Free The Woman Who Stopped Traffic by Daniel Pembrey

doubt people will pay attention to.”
    But that wasn’t what she’d meant: “I love -d that bastard!” she’d burst forth, tears leaking out again, the sky falling in once more.
    “You bawled that out to the big guy?” Melinda had asked, open-mouthed, in the Alibi Room. Natalie had been given just five days to get her story straight, get her emails out, say her goodbyes and vacate her office for good. Initially the headhunters called. She was still crouching in her comforter, knees to her chest, forehead to her knees – on the floor of the penthouse once shared with the man she’d loved, not even ten blocks north of where she now sat … … …
    Where she now sat, in a ratty Internet café beneath a grimy noodle bar, in front of the world’s slowest ever computer. Living the latest nightmare. She’d been waiting for some alphanumeric sequence on the screen, and didn’t at first notice the double blink sound:
                
    A computer-headed stick figure, appearing in duplicate.
    What the hell ?
    She tried to run an image search, but the Compaq was too slow. She felt hunger. She pulled out her notepad and drew the character and stared at it till it danced above the page.
    Then she trudged upstairs: the grimy noodle bar would have to do.
    Just a couple of other diners at greasy formica tables. As with the basement, someone had gone to great lengths to ensure the place was awfully lit. An elderly owner took her order: house noodle soup, please. She pushed the boat out, succumbing to the Three Dollar Deep Bowl.
    After wiping the table with a paper towel, she opened her notebook and stared again at the stick figure. What did it remind her of?
    One of those Space Invader graphics, from the retro-‘80s video game. Suddenly she thought of Malovich, and that damned Atari T-shirt…
    The soup arrived. It was warm, oily water but nutritious and flavorsome enough. She hoped it wouldn’t react too weirdly with the Rémy Martin triple measure and Alaska in-flight snack. Bringing the bowl closer to her mouth, she exhaled the steaming vapors into her face, closing her eyes. How she’d loved to do that as a child, in the Vietnamese restaurants around Paris, with her dad.
    When she looked up again, the owner was smiling at her. She smiled back: he was almost a parody of himself. Right down to his wispy beard, like soft strands of wool.
    “Ah,” he said. “Very good”.
    He seemed to be talking about the soup.
    “Yes,” she said.
    “I can do better,” and he walked back to the serving area.
    “No,” she called after him, “that was quite enough, thanks!”
    But instead of returning with more soup, he came back with an old fashioned, ornate pen. “Here,” he said. And with the most beautiful, sweeping curves of his willowy wrist:
                   
    The black ink bled into the coarse paper.
    “This very popular Chinese name,” he said proudly. “Woooo.”
    The owl-sound went through her like a blade –
    Had Nancy Wu signed her own forgery?
    “And this, he pointed to her space-invader version higher up the page, “is American version of same name. More stray’-for-wah’,” he laughed.
    Or was someone expecting her to infer that – someone impersonating Wu? With her head spinning, she paid, found her car, fervently hoped she wouldn’t be breathalysed and headed back to the airport.
    For the rest of that night, she traded texts with Tom Nguyen. Ultimately, she was too tired to talk to him, let alone meet him – what she’d intended boarding the plane. On arrival back in San Francisco, she returned to the Keaton and there, fell into deep sleep.                        
     
                                     *    *    * 
     
    No! – she tried to yell, awakening and realizing that she could only manage a suffocated gasp. The ‘Wu’ symbol had come alive in her sleep, wielding a machete-like blade. “No,” she repeated.