Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig Page A

the cunt."
      Paul blanches.
      "What?" she asks. "You don't like that word?"
      "It's just… a harsh word."
      "Harsh word for harsh times, Paul. Don't be a girl about it. In England, they say it all the time. It's just part of the language."
      "We're not in England."
      "No shit?" Miriam snaps her fingers. "I guess I'd better stop driving on the left side of the road, then. Explains all the honking. And the fatal car crashes."
      Paul's mouth forms a grim line. "So you met some… woman."
      "Austin's bitchy cunt whore mother. Twat bitch axe wound prostitute witch. She's got her designer handbag, her Botox-paralyzed smile, her hair pulled back so tight she can't fucking blink without tearing her eyelids off, her little cell phone Bluetooth robot antenna shoved up into her ear or her ass or whatever. I went up to her and I said, 'Lady, I need your help. Your kid. He's going to die soon unless you help me save him.'"
      "How'd she react?" Paul asks.
      "I'm going to go with 'not well' for $200, Alex."
      "I think it'd actually be, 'What is, not well.' Because it's Jeopardy."
      Miriam takes a last drag of the Marlboro and chain-lights another off the cherry. "You really know how to take the energy out of a story, Paul."
      "Sorry."
      "Twat-cunt looked at me like I just took a piss on her complete set of Sex and the City DVDs, so I went ahead and repeated myself. The woman mumbled something at me about being crazy, and I reached over to grab her arm – I got a hold of her shirt, not her skin – and she didn't like that very much.
      "Fast-forward twenty minutes, and I'm yelling at the cop, she's yelling at me, the cop is just trying to make sense of everything–"
      "Wait. Cop?" Paul asks.
      "Yes, Paul, the cop. I said we were fast-forwarding twenty minutes, c'mon. Catch up. She marched outside and called the police, said some crazy lady was threatening her son."
      "And you didn't run?"
      Miriam flicks ash at Paul; he blinks it away.
      "No, remember? I was trying to save the kid's life? I figured a cop on the scene could only help, not hurt. Maybe he'd drag us all downtown, which would solve the problem right out of the gate. I wasn't just going to… leave the scene, let it all happen."
      Her hand tightens into a fist, and she pops her knuckles.
      "But I should've. I should've run away. Because while we were all standing there yelling at one another outside a fucking Wendy's, Austin saw a penny on the ground. Even now, I can hear his voice play out, but at the time I wasn't giving it any thought, you know? I was so caught up in giving his stupid goddamn mother a piece of my goddamn mind that I didn't really register what was happening.
      "Austin says, 'See a penny, pick it up!' and he reaches down to pick up this… this penny. And when he does, the balloon slips from his grip. Now, I don't know how long he'd been carrying around the balloon, but the helium had started to go south, so it didn't float away. Instead it just… hung there, in mid-air, until a wind came and nudged it along."
      Paul swallows a knot.
      "The balloon picks up speed. He chases after it. I see him run for it. And I try to yell, but the mother is yelling at me, not watching her son. And the cop is watching the mother, because she looks like she's about to rake my eyes out. I scream and start to run but the cop pulls me back.
      "It's still there. In my head. The balloon drifting past. The SUV. His body. His shoes. It's unreal. Like something you'd see on the internet. Like a joke."
      Silence.
      Miriam blinks away the start of some tears. She won't let them come.
      "That's messed up," Paul says finally.
      She grits her teeth. "No, what's messed up is what comes later. After you pull yourself out of that moment, after you find a way to escape the loop of images your brain keeps playing, you start to make some connections. You realize, all of life is written in a book, and we all