Free We Are Here by Michael Marshall

was confident it would get good word of mouth. It had a chance, in other words.
    It had also, unfortunately, said just about all David had to say about what it was like to be David.
    The publishers wanted another. David wasn’t sure he had one, and the last month had done nothing to convince him otherwise. He’d started and scrapped three story lines already. It seemed possible that he could keep coming up with ideas and pushing them around the screen before abandoning them … for the rest of his life .
    Which was why he was here, in the coffeehouse, trying to do something else. It wasn’t working. Like their increasingly quiet and desperate attempts to get pregnant, there seemed to be some kind of block. Something invisible but real. Something they couldn’t get past. Something in the way .
    He turned from his notebook—to which he hadn’t added a word—and looked out the window, summoning up the energy to go home.
    Outside, people wandered up and down. Some seemed like they had pressing goals, others like leaves being blown nowhere in particular. It seemed for a moment like there was someone on the opposite side of the street, looking at the coffeehouse, but then he or she was gone.
    “How’s it going? Really?”
    Talia had appeared on the other side of his table. She seemed diminished when not behind the counter.
    “Not great.”
    She sat, plunking her big elbows down and supporting her chubby face in her hands. “Must be tough, huh?”
    David couldn’t tell how much irony this carried. “What do you mean?”
    “Dreaming dreams is easy. Living them, not so much. That’s why they’re called ‘dreams’ instead of ‘lives.’ ”
    “Nice. I may write that down.”
    “Check the copyright position. Think I heard it in a country-and-western song, which is how the eternal truths are most often revealed.” She smiled. “You’ll get there, David. You done it once, you can do it again.”
    “Got proof?”
    “I feel it in my bones. And I got heavy bones.”
    There was a loud clattering, and they turned to see the door to the coffee shop had swung open by itself. They stared at it together, and laughed.
    “Huh,” David said, getting up to close the door. “Doesn’t even look that windy out there.”
    Talia looked enthused. “That reminds me! You know George Lofland, right?”
    “Works at Bedloe’s? Not really. By sight.”
    “Well, he was in here at the crack of dawn, like always—that guy actually drinks too much coffee—but he looked a little whacked, so I asked if he was okay.”
    “And?”
    “ And so early yesterday evening he’s driving back from his mother’s on the other side of Libertyville—she’s rocking Alzheimer’s big-time—and he’s coming home through the woods and he sees this guy by the road. It’s cold and windy with a pissy little drizzle on top and George decides to take pity on the asshole. He pulls over, asks where he’s going. The guy says Rockbridge and George tells him to hop in, but the passenger seat is full of work files so he should get in the back if he doesn’t mind. George drives on and they talk about this and that, though not much—George ain’t no great talker when he’s not selling something, never has been—but then he pulls over on the street here to let the guy out … and guess what?”
    “I have no idea.”
    Talia leaned forward. “He wasn’t there.”
    David laughed. “ What ?”
    “For real, and like, O-M-fucking-G. George says, ‘Okay, here we are’—there’s no reply. He looks around and … dum dum DUM: the backseat’s empty , dude. He jumps out of the car and goes around to check. But there’s no one there .” She sat back and folded her arms. “Freaky, no?”
    “But … you realize that’s a classic FOAF story, right?”
    “FOAF? WTF?”
    “Stands for ‘friend of a friend.’ As in ‘This weird thing happened to me, well, not to me , actually, but to a friend … In fact, it wasn’t even a friend. It happened to the