All the Happiness You Deserve by Michael Piafsky

Author:Michael Piafsky [Piafsky, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company

The phone rings. Pan answers and all of a sudden everyone is moving. It is very difficult for your abused brain to process, so you sit quietly while hurried legs pass through your line of vision.

“It’s one o’clock and his wife and kids are on their way home,” Jensen shouts down at you.

“What day?”

“Sunday.” Jensen pushes his socked toe deep into your ribs. “You missed church. Now help us clean up.”

In the bathroom you splash water on your face, pulling down at your cheeks, exposing the very thin layer of white beneath the flared capillaries of your eyes. You stretch and coil your hands; red and splotchy, they function about on par with the rest of your body, which is to say petulantly, and only after debate.

As expected, the sun has melted most of the snow, leaving dunes on the lawn but the streets navigable. Unfortunately Jensen or Pan, whoever had been driving on their late-night jaunt, missed the street by a wide enough margin that most of Jensen’s car is tucked neatly underneath a blanket of snow with only the rear bumper and tires peeking out. The four of you come at it from different angles, surveying, looking for some way to reason through the problem. Jensen opens the door and the snowbank calves down his leg. He looks up at you. “Well, that finishes the circle,” and moves something around in his throat. Then he gets into the car. You can hear the hum of the engine and, if you reach your face close enough, you can see the tiny snow particles dancing up and down on the trunk. Unfortunately, the car itself is hopelessly entrenched, even when you all kick the snow off the tires, even when you drag the shovel from the garage and try to carve out a path. During the night, the car not only drove up over the concrete of the sidewalk but continued down the slope onto the lawn. It is a gentle slope, no more than a few feet, but enough to ensure that with all the snow the car cannot bully its way back in reverse. Jensen sticks his head out the open window. “Get to the front and push me out,” he says to you.

“Why me?” you whine.

“Because you are the only person here that I can fire,” Jensen replies and it is, you must admit, a very good answer.

You wade through snow no higher than your waist and dig to the hood of the car. Jensen hits the accelerator, hard. If his condition approximates your own, there is a chance that he has actually put the car in forward, yet when you shout this to him, he seems offended.

“It’s in reverse,” he snarls. “Trust me.”

“Yes, absolutely,” says Pan, safe and dry in the middle of the street, his energy faded but still present. “Why on earth would you not trust him? He, after all, who has proven himself so adept at the conducting of automobiles thus far. Whatever could have prompted you to doubt him now, young man?”

“Fuck you,” Jensen replies.

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