Page 62 of The Quiet Tenant

What the stories never said: at the end of the day, if a man wants to kill you, he kills you. It’s not on you to convince him not to.

You look out the window. You think:Almost.Something bad happened to me, and I thought I was going to die but I didn’t, and I almost made it. It just wasn’t meant to be.

You don’t want to die, but death makes sense to you.

Something surges through you. Maybe you stop being afraid. Maybe you’re more terrified than ever, and it unlocks the recklessparts of you. You keep talking. You say a bunch of bullshit, like you don’t care anymore. Talking is the only thing that belongs to you, and you’re going to use it for all it’s worth.

“The weather is so nice up here,” you say. “I watched a movie the other night and I expected it to end well but it didn’t. Don’t you hate when that happens?”

He raises an eyebrow at you, just barely.

“I don’t even watch that many movies,” you continue, “precisely for that reason. I don’t like investing two, three hours of my time only to end up disappointed. Or sad.”

His fingers flick an invisible speck of dust off the steering wheel. Long fingers, strong hands. Bad news everywhere.

“Shut up,” he says.

Or else? You’ll kill me?

You stare back outside. He’s driving down a stretch of road you don’t recognize, trees and mud as far as you can see.

Then, a deer. He sees it coming from afar and slows down, waits for it to cross. A responsible driver. Now’s not the time to crash or stall out. What would he do, call AAA? How would he explain the quivering girl in the passenger seat, and all that stuff in the back?

You watch as the deer gets away. She’s not coming to save you. But behind her, you spot them: black birds, at least ten of them, pecking at a tree trunk.

“It’s called a murder,” you say.

The truck rolls past the birds. They turn their beady eyes up to you, like your presence compels them to believe in something.

He takes his foot off the gas pedal. The truck stops. He turns to look at you. Really look at you, for the first time.

Blue eyes,you think.How dare you have blue eyes? How dare you ruin that for everybody?

“What did you just say?” he asks.

You tilt your head toward the birds.

“That’s what they call a group of crows. Not a flock or a fleet or anything. A murder of crows.”

His Adam’s apple bobs up and down. What you just said, it must mean something to him. You don’t know if it’s good or bad. You don’t know if it’s anything of value.

You don’t know it yet, but this man has a family. A daughter and a wife, whose cancer has just returned.

You don’t know it yet, but this man has trouble believing in anything. For the first time since he started killing, he has trouble believing in himself.

He turns to face the road. His fingers grip the steering wheel, white knuckles on black polyurethane.

Outside the truck, a crow flies away.

The truck starts again. He gives it some gas, then veers to the right. The truck comes to a halt. He steers the other way, across the road, and hits the gas pedal. Your body shifts against the seat, rocked by his maneuvering.

A U-turn.

A fucking U-turn.

You have no idea what this means.

He takes one hand off the wheel and shuffles around the glove compartment until he finds a bandanna.

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