The Fate Merchant

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

     The kitchen of the Horseshoe Grill smelled of bacon and burned toast. Jasper leaned against the refrigerator, closed his eyes, and inhaled. Bacon made everything better. It made a sandwich sexy; it made any room smell like Saturday morning; it transformed salad from a punishment into a viable meal option. He understood bacon. Everything else was proving annoyingly hard to process, and he was fairly certain that someone had scooped out his brain while he was unconscious and replaced it with a lima bean.

     “So just for the record,” Jasper said, opening his eyes, “last night actually happened?”

     Callie, her eyes bloodshot, her red hair bunched at the top of her head in a messy knot, cracked three eggs into a metal mixing bowl, wiped her hands on her apron, and attacked the yellow slime with a whisk.

     “Yeah. It happened.”

     “You okay?”

     “Great. Perfect.” Her body shook as she churned the eggs into a yellow froth.

     “You know,” Jasper said, “if you keep beating those eggs like that, it’s going to turn into a chicken.”

     She slammed the bowl on the table; a wave of egg sloshed over the side. “Is everything a big joke to you?”

     “Uh…”

     She pressed a hand to her breastbone. “I had a rope growing out of my chest last night. A rope. Out of my chest.”

     “I don’t know if I’d call it a rope—”

    She flicked the whisk again in irritation, and globs of raw egg hurtled toward Jasper. He ducked, and the egg splattered against the door of the fridge. “Whatever it was,” Callie said, “I saw it. And I swear I can still feel it.” She shuddered. “Can you feel yours?”

     “Can you put that thing down?” he asked, pointing at the whisk.

     She ignored him. “I have one foot in my old life, where things were shit, but relatively normal, and I have the other foot in this new life, where things are shit, but everything that used to ground me is now overshadowed by the giant fact that there are these…these…things out there that have measured out my entire life. And they’re kind of bossy. What am I supposed to do with that information? Got a joke for all that?”

     “You could—”

     “And here’s what I want to know: how does this big, important cosmic plan work? Getting my heart broken…no, not broken…shattered…getting my heart shattered, getting completely and utterly emotionally eviscerated: what did that accomplish? Did some starving kid in Africa get adopted by a celebrity as a result? How about when I got fired? Did some rare species of bird get saved from extinction? I sure as shit hope so, otherwise I’m going to be really pissed.”

     “I thought you said you quit your job?”

     She brushed aside his question with another flick of the whisk that launched a second salvo of egg at Jasper. He jumped to the right, and the egg sprayed the fridge.

     “That’s beside the point,” Callie said. “The point is that life has gotten seriously weird, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

     “You know what I do when I get stressed?”

    She arched an eyebrow. It was the sort of expression that told Jasper that his advice wasn’t going to help, wasn’t wanted and/or needed, but he could go ahead and make a fool of himself if he wanted to. He never liked that expression, preferring that people wait until he opened his mouth before deciding whether or not he sounded like an idiot.