A woman tapped the cartoon cherries and teal diamonds on the cellphone
screen as she steered through town with her knee. The game went gling gling gling and then there was a bursting sound, meaning
she’d won. She looked up as a man in a camel-colored jacket
wandered into the street on a diagonal. The woman hit him with the car and
then stomped the brakes.

He’d flown into a pile of cardboard boxes and discarded fake floral
arrangements outside the florist shop and was now just crumpled there,
wheezing and bleeding.

In her shock, she forgot to put the car in park. As she jumped out to run
to the man, the car with its dented steel and blown out glass kept rolling
down the hill towards the foggy sea. But no one saw any of this. And soon
she was crouching at his side.

“I messed up!”

He spun his lacerated face and his bright blue eyes looked so familiar. But
the mouth was full of blood and the mouth of a stranger.

She wasn’t crying, but he said, “Don’t cry. It’s okay. I hit somebody with
my car last week. I didn’t even stop. Just kept going.”

“I’m so so sorry,” she said.

He wiped his mouth with his coat and said, “I’m sorry, too. My phone went
flying. Can you get it?” He motioned up the sidewalk and the woman stood
like there’d been a gunshot at the beginning of a race. The final wishes of
a dying man, to tweet about his simple fleeting life or to post a final
goodbye selfie. Maybe retweet something religious to ensure entry into
questionable Heaven.

His phone had a cracked screen and she apologized again when she handed it
to him, but all he said was, “I’m the dumbass who should have been looking
at the —” He tapped his phone and finished a text he’d been trying to send
to his kid.

“I’ll call an ambulance …” she said.

“Nah.” He hacked red. “Don’t call an ambulance. I don’t have health
insurance and that’s too much money.”

“I get it, I don’t have health insurance, either.”

“Help me up. This is embarrassing.”

She held his hand. It was already blue.

He kept bleeding and bleeding. Most of it was from somewhere in the middle.
She made him sit up, and he had the bright idea to stuff fake flowers where
the blood was coming from. An entire bouquet of plastic roses and
artificial ivy, pushed into his wound. She wrapped him in bubble wrap
around the torso. There was twine in a trash can nearby. She tied him up
tight like a package. He said, “I’m fine now. I really am. It was nice to
meet you. Which way is the cemetery? I’ll just go die now.”

“It’s up there,” she said, squinting past the sun, motioning upward through
the steep town.

He laughed. “I’ve never walked uphill in my life. Why start now?” He shook
her hand. Did a little bow.

“No. No. I’ll fucking drive you … fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

They got to their feet, and she looked back but the car was gone. She ran
down the hill, now in a panic. Cars were parked on either side of the
street and her car had plummeted down the hill like a pinball, pounding
into Chryslers and Toyotas, Hondas and even a Maserati flying an Italian
flag. Her car had been stopped somehow by a parking meter, that was now
bent back, way back, twisted like a noodle.

The sun came out from behind a cloud. The day was revealed, all shadows
gone poof, and here were these ordinary little people stuck in permeant
lightning flash. Sweat rolled down her face. The dying man inched down the
street, perfectly cool. He was weak and shaking, but perfectly cool. The
hem of his coat was now dripping red. She called for him. “Wait there, you
stubborn sonofabitch! I’ll come to you! It’ll be alright.”

She was able to get her car in reverse. But the parking meter ripped out of
the cement and remained imbedded in the nose of the car as she drove up the
hill. For a little while there were sparks but the sparks stopped after the
asphalt ground down the bottom of the parking meter. Then everything was
fine, was normal.

They felt guilty about the damages. So they scribbled quick notes, and left
the notes stuck to all the cars, except the black sedan that was his,
crumpled worse of all, emblems ripped off. He wrote notes on scraps of
paper from a notebook he carried in his breast pocket. She jotted her
apologies on lavender post-it notes that were kept above her sun visor. The
man left his contact information on some of the notes. The woman left her
contact information on the rest of the notes. They stuck the notes under
windshield wipers, to the passenger side windows, on gas caps. They drove
away.

“Actually, besides the funeral home. I have a few errands I was trying to
run,” he said. “Can you help me?”

“Anything you need.”

“I don’t wanna mess up your day though.”

He put his head back on the headrest and stopped breathing. She shook him
as she drove and said, “Hey! Hey! Hey!”

The man shuddered and his arm shot out. He turned the radio on. He shouted
over the noise of the radio, “What are your plans for the afternoon?”

She turned the radio down.

“On my way to a job interview,” she said. “I’m almost late.” She pointed at
the clock. “But that doesn’t matter. We should be getting you to a doctor.”

“I don’t do doctors. Take me to the bank,” he said. “I want to deposit my
paycheck. Then, I don’t care, we can go to your interview. If you need a
reference, you can give them my cellphone number.”

“They might call two weeks from now though. You won’t be around in two
weeks.”

He laughed, “You just answer my phone and speak on your own behalf. Pretend
you’re me.” He handed her his phone.

“That’s nice of you, how much was the phone, I want to reimburse you. Or
your estate or whatever. Your kids …”

“It came with the phone plan. De nada. It’s nothing. You’re sweet. Speaking
of my estate, how patient are you? Could you sit through a game of tee ball
tomorrow night? My kid has tee ball and I’ll be … Can you?”

“Of course!” she said. “I love tee ball. I take full responsibility.
They’ll call me Mrs. Tee Ball, okay?”

“Make my kid wear sunscreen.”

She nodded.

The man refused to go through the drive thru so the woman helped him into
the bank. He couldn’t walk. His organs must have been shutting down and his
legs didn’t work now. She held onto him at the counter, supporting him as
he filled out the deposit slip and passed it to the clerk behind the
counter in the flowery dress shirt, who insisted on giving them three
bottles of mineral water and a ridiculous amount of lollipops.

Next they went to the post office and sent off a couple Easter cards. The
envelopes had started out pink and only one of them had gotten slick with
blood. That envelope was now shit brown, and the postal clerk refused to
take any money for the stamp. This one is on the house, sir.

The man also refused to sit in the car when the woman went in to her job
interview. She popped the trunk and found two beach towels in the back and
wrapped them around him to cover up the mess that his body was making
through the bubble wrap and twine and artificial flowers. He was starting
to smell. It was his idea to be doused with air freshener from a forgotten
bottle next to the spare tire.

Even though she was late and even though she had a dying man with her, the
job interview went pretty good. It looked like she’d get the position. The
only part of the interview she had thought was a touch too personal, was
when her future boss(?) had pried into whether or not she had children.
She’d tried to skate around the fact that she medically could not have
children of her own, and the man frowned, as if—one demerit. But when she
said she did not smoke cigarettes, and did not feel the need to see much of
the world, and therefore that meant less vacation time, he’d nodded
happily, like, alright—two bonus gold stars next to your name, well done.
Gling gling gling.

On the paperwork for references, she wrote the name she’d seen the dying
man put on the bank deposit slips. She wrote his cellphone number. It felt
good to have a friend in the world, someone to count on.

When she went back into the lobby he was dead.

The receptionist hadn’t noticed. One of the other job applicants walked in,
late for his interview anyway, and made a whole scene about it, like he’d
get brownie points for noticing or something. But the woman dragged the
dead man out to her car. She softly wept as she drove farther down the
hill. Directionless on a sunny afternoon.

She noticed some bloody books had fallen out of his coat. She reached down
at his feet and grabbed them. Library books. She’d return them for him. A
book about black holes. A novel about nazi gold in a sunken submarine,
treasure hunters scuba diving down to steal it, but you know, there was
also this mutated nuclear warhead octopus. How preposterous. She threw the
books out the window into oncoming traffic.

The dead man’s cellphone began to ring on the console.

She picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Hello, I’m calling because you are qualified for a free vacation …”

The woman screamed. The scream turned into a shriek of sorrow and then
uncontrollable tears. The telemarketer said, “Everything okay?”

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry—guy you’re calling is kaput. I’m looking at him
right now. He’s no longer of the mortal coil and he’s in my car.”

The telemarketer stuttered, “In in in your ca-car? Who is this?”

“I hit him with my car, d-e-a-d. I’m so sorry!”

“Lady, just stop it.”

Cars turned in front of her on the boulevard that went down towards the
sea.

“I hit him with my car …”

“You said that, yeah. Okay, you’re on the no call list now. You’ve made
your point.”

“But I—” She was out of words. The telemarketer blabbed on about the free
vacation.

A park flashed by. Kids were paying soccer in the park. She stopped at a
red light. A cop pulled next to her. He looked in the car. The car was
wrecked. There was a parking meter stuck to the hood. There was a dead body
in her passenger seat. She was on the phone.

The cop rolled down his window and leaned over. He was hot about it. He
looked like a bull in a Bug’s Bunny cartoon. Red faced and steam coming out
of his nostrils.

She hung up the phone.

The cop changed into a smiling boy. His eyes became kind. He gave her a big
thumbs up.

The cop looked twice each way and then rolled through the red light.

Traffic swarmed around her, she remained motionless. She ran her hands
through the dead man’s hair, clearing it away from his forehead.

She did a k-turn and headed back up the hill, away from the sea, towards
the cemetery.

Her car was shaking and she wasn’t sure she would make it. But she had
Triple A and if Triple A had to tow her to the cemetery then they would
just have to. She didn’t know how much it cost to bury a person. She would
finance it. She would charge a deposit to her credit card. She’d get a
second job if she did indeed get the first job. Tax returns were coming.

In the parking lot of the cemetery, his phone buzzed again. A text from the
dead man’s kid, who was at school and needed a lift.

The woman texted the dead man’s kid, I love you, be there soon. Give me some time. Stay in the shade.