Over the phone, I tell the customer service rep my pizza has disappeared, and more to the point, my delivery driver, Zephyr, has likewise vanished. I watched it happen, I say. I watched the map on my phone as the car icon barreled apocalyptically up Route 4, Pac-Manned its way through town, and turned onto my road, Esker Road, a serpentine path winding for miles through the woods. Around 1:26 a.m., the car\u2014along with Zephyr and, presumably, my medium Carnivore\u2019s Delite\u2014evaporated. Along that stretch, at this time of night, something marginally catastrophic may have happened, and I don\u2019t want to get into a whole big thing here, but this should, ideally, be concerning.<\/p>\n
I tell the rep other things. First, I say, I don\u2019t want the credits toward another purchase. Yes, I\u2019ll take the credits, but I don\u2019t want to appear to want the credits. What I\u2019m saying is this kind of thing doesn\u2019t happen. I\u2019ve ordered a lot of food since the advent of lockdown, much more than you\u2019d need to feed a man living alone. A recently unmarried man, by the way. And by the way, a father whose daughter died on purpose. Point is, this doesn\u2019t happen. If there\u2019s a problem, the order\u2019s canceled. Or I get a text message asking if there\u2019s really a house out this far. Something happens, though. Not this. Not nothing.<\/p>\n
The rep says he\u2019s doing his best. Which I get. But Zephyr, I say, seems to be on the younger side. Seventeen maybe. My daughter\u2019s age. As old, by the way, as she\u2019d ever get. How is it that I\u2019ve so confidently ascertained Zephyr\u2019s age? Consider that Zephyr is, arguably, a pseudonym. And not the pseudonym of an ancient like me. An ancient like me picks something from his cinematic upbringing, such as Marty McFly. And with a name referring to a gentle breeze, Zephyr must be imaginative, which is a feature of youth. Picture a squirmy sketcher of ink drawings, a lover of dragons. Piercings. Hair that\u2019s occasionally pink. Scars laddering her forearms.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re easy to see, these scars. Anybody could see them, I say. Did her father see them? What did he say when he saw them? What did he do? And how can it be that, in the middle of the night, this Zephyr is wending her way up Esker with nothing but a phone glow to guide her?<\/p>\n
The rep, audibly vexed, says there\u2019s no reason to think anything nefarious has happened. This, to be clear, is derision. Unsubtle mockery of my unique vocabularic choices. But I take the high road and spare him the full brunt of my prodigious lexicon. This is about Zephyr.<\/p>\n
With exemplary patience, I tell him Esker Road traces the spine of an actual esker, a thin ridge formed ten to twenty thousand years ago by the meltwater from the shrinking Laurentide ice sheet.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s nice, he says.<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t understand, I say. Given this provenance, the ditches flanking the road are steep. Is ditches even the word? Chasms, maybe.<\/p>\n
Steep, he says.<\/p>\n
I remain calm. I ask him his name.<\/p>\n
Patrick, he says.<\/p>\n
Okay, let\u2019s go with Patrick. Zephyr needs our help, Patrick. Understand that if my car battery still had a charge, I\u2019d launch a search myself along Esker\u2014looking for skid marks, broken branches, headlights casting needles of light into the forest canopy.<\/p>\n
I pause to see if Patrick understands. It\u2019s hard to tell with Patrick.<\/p>\n
Imagine being seventeen, I continue. Seventeen today, I mean\u2014an era in which truth yields to loud opinion, when mere reality bends to assertion, when This is not really happening does not contradict This is all your fault. Zephyr\u2019s told to work hard, stay strong, better days are ahead. And yet these days have collapsed into a thin strip of sameness lolling out into an oxymoronic future that all of us made and none of us wanted.<\/p>\n
Therein, Patrick, lies my point. The future\u2014not wanting one. Picture Zephyr. There she goes up Esker, her hair soft as a newborn\u2019s. And she knows it\u2019d be easy. A sharp acceleration, a quick unbuckling, a smart flick of the wheel. And that would be it. Pinned in a tree-crumpled car, she could subsist on Carnivore\u2019s Delite for a time, maybe still playing the classic rock she inherited from her dad, himself somewhere ending in his own way, whether he knows it yet or not.<\/p>\n
Patrick has, at some point, terminated the call.<\/p>\n
Who can blame him? We\u2019ve all had enough.<\/p>\n
And maybe, after everything, it\u2019s just a glitch. The signal is, I admit, pretty weak along that stretch. Or maybe the pizza was delivered to the wrong house and then not logged\u2014mistakes eating mistakes.<\/p>\n
Maybe Zephyr, at least, is fine.<\/p>\n
Maybe more than fine. Maybe she\u2019s absconded. Maybe she\u2019s driven past my driveway and followed Esker until it emerges from the woods, cuts across the salt marsh, and becomes Ocean Boulevard along the coast. She\u2019s a drifter now, this Zephyr, blowing from town to town picking up orders, keeping them for herself, gliding down the unending road.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not so far-fetched.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s cruising down the rocky coast in a cherry convertible, a late afternoon in the late summer, her long hair fluttering in the salty wind, aviators glinting in the sun, speakers blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd. The pizza\u2019s wearing a seatbelt.<\/p>\n
Everything and everyone is behind her now. They\u2019ll think of her often, of course. Her father, especially. He\u2019ll wonder where she is, what she\u2019s doing, whether she thinks about him. Maybe, after a while, he\u2019ll give her a call, maybe leave a voicemail. Just checking in, he\u2019ll say. Just seeing if you need anything. Call back if you want. It\u2019s okay to call back. We didn\u2019t mean for things to be this way, he\u2019ll say. Come home, he\u2019ll say. We miss you, he\u2019ll say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Around 1:26 a.m., the car\u2014along with my medium Carnivore\u2019s Delite\u2014evaporated. Along that stretch, at this time of night, something marginally catastrophic may have happened, and I don\u2019t want to get into a whole big thing here, but this should, ideally, be concerning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":23485,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[4301,3722,851,863,2448,4300,4302,1013,53,4299],"class_list":["post-22524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","tag-customer-service","tag-daughter","tag-father","tag-flash-fiction","tag-pandemic","tag-patrick","tag-pizza-delivery","tag-short-fiction","tag-suicide","tag-zephyr","writer-will-willoughby"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22524"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23493,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22524\/revisions\/23493"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}