Free Brief Encounters with the Enemy by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

AIDS.
    No.
    I guessed again.
    No.
    “Should we really be talking about dying while you’re driving in the rain?” I asked. She let out a ghoulish movie laugh and pantomimed turning the wheel hard, as if to swerve into oncoming traffic. This made me tense. The windshield wipers beat out their rhythm. “What killed them?” she said again. We went around a bend, and the office building disappeared momentarily and then reappeared, so that its giant antenna resembled a needle stuck in an arm.
    “It’s an airplane, silly,” she said. “They’re seat-belted into the
cabin
of an airplane that’s crashed in the woods.”
    I thought about this, piecing it back together from the opposite end. “That’s a good riddle,” I said at last.
    “I know,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of them.”
    We were coming back over the railroad tracks that were about a mile from my apartment. A dishwasher from the restaurant once managed to elude the police who had come to arrest him in the middle of his shift, and not knowing where to go, he had run all the way to the tracks and hidden in the underbrush. They’d found him three hours later, covered in dirt, and taken him to jail. At his trial, he had pleaded no contest on the advice of his court-appointed lawyer so that he’d get only a three-year sentence. He had not known what the phrase meant, though, and so, standing in the courtroom in his baggy suit, he had said, “No
contents
,” and everyone in the courtroom had laughed.
    “What are you thinking about?” she asked me abruptly. “What are you so quiet for?”
    I told her about the dishwasher, and she said, “That’s a funny story.” And then she said, “That’s a strange story.”After that she said she had thought about studying law but decided against it. But might study it after all.
    “You’re a funny boy,” she said. “You know that?” And it was my turn to smile, because it’d been a long time since anyone had called me a boy. When had I crossed that line from boy to man? Whenever it was, the line had been so faint, so subtle, that I had missed it entirely. Maybe if I had been paying closer attention, things might have turned out differently for me.
    “ ‘Boy,’ ” I said. “That’s a weird thing to call me.”
    So she said it again. “Boy … boy … boy.” Teasing now. But suddenly she was no longer saying just “boy” but “pretty boy.” Or perhaps I had misheard her. “Pretty boy.” I wanted to ask if I was hearing her correctly, because the rain was loud, and the car was loud, and she was driving with great vigor along the wet streets, all the power of her skeletal limbs surging into the car. I watched her mouth, waiting for it to speak again. A wide mouth with wide lips. Her lips were the fleshiest part of her body. The second I looked back toward the street, I heard her say it again.
    “Pretty boy,” she said. “Pretty, pretty boy.”
    “Really?” I asked her. “Really?”

ASSOCIATES
    It was about a month after the war began that I took two boxes off the Walmart truck and hid them in the mop closet. I wasn’t proud of my behavior, considering I’m the assistant manager, but I was in love with a girl who might or might not have been in love with me. Either way, this was the necessary course of action.
    When the truck pulled up to the loading dock, I opened it myself and walked around being a pest with my clipboard, punctilious and official, examining things, checking things off my list. The driver kept sighing and coughing and making all manner of frustrated sounds. “It takes as long as it takes,” I said. Finally he went to piss, and while he was away, I grabbed the boxes and fled to the mop closet. I took a big box of toilet paper, sixty-two count, and I took a big box of something else that I didn’t bother to look at. I just grabbed it. Cookies orcupcakes, I think it was. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care. Mr. Bildman didn’t care either. He took whatever you