? I have been thinking about getting one. Old Tremayne Jackson down on Orchard Lane, he has one sitting out in his driveway. Was his daughter's, I guess, but she got a scholarship – first one in the family to go to college – so now the car's just sitting there, collecting pollen and leaves and whatnot on the hood. He said he'd sell it to me, but I hadn't decided yet. Heck – maybe I'll go for it! I'd forgotten about it until now."
      Miriam's insides tighten. She screams within her own head. The thoughts rage at her, throw things, kick down mental doors and hurl bricks through windows: See what you did? See how it all happens? You say something, and bad shit happens. Before she wasn't sure about buying that goddamn car, but now you open your lippy bitch mouth, and now she's got the idea planted in her head like a bad seed growing an ugly tree, and one night she's going to get crunched into that tree by some drunk dumb fuck in a pickup truck – way to go. You have to keep trying, don't you?
      And even then, a littler voice chimes in: Tell her no. Tell her that Honda hatchbacks are known to spontaneously burst into flames when you turn on the radio. Or better still, go down to Orchard