"Austin says, 'See a penny, pick it up!' and he reaches down to pick up this… this penny. And when he does, the balloon slips from his grip. Now, I don't know how long he'd been carrying around the balloon, but the helium had started to go south, so it didn't float away. Instead it just… hung there, in mid-air, until a wind came and nudged it along."

Paul swallows a knot.

"The balloon picks up speed. He chases after it. I see him run for it. And I try to yell, but the mother is yelling at me, not watching her son. And the cop is watching the mother, because she looks like she's about to rake my eyes out. I scream and start to run but the cop pulls me back.

"It's still there. In my head. The balloon drifting past. The SUV. His body. His shoes. It's unreal. Like something you'd see on the internet. Like a joke."

Silence.

Miriam blinks away the start of some tears. She won't let them come.

"That's messed up," Paul says finally.

She grits her teeth. "No, what's messed up is what comes later. After you pull yourself out of that moment, after you find a way to escape the loop of images your brain keeps playing, you start to make some connections. You realize, all of life is written in a book, and we all get one book, and when that book is over, so are we. Worse, some of us get shorter books than others. Austin's book was a pamphlet. Once it's over, it's over. Throw it away. Say goodbye, Gracie."

"That's morbid."

Miriam stands, kicks over her chair, then picks it up and wings it hard – it clatters against the warehouse floor, spinning away.

"Paul, don't you get it? I tried to save this stupid little kid's life, and in trying to save it, I'm the one who doomed it. I killed him. If I didn't have that vision, if I didn't act on that vision, his dog-fucker of a mother would've probably dragged him into a shoe store or back home and she'd never have been distracted by the crazy girl, and her kid would never have made it to the highway. It's like some sick snake-biting-its-own-tail bullshit. Fate had a plan, and I was part of that plan all along even though I thought I was being slick and wriggling free from destiny's grip. By trying to stop it, I made it happen."

The chair is far away now, so Miriam sits down on the floor. She smokes quietly, huddled over, breathing heavy and deep.

"That's why I don't try to save people," Miriam finally says.

"Oh."

Miriam stubs her cigarette out on the hard concrete floor.

"Now," she says. "What you really want to know is, how did I get this way?"

FIFTEEN

Ouroboros

Waffle House, a staple of the American South, is essentially a greasy yellow coffin. It's small. It's boxy. Half the people inside are little more than animated corpses, stuffing their mouths full of hash browns and sausages and the requisite waffles, their bodies bloating and swelling, their hearts dying. Miriam thinks it's awesome. She eats here because it's just one more nail in the ol' pine box; she can hear her arteries clogging, crunchy and crispy like the skin on fried chicken.