Free Shelby by Pete; McCormack

destiny is for those who are, for better or worse, great. All others are at the mercy of fate. Fate is about everyday little things; spotting a celebrity in a supermarket, getting the car towed, being struck by diarrhoea in an elevator, premature ejaculation. It wasn’t having fallen from destiny to fate that scared me. What scared me was not knowing if I’d stopped falling.
    After repeated calls I got hold of Lucy the following morning. She never made mention of the day before. I thought that showed a lot of class on her part. We made another plan for a more elaborate psychic reading. She seemed distant on the phone.
    â€œYou okay?” I asked. There was no answer. “Lucy?”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œYou okay?”
    â€œYeah. Hey, Shel, do you know how many witches were burned at the stake between 1300 and 1700?”
    â€œUh … five hundred?”
    â€œ Five hundred !”
    â€œI meant five hundred thousand.”
    â€œTry nine million. Nine fucking million. And you know why?”
    â€œUm … I’d have to think about it.”
    â€œBecause they were different. Because they stood up for what they believed in. What that means, Shel, is that if you were dull, if you were subversive, you lived. If you were an original thinker, you were burned at the stake, Imagine the genetic void of brilliance that was left by that?”
    â€œHey, Lucy?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œAbout yesterday—”
    â€œDon’t worry about it.”
    â€œBut I—”
    â€œShit, I’m late! I got to go. Give me a call soon, okay?”
    â€œLucy, how do you feel about pre-marital sex?”
    â€œGood or bad?”
    â€œI’m asking you.”
    â€œI’m really late. Call me.”
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œTomorrow.”
    I did. But it was another twenty calls and two days after that before I got hold of her again. I had no idea where she’d been and I didn’t ask. It was ten after nine on a gray Sunday morning and I woke her up. She wasn’t overly friendly but I was able to wrangle a lunch date at the Alma Street Cafe for later that day. It opened my eyes.
    In the middle of pancakes and fruit and muffins and coffee we started talking about God and divine inspiration, and then began name dropping our own heros. My mentioning of William Blake and the episode with Christmas future that took place with the teacher in the auditorium when I wrote the MCAT and then quit school was greeted with enthusiasm—as were all other poetical references. Science did not fare so well.
    â€œNewton?” she said. “He’s a total asshole.”
    â€œPardon?”
    â€œHim and his buddies; assholes.”
    I chuckled and picked up my orange juice. “I think you have him mixed up with someone else.”
    â€œI think you do, dick-head. Copernicus, Gallileo … Bacon. The Scientific Method. They’ve sanctioned world rape. They make the Serbs look like fuckin’ saints.”
    â€œI … I don’t know what you mean.”
    â€œThen don’t laugh at me like a dick-head.”
    â€œI didn’t.”
    â€œLet me tell you something, ass wipe. The Scientific Method is the reason we’re twenty minutes from being a fucking fossil footnote.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œShel, if you solve problem B with experiment A, you better damn well know what C is.”
    â€œC?” I said meekly, avoiding eye contact. Lucy’s voice had attracted attention throughout the resturant.
    â€œChernobyl is C.”
    â€œHm.”
    â€œThe Hiroshima survivors are C. Women with PCBs in their breast milk are C. Frogs with fucked up genitalia are C. The repercussions, Shel. Newton didn’t care shit about repercussions.”
    Our eyes fastened and I became self-consciously aware of both embarrassment over the staring patrons and my loins pulsating in needy throbs at her display of passion. “Crumpet?” was my lame