I got plain tart, lychee, and watermelon (the seasonal flavor), and then on top of that I put rainbow sprinkles, strawberries, and those cute little chewy mochi. It came to $6.73, but it was half off! I tipped well.  

 

“Hey,” I asked the cashier, handing over a ten and an almost-full loyalty stamp card. “This is gonna sound weird. But, uh- earlier today, on my way to this work coffee thing, I was stopped at a traffic light, and I noticed next to me there was this dead pigeon. And ever since then I’ve been kind of obsessing over this idea that it somehow ended up in my car and then, somehow, in everything I’ve been eating?” The cashier didn’t respond, so I pressed forward. “Anyway, I know how this sounds, but it would really help me out a lot if you could reassure me that, you know, this fro yo doesn’t contain… dead pigeon guts?”

 

“Oh, it does.”

 

Somewhere in the background of the dead silence, a HelloFresh advertisement announced that the shop hadn’t sprung for Spotify Premium.

 

“Uh,” I offered. “What?”

 

The cashier started ringing up the customer behind me as he clarified. “The fro yo. It’s got dead pigeon guts.” He rolled his eyes. “Okay so what happened was-

 

-I commute here every day from across town. It’s a long drive. Generally I listen to an audiobook or a podcast or something but I forgot to plug my phone in last night. So I listened to the regular radio instead. 96.5.”

 

“KOIT,” I helped.

 

He gave me a look that withered me, and then revived me, and then withered me again. “Do not interrupt-

 

-I was listening to 96.5, and that song came on, ‘Free Fallin’, by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. You know it?”

 

I had just been told not to interrupt, so I nodded.

 

“Of course you know it. It’s my favorite song,” he continued. “It is my jam.

 

I was singing along to it really well. I’ve practiced a lot. I always use the same intonations. And there’s one part where I close my eyes. ‘Move west down Ventura Boulevard’. Right as that part was coming up I was approaching a stop light, and it was yellow, so I figured it would be okay. I’d just close my eyes for that one second. I’ve done it hundreds of times. But this time, BAM - I hit a pigeon. I thought it would move before I hit it, but it just stayed there, and the next thing you know, my tire’s on top of it and the whole car goes bump. One second it’s there, the next it’s dead as shit. Smushed right into the road.

 

Ugh, I feel like this all sounds so callous. Don’t get me wrong, I love animals. I used to go to day camp at the zoo and everything. I really would have helped it if I could. Sorry, not it, her- you can tell because the pigeon was on the smaller side and had a slightly flattened head. That’s something I learned at zoo camp. I would have helped her if I could but the light turned green and I had to keep driving. Besides, I couldn’t have saved her at that point even if I tried. I mean, you saw her, I demolished that pigeon.

 

I didn’t sing the whole rest of the way to work, even though there were some bangers. ‘Borderline’. ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’. ‘Whenever, Wherever’. But I felt so bad about that poor pigeon. You know pigeons process images so much faster than we do that a movie looks to them like a slideshow? She must have watched her death happen in slow motion. You know how many lives pigeons saved during World War II? Lots, probably.”

 

“Is there dairy in the pecan pie?” A customer asked, and the cashier shook his head no, wiping a tear from his cheek - to the other customer, it must have looked as though he really loved dairy.

 

“Where was I? Right, how the roadkill pigeon guts ended up in the specific fro yo cup that you are currently holding.

 

So by the time my lunch break comes around, I’m still thinking about the pigeon, and about how even if I couldn’t have saved her, I could still at least do her the kindness of finding somewhere nicer to be dead. Somewhere a pigeon would like. A park or a bread factory or something.

 

We’ve got these squee-gees we use for the ice machines, to clear out ice blocking any of the spouts in the yogurt dispensers. So I grabbed one and I headed back to that intersection, thinking it might be a little less crowded now that it’s not morning rush hour.

 

When I got there, I was pretty upset to see the shape she was in. She’d been run over so many times. Her guts were just everywhere, and the new thing was that her feathers were scattered now, too! Some of them had landed in the guts, and the guts were all dirty. They’d baked into the street.

 

I parked my car at the side of the road and waited until the light turned red. Each time it did, I’d dart out into the street and scrape up just a little bit more of the guts into this jar I keep in my car for long road trips – don’t give me that look, it’s clean. By the time you rolled up I’d actually already made a pretty good dent in the clean-up.

 

So, yes, I saw you pull up to the light, and I saw you look down at the mess in the road, and I saw you look away. And I’m not gonna lie, that made me angry. This was once a living creature, and not only that, but a bird, a flawless flying machine created by God’s own hand to soar through the actual air. And now, because of my carelessness and your disgust, she was reduced to contemptible detritus on the ground.

 

I don’t want you to think you were the only one to react this way. Everyone who pulled up at that light in that lane had the same reaction you did. But I remembered you because of what you did next. You had your radio turned up loud enough that I could hear, and I heard… I’m sorry, give me a second.

 

I heard ‘Free Fallin’ start to play. And you. Switched. Stations.

 

I saw red. And not the red of the pigeon’s guts because they were really more of a greige-y pink by then. You passed by a beautiful animal and a beautiful song, one right after the other. As though the whole world was absolutely made for you.

 

These small decisions we make, they have a huge impact. Every single one. Looking away from a dead bird, switching songs on the radio. It’s a butterfly effect. Though I’m sure if you saw a butterfly you’d swat it, too afraid to look true beauty in the face, you coward, you philistine.”

 

At this point my fro-yo had started melting and a line had formed behind me. He must have noticed my anxious shifting because he said, “They can wait.

 

So, I’ve got a jar of roadkill pigeon guts and I’m following you in my car.

 

Of course your ‘work coffee thing’ was at a Starbucks Reserve. Of course it was. I watched you park, I watched you feed the meter. Honestly I didn’t know what I was going to do until I saw your face. I recognized you; you come in here sometimes and you comment to whoever you’re with that you’re ‘being bad’ today. Fuck you. As though you comprehend the ways in which you’re truly bad. But it meant you were a customer, which meant I had a plan.

 

The first step was easy. I have a background in graphic design, and I had my tablet on me. It didn’t take long to mock up a half-off fro-yo sign. The trickier part was getting it on a sandwich board in the hour I figured I had before you left the Starbucks. I used to date this guy Tom who worked at a print shop in Los Feliz and we’re still on good terms so I called in a favor. I texted him the PDF and told him it was an emergency. You know what’s crazy? I sprung for the glossy finish. It was fifteen bucks extra but it looks that much more legit! Not that you’d notice.

 

I ran- physically ran, I used to be a graphic designer and a marathon runner, too- to the print shop.

 

When I got there Tom had the mocked-up ad ready for me. I was ready to pay for it but he wouldn’t hand it over until I told him why I’d ghosted him.

 

‘Tom, I don’t have a good answer for you,’ I said.

 

‘Try,’ he pleaded, and his eyes were so green that in that moment I remembered why I’d asked for his number the first time I’d come in here to make that cardboard cutout of Willem Dafoe to scare my roommate.

 

‘You’re sure you want to know? Because you won’t like the answer and I have a jar of pigeon guts sitting in my hot car so I don’t want this to turn into a whole thing.’

 

‘I can take it,’ he said. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of work on myself. I’ve been in therapy. I’m meditating. I don’t fear rejection the way I used to.’

 

‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘Okay. Well. I always thought you had really bad breath. It’s not your fault. Some people just don’t smell good to other people.’

 

‘Oh,’ he said. He really thought about it for a second. ‘Well. Thank you for the feedback.’

 

I paid him and he handed over the printed ad. It looked great, Tom does great work. We made vague plans to get a drink some time, but it’ll never happen.

 

I always keep a sandwich board and a roll of tape in my trunk, so I set up the ad right in front of your car. I wanted to wait and make sure you saw it, but my lunch break was almost over and anyway I had to get to the security footage.

 

I always review the security footage at the end of the day and keep a log who’s been in the shop. This way, in case anyone famous ever comes in and then dies one day, I can sell the footage at a premium to TMZ on a slow day. ‘THE LAST UNSEEN VIDEO OF ED HELMS GETTING FRO YO!’ or whatever. I don’t know why I went to Ed Helms, he’s never come in here. I did see Nick Cannon one time, though.

 

So I knew where to find you on the tapes. You came in on November third, then February twenty eighth, which is your birthday, which I know because you got double loyalty stamps. Then you came back on March fourteenth. Every time you’re here you get tart, one of the fruit flavors, and the seasonal special if it’s a fruit flavor. If it’s not, you get peanut butter. But today, it’s watermelon. It’s really good, too. It tastes like real watermelon and not like the artificial flavor. Not that you’ll ever know. That’s the one I tipped the pigeon guts jar into.”

 

“THE WHAT?!” A woman behind me scream-asked.

 

“I’M TELLING,” the cashier responded, matching her tone. “A STORY!

 

I’m so sorry, some people are so rude.

 

I was saying – I put an out of order sign on the seasonal flavor dispenser. A bunch of people asked about it, I missed out on so many sales because of you. But I just had to wait. I was starting to worry you wouldn’t show up for the special. I was gonna have wasted all that fro-yo and guts for nothing! But then, I saw you pull up outside on the security camera. I had to be quick- I pulled off the out of order sign just as you entered.

 

And sure enough, predictable you, you fell for it. Every decision you made, today and every day before it, it all brought you here. Every cowardly decision, to go to the easy coffee shop choice, to turn away from that which disgusts you, to turn off the radio. It all lead you to this moment. You got guts – for once in your life.”

 

He stared at me. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to speak yet, but I didn’t know what to say. In most ways I was horrified. But in a small way, I was really grateful. I’d always sort of suspected things like this were not only possible, but happened all the time. I frequently thought, maybe stranger had used a micro-needle to inject liquid LSD in the specific can of pre-packaged soup I’d just purchased from the bodega. Maybe the balloon that popped on the other side of the room had flown into my mouth without me noticing and soon it would lodge in my lungs. If only I hadn’t picked that soup, or stood in that corner at that birthday party, or hadn’t stopped at that light and looked at that pigeon or skipped that—

 

The song that started playing on the shop’s Spotify channel stopped my train of thought. I looked at the cashier, who nodded, as though we both knew what I had to do.

 

“She’s a good girl, loves her mama…” I started in a small voice. “Loves Jesus and America too.”

 

The other customers were staring now, though one was busy calling a health inspector.

 

“She’s a good girl, crazy ‘bout Elvis. Loves horses, and her boyfriend too.”

 

The cashier nodded and I an unexpected wave of gratitude swept over me. For the first time, as much as I didn’t want it to have been true, I’d been proven right. For all of its disgusting improbability, that thought I couldn’t shake? It was real.

 

“AND I’M FREE!” I belted, because in that moment, I was.