A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Too Nice a Day to Die

Then she went back to where the cushions were, and quite simply and unstudiedly she lay down there, resting the back of her head on them.

There were no symptoms yet. To take her mind off it, she pulled a cigarette out of the package and lit it. Then, as was invariably the case whenever she smoked one, she took no more than two or three slow, thoughtful draws before putting it down on the ashtray and not going back to it again.

She thought of home. “Back home” she always called it whenever she thought of it. But there was no one there to go back to any more. Her mother had died since she’d left. Her father and she had never been very close. He had a housekeeper now, she understood. In any case, she had an idea he much preferred the unfettered company of his cronies to having her back with him again. Her sister was married and had a houseful of kids (three by actual count, but they seemed to fill the place to spilling over point), Her brother was doing his military hitch in West Germany, and he wasn’t much more than a kid anyway.

No, there was no one for her to go to, anywhere.

It was beginning now. This was it. She wasn’t drowsy yet, but she had entered that lulled state just preceding drowsiness. There was a slight hum in her ears, as if a tiny mosquito were jazzing around outside her head. It was too much effort to go ahead thinking things out any longer. She wouldn’t beg the masked faces in the crowd for a friendly look any more. She wouldn’t hope for the slot in the letterbox to show white any more. She wouldn’t wish for the telephone to ring any more. Let the world have its wakefulness — she’d have her sleep. She turned her face to one side, pressed her cheek against the cushions. Her eyes drooped closed. She reached for the soaked cloth, to put it across them, so that they would stay that way.

Then she heard the bell ringing. First she thought it was part of the symptoms. It was like a railroad-crossing signal-bell, far down a distant track, warning when a train is coming. She contorted her body to try to get away from it, and found herself sitting up dazedly, propped backward on her hands. Consciousness peeled all the way back to its outermost limits like the tattered paper opening up on some circus-hoop that has just been jumped through.

It burst into sudden, crashing clarity then. It was right in the room with her. It was over there in the corner. It was the bell on the telephone.

She managed to get up onto her feet. The room swirled about her, then steadied itself. She felt like being sick for a moment. She wanted to breathe, even more than she did just to live, as though they were two separate processes and one could go on without the other. She threw the two windows open one after the other. The fresh air suddenly swept into her stagnant mind tingling like pine-needles in a stuffy place. She remembered to close off the key under the gas-burner in the kitchen-alcove.

It had never stopped ringing all this while. She stood by it, stood looking at it. Finally, to end the nerve-rack of waiting for it to stop by itself, she picked it up.

The voice was that of a woman. It was slightly accented, but more in sentence-arrangement than in actual pronunciation.

“Hello? It is Schultz’ Delicatessen, yes?”

In a lifeless monotone Laurel Hammond repeated the question word for word, just changing it to the negative. “It is not Schultz’ Delicatessen, no.”

The voice, hard to convince, now repeated the repetition in turn. “It is not Schultz’ Delicatessen?”

“I said no, it is not.”

The voice made one last try, as if hoping persistence alone might yet result in righting the error. “This is not Exmount 3-8448?”

“This is Exmount 3-8844,” Laurel said, with a touch of asperity now at being held there so long.

Unarguably refuted at last, the voice became properly contrite. “I must have put the finger in the slot the wrong way around. I’m sorry, I hope you weren’t asleep.”

“I wasn’t, yet,” Laurel said briefly. And even if I had been, she thought, it wouldn’t have been the kind you could have awakened me from.

Still coughing a little, but more from previous reflex now than present impetus, she hung up.

It took a moment for it to sink in. Then she began to laugh. Quietly, simmeringly, at first. Saved by Schultz’ Delicatessen. She wondered why there was something funny about it because of its being a delicatessen. If it had been a wrong-number on a personal call, or on a call to almost any other kind of establishment, there wouldn’t have been anything funny in it. Why was there something ludicrous about a delicatessen? She couldn’t have said. Something to do with the kind of food they sold, probably. Comedy-food: bolognas and salamis and pigs’ knuckles.

She was laughing uncontrollably now, almost in full-blown hysteria. Tottering with it, tears peering in her eyes; now holding her hand flat across her forehead, now over her ribs to support the strain of the laughter. No joke had ever been so funny before, no near-tragedy had ever ended in such hilarity. She only stopped at last because of physical exhaustion, because she was on the verge of prostration.

You couldn’t go back and resume such a thing, not after that kind of a farcical interruption. Your sense of fitness, your sense of proportion, alone — any life, even the most deprecated one, deserved more dignity than that in its finish. She turned on the key under the burner again, but this time she lit a match to it. She put on water, to make a cup of tea. (The old maid’s solace, she thought wryly: trade your hopes of escape for a cup of tea.)

I’ll see it through for one more day, she said to herself. That much I can stand. Just one more. Maybe something will happen, that hasn’t happened on all the empty, barren ones that went before (but she knew it wouldn’t). Maybe it will be different (but she knew better). But if it isn’t, then tomorrow night — she gave a shrug, and the ghost of a retrospective smile flitted across her face — and this time there’ll be no Schultz’ Delicatessen.

She spent the vestigial hours of the night huddled in a large wing-chair, looking too small for it, her little harmonica-sized transistor radio purring away at her elbow. She kept it on the Paterson station, WPAT, which stayed on all night. There were others that did too, but they were crawling with commercials, this one wasn’t. It kept murmuring the melodies of Roberta and Can-Can and My Fair Lady, while the night went by and the world, out there beyond its dial, went by with it. She dozed off finally, her head lolling over like a little girl’s propped-up asleep in a grown-up’s chair.

When the sun made her open her eyes at last, she gave a guilty start at first, thinking this was like other days and she had to be at the office. But it wasn’t. It was the day of grace she’d given herself.

When she was good and ready, and not before, she called the office and told Hattie on the reception-desk: “Tell Mr. Barnes I won’t be in today.” It was after ten by this time.

Hattie was sympathetic at first.. “Not feeling too good, nn?”

Laurel Hammond said, “As a matter of fact, I don’t feel too bad. I feel better than yesterday.” As a matter of fact, she did.

The girl on the reception-desk still tried to be loyal to a fellow-employee. “You want me to tell him you’re not feeling good though, don’t you?” she asked anxiously.

“No,” said Laurel, “I don’t. I don’t care what you tell him.”

The girl on the reception-desk stopped being sympathetic. She was up against something she couldn’t grasp. She became offended. “Oh,” she said, “just like that you take a day off?”

“Just like that I take a day off,” Laurel said, and hung up.

A day off, a lifetime off, forever off, what difference did it make?

Shortly before noon, with a small-sized summer hat on her head and a lightweight summer dress buoyant around her, she closed the door behind her, put the key in her handbag, and stepped out to meet the new day. It was a fine day too, all yellow and blue. The sky was blue, the building-faces were yellow in the sunlight, and the shady sides of the streets were indigo by contrast. Even the cars going by seemed to sparkle, their windshields sending out blinding flashes as they caught the sun.

Where did you go on your last day in New York? That is, on your last day in New York? You didn’t walk Fifth Avenue and window-shop, that was for sure. Window-shopping was a form of appraisal for the future, for a tomorrow when you might really buy. You didn’t go to a show. A show was an appraisal of the past, other people’s lives in the past, dramatized. A walk in the park? That would be pleasant, pastoral. The trees in leaf, the grass, the winding paths, the children playing. But somehow that wasn’t for today either. Its very tranquility, its apartness, its lostness in the center of the buzzing, throbbing city, she had a feeling would make her feel even more apart, more lost, than she felt already, and she didn’t want that. She wanted people around her; she was frightened of tonight.

She got on a bus finally, at random, and let it take her on its hairpin crosstown route, first west along Seventy-second, then east along Fifty-seventh. Then when it reached Fifth and doubled back north to start the whole thing over, she got off and strolled a few blocks down the other way until suddenly the fountain and flower-borders of Rockefeller Center opened out alongside her. She knew then that was where she had wanted to come all along, and wondered why she hadn’t thought of it in the first place.

It was like a little oasis, a breathing-spell, in the rush of the city, and yet it was lively, it wasn’t lonely in the way the park would have been. It was filled with a brightly dressed luncheonbreak crowd, so thick they almost seemed to swarm like bees, and yet in spite of that it was restful, it was almost lulling.

She went back toward the private street that cuts across behind it, which for some highly technical reason is closed to traffic one day in each year in order to maintain its non-public status, and sat on the edge of the sun-warmed coping that runs around the sunken plaza, as dozens of others were doing. She’d come here once or twice in the winter to watch them ice-skate below, but now the ice was gone and they were lunching at tables down there, under vivid garden-umbrellas. Above, a long line of national flags stirred shyly in a breeze mellow as warm golden honey. She tried to make out what countries some of them belonged to, but she was sure of only two, the Union Jack and the Tricolor. The rest were strange to her, there were so many new countries in the world today.

And in every one of them perhaps, at this very moment, there was some girl like herself, contemplating doing what she was contemplating doing. In Paris, and in London, yes and even in Tokyo. Loneliness is all the same, the world over.

Her handbag was plastic, and not a very good plastic at that, apparently. The direct sunlight began to heat it up to a point where it became uncomfortable to keep her hand on it and she could even feel it against her thigh through the thin summer dress she had on. She put it down on the coping alongside of her. Or rather a little to the rear, since she was sitting slightly on the bias in order to be able to take in the scene below her. Then later, in unconsciously shifting still further around, she turned her back on it altogether, without noticing.

Some time after that she heard a curt shout of remonstrance somewhere behind her. She turned to look, as did everyone else. A man who up to that point seemed to have been striding along rather more rapidly than those around him now broke into a fleet run. A second man sprang up from where he’d been sitting on the coping, about three or four persons to the rear of her, and shot after him. In a moment, as people stopped and turned to look, the view became obstructed and they both disappeared from sight.

It was only then she discovered her handbag to be missing.

While she was standing there trying to decide what to do about it, they both came back toward her again. One of them, the one who had given chase, was holding her handbag under one arm and was holding the second man by the scruff of the coat-collar with the other. What made this more feasible than it might otherwise have been was that the captive was offering only a token resistance, handicapped perhaps by his own guilty conscience.

“Whattaya trying to do? Take your hands off. Who do you think you are?” he was jabbering with offended virtue as they came to a halt in front of Laurel.

“Is this yours?” the rescuer asked, showing her the handbag.

“Yes, it is,” she said, taking it from him.

“You should be more careful,” he said in protective reproof. “Putting it down like that is an open invitation for someone to come along and make off with it.”

The nimble-fingered one was quick to take the cue. “I thought somebody had lost it,” he said artlessly. “I was only trying to find out who it belonged to, so I could give it back to them.”

“Oh, sure,” his apprehender said drily.

A policeman materialized, belying the traditional New York adage “They’re never around when you want them.” He was a young cop, and still had all his police training-school ideals intact, it appeared. Right was right and white was white, and there was nothing in-between. “Your name and address, please?” he said to Laurel, when he’d been told what had happened.

“Why?” she asked.

“You’re going to press charges against him, aren’t you?”

“No,” she demurred. “I’m not.”

His poised pencil flattened out in his hand. He looked at her, first with surprise then with stern disapproval. “He snatched your handbag, and yet you’re not going to file a complaint?”

“No,” she said quietly. “I’m not.”

“You realize,” he said severely, “you’re only encouraging people like this. If he thinks he can get away with it, he’ll only go back and do it some more. Before you know it, this city wouldn’t be worth living in.”

“You shouldn’t be so good-natured, lady,” another woman rebuked her from the crowd. “Believe me, if it was me, I’d teach him a lesson.”

Yes, I guess you would, thought Laurel. But then, you have a whole lifetime ahead of you to show your rancor in. I haven’t enough time left for that.

The prisoner had begun to fidget tentatively now that this unexpected reprieve had been granted him. “If the lady don’t want to make a complaint, whaddye holding me for?” he complained querulously. “You got no grounds.”

The quixotic young cop turned on him ferociously. “No? Then I’ll find some, even if I have to make it loitering!”

“How could I be loitering when I was running full steam ah—” the culprit started to say, not illogically. Then he shut up abruptly, as if realizing this admission might not altogether help his case.

“Oh, won’t somebody get me out of this, please!” she suddenly heard herself say, half in wearied sufferance, half in rebellious discontent. She didn’t want to spend the little time there was left to spend standing in the center of a root-fast, cow-eyed crowd. Above all, she didn’t want to spend it making arrangements to have some fellow-wayfarer held in a detention-cell overnight until he could be brought before a magistrate in the morning. She hadn’t meant it for anyone to hear; she’d only meant it for herself. A plea to her own particular private fortunes of the day and of the moment.

But the man who had salvaged her handbag must have caught it and thought it was meant for him. He put a hand lightly under her elbow in guidance and opened a way for her through the ever-thickening crowd.

“Sure you won’t change your mind, lady?” the cop called after her.

“I’m sure,” she said without turning her head.

Once detached from the focus of attention, they continued to walk parallel to one another along the flower-studded, humanity-studded promenade or mall that led out to the Avenue. Past and past.

“You let him off lightly,” he remarked. “Not even a lecture.”

She nodded meditatively, without answering. It’s so easy to be severe, she thought, when you’re safe and intact and sure of yourself, as you probably are. But me, I feel sorry for the whole world and everyone in it, today, even that poor cuss back there.

“I remember, in Chicago once,” he was saying, “I had my wallet lifted out of my back pocket right while I was standing in line outside the ticket-window in Union Station—”

They’d reached the Avenue. With one accord, without even a fractional hesitancy or break in stroll, they turned and continued on northward, back along the way she’d originally come. It was done as unself-consciously as though they’d known each other long and walked along here often. As naturally as though they had a common destination agreed upon beforehand.

She noticed it after a moment, but didn’t do anything to disrupt it. On any other day, she realized, she would have been alerted, taut to separate herself from him. Not today. Until he said something, or did something, that was out of order — not today. It was better to walk with somebody, than to walk with nobody at all.

“—Things like that happen in all large cities, far more than they do in smaller places. I guess the huge crowds give them better cover.”

“Aren’t you from a large city yourself?”

“We like to think of ourselves as a medium-large city, but we’re willing to admit we’re no Chicago or New York. Indianapolis.”

“Oh, where the speedway races are.”

“Our only claim to fame,” he said mournfully.

“I suppose you used to go to them regularly.”

“I never missed a year until this year, and then I couldn’t go because I was here. I saw it on t.v., but it wasn’t the same. Like a midget-race around a twenty-one-inch oblong.”

Suddenly and quite belatedly — for if she’d had any actual objections they would have manifested themselves long before now — he turned to ask: “I’m not bothering you by tagging along like this, am I? I never realized I was until this very—”

“That’s quite all right,” she said levelly. “It’s not a pick-up. And if it were, I’d be the one who did the picking.”

“Nothing of the sort,” he asserted stoutly.

That was the conventional, the expected, answer, she recognized. But in this case it also happened to be true. A pick-up was a planned selection. This had been anything but that; un planned, unsought-after, by both of them.

“Been here long?” she asked him, to get off the prickly topic.

“About six months now. I was transferred here to the Company’s New York office.”

She asked him a question out of her own melancholy experience. “Did you find it hard to adjust?”

“Very. I was king, back home. The only fellow in a houseful of women. I got the royal treatment. They spoiled me rotten.”

That, she decided, was not apparent on the surface, at least.

“My mother spoiled me because I was the only son in a family of girls. (My eldest sister’s married and lives in Japan.) My elder sister spoiled me because she looked on me as her kid brother, and the younger one looked up to me as her big brother. I couldn’t lose.”

“And what did you do to entitle you to all this?”

“Brought home money, and could always be depended on to fix the car or the t.v. without calling in costly repairmen, I suppose.”

“That’s fair enough value received,” she laughed.

They’d reached Fifty-seventh Street. This time they did stop, but not to part, to decide what next to do, where next to go, together. They both seemed to have tacitly agreed to spend the balance of the afternoon together.

“Have lunch with me,” he suggested. “I haven’t had any yet, have you?”

“It’s late; don’t you have to go back to the office?”

“I have the day off. The Company’s founder died, an old man of eighty. He hasn’t been active in years, but out of respect to his memory all our offices everywhere were closed down for one day.” He repeated his invitation.

“I’m not hungry,” she said. “But I am thirsty, after that stroll in the sun. I’ll take you up on an ice-cream soda.”

They turned west for a short distance and stopped in at Hicks, at her suggestion. She waived a table, and they sat down at the counter.

“I stop in here every Christmas — or at least, the day before — and buy myself a box of candy,” she told him.

His brows rose slightly, but he didn’t say anything.

“I have to,” she added simply. “Nobody else does.”

“Maybe next time around,” he said very softly, “you won’t have to.”

She had a chocolate malted and he a toasted-ham and coffee.

They walked on from there and entered the park at the Sixth Avenue entrance, and drifted almost at a somnambulistic gait along the slow curving walk that paces the main driveway there, then finally straightens out and strikes directly up into the heart of the park itself, toward the Mall and the lake and the series of transverses.

Now they were becoming more personal. They spoke less of outside things, of things around them and things on the surface of their lives, and more of things lying below and within themselves. Not steadily, in a continuous stream, but by allowing occasional insights to open up, like chinks in the armor that was each one’s privacy and apartness. Thus she learned many of the things he liked, and a few he didn’t, and he learned them too about her. And surprisingly many of the things they liked were the same, and not a few of the things they didn’t, also.

We’re remarkably compatible, the thought occurred to her. Isn’t it too bad we had to meet — so late.

It’s not so late, she said to herself then, unless you will it to be so. And a daring thought barely ventured to peer forth around the corner of her mind, then quickly vanished again: it needn’t be late at all, it can be early, if you want it to be. Early love, first love.

“What were you doing six months ago today, exactly to the day?” she asked him suddenly.

“It’s difficult to pin-point it that closely. Let’s see, six months ago I was still back in ’napolis. If it was a weekday, then I was slaving over a hot draught-board until five; after five I was driving back to the harem. If it was a Sunday I was probably out driving in the crate with some seat-mate.”

Anyone special? she wondered, but didn’t say it.

“Why did you ask that?”

She upped a shoulder slightly. “I don’t know.”

She did, though. How different my life might have been, she couldn’t help reflecting, if I’d met you — as you seem to be — six months ago instead of today.

“Do you get lonely at times, since you’ve come to New York?”

“Sure I do.” Then he reiterated, “I sure do. Anyone would.”

“It’s easier for a man, though, isn’t it?”

“No it isn’t,” he told her quietly. “Not really. Oh, I know, girls think that a man can go a lot of places they can’t, by themselves. And he can. But what does he find when he goes to those places? Loud, laughing companionship for an hour-or for an evening. Did you ever know, you can be lonely with someone’s loud laughter ringing right into your ear? Did you ever know?”

She had a complete picture, a vignette, of his life now, of that one aspect of it, without his having to say anything further.

“No,” he said, “we’re in the same boat, all of us.”

They sat down on a bench overlooking the lake. They didn’t talk any more for a while. After a time an indigent squirrel spotted them, made toward them by fits and starts, looked them over from a propitiatingly erect position, then scrambled up to the top-slat of the bench-back and ran nimbly across it. She could feel the fuzz of its tail brush lightly across the back of her neck. It stopped by his shoulder and sniffed at it inquiringly. “Sorry, son,” he said to it. They both looked at it and smiled, then smiled to each other. Completely matter-of-fact, and far too venal to waste time allowing itself to be petted empty-handed, it dropped down to the ground again and went lumbering off bushy-tailed across the grass.

The irregular picket-fence of tall building-tops around them on three sides in the distance looked trim and spruce and spotless as new paint in the sunshine. Much better than when you were up close to them. It was a brave city, she decided, eyeing them. Brave in its other sense; not courageous, so much as outstanding, commanding. It was too nice a town to die in. Though it had no honeysuckle vines and no balconies and no guitars, it was meant for love. For living and for love, and the two were inseparable; one didn’t come without the other.

By about four in the afternoon they were already using “Laurel” and “Duane” when they said things to each other. Sparingly at first, a little self-consciously. As though not wanting to abuse the privilege each one had granted to the other. The first time she heard him say it, a warm, sunny feeling ran through her, that she couldn’t contradict or deny. It was like belonging to someone a little, belonging to someone at last. While at the same time you at last had someone who belonged a little to you.

There is no hard and fast line that can be drawn that says: up to here there was no love; from here on there is now love. Love is a gradual thing, it may take a moment, a month, or a year to come on, and in each two its gradations are different. With some it comes fast, with some it comes slowly. Sometimes one kindles from the other, sometimes both kindle spontaneously. And once in a tragic while one kindles only after the other has already dimmed and gone out, and has to burn forlornly alone.

By the time they left that consequential bench overlooking the tranquil little lake tucked away inside the park and started walking slowly onward in the general direction of her place, she was already well on the verge of being in love with him. And she sensed that he was too, with her. It couldn’t be mistaken. There was a certain shyness now, like a catch, she heard somewhere behind his voice every time he spoke to her. The midway stage, the falter, between the assuredness of companionability and the assuredness of openly declared love. And when their hands accidentally brushed once or twice as they walked slowly side by side, he didn’t have to turn his head to look at her, nor she to look at him, for them both to be aware of it. It was like a kiss of the hands, their first kiss. The heart knows these things. The heart is smart. Even the unpracticed heart.

They were beginning to be in love. The very air transmitted it, carried it to and fro from one to the other and back again. It had perhaps happened to them so quickly, she was ready to admit, because they both came to it fresh, wholehearted, without ever having known it before.

The June day was slowly ebbing away at last, in velvety beauty. The twin towers of the Majestic Apartments were two-toned now, coral where they faced the glowing river-sky, a sort of misty heliotrope where they faced the imminent starting point of night. The first star was already in the sky. It was like a young couple’s diamond engagement-ring. Very small, but bright and clear with promise and with hope.

New York. This was New York, on the evening of what was to have been the last day in the world — but wouldn’t be now any more. It had been a lovely day, a nice day, too nice a day to die.

They emerged at the Seventy-second Street pedestrian outlet, and sauntered north along Central Park West for a few blocks, until they’d arrived opposite the side-street her apartment was on. There they waited for a light, and crossed over to the residential side of the great artery, on which the headlights of cars in the deepening dusk were like a continuous stream of tracer-bullets aimed at anyone with temerity enough to cross their trajectory. There they stopped and stood again, a little in from the corner — in what they both hoped was to be only a very temporary parting — for she had to cross once more, to the north side of the street, to reach her door.

For a moment he didn’t seem to know what to say, and for a moment she couldn’t help him. They both turned their heads and looked up one way together. Then they both turned the opposite way and looked that way together. Then they looked at each other and they both smiled. Then the muteness broke too suddenly, and they both spoke at once.

“Well, I guess this is where—”

“Well, I suppose this is where—”

Then they laughed and there was no more constraint.

She knew he was going to ask her to dinner — the first of all the many that they’d most likely share together — and he did. First she was going to agree with ready willingness, and then she remembered the things that were waiting upstairs. Waiting just as she’d left them, from last night. Waiting dark and brooding all through the sunny, glorious day — for tonight. The pillow on the floor, the cigarette-dish. The little bowl of water with the handkerchief still soaking in it, the blindfold that was to have shut out the sight of death. She shuddered to think of them now. But more than that, she didn’t want them to still be there if she brought him up with her. She wanted to go up ahead and quickly disperse them, do away with them.

“Look, I’ll tell you what,” she said animatedly. “The next time — the very next — we’ll go to a restaurant, if you want to. But tonight let’s do this: let’s eat in. It’s a good night for cold-cuts.” She knew he wouldn’t misunderstand if she had him up so soon after meeting him; she already knew him well enough to know that. “I want you to go to Schultz’ Delicatessen, and pick up whatever appeals to you — I’ll leave that to you — and bring it up to the apartment. I’ll make the coffee.”

“Schultz’,” he said dutifully. “Where is it?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted with a chuckle and a handspread. “But I know you can find it in the directory. I can give you the number. It’s Exmount 3-8448. It’s the same as my own number, just twisted around a little. Promise me you won’t go anywhere else. Only Schultz. I have a very special reason for it. I don’t want to tell you what it is right tonight, but some day I will.”

“I promise. Schultz’ and nobody but Schultz.”

They separated. She started across the street on a long diagonal. She turned and called back: “Don’t take too long.”

“I won’t,” he answered.

Then she turned unexpectedly a second time.

“I forgot to give you the apartment-number. It’s Three—”

It was a big black shape. It was less like a car than an animal leaping at its kill. It was feline in its stealth, and lupine in its ferocity, big malevolent eyes blindingly aglow. Whether its occupants were drunk, or crazed with their own speed, or fleeing from some misdeed, it gave her no warning. It came slashing around the corner like the curved swing of a scimitar.

She was caught dead-center in front of it. Had she been a little to one side, she might have leaped back toward her companion; a little to the other, she might have leaped forward to the safety of the empty roadway alongside it. She tried to, but at the same moment it swerved that way, also trying to avoid her, and they remained fixed dead-center to one another. Then there was no more time for a second try.

She didn’t go down under it. It cast her aside in a long, low parabola. Then it slowed, then it stopped, with a crazy shriek that sounded like remorse. Too late.

She lay flat along the ground, but with her head propped up by the sharp-edged curbstone it had crashed against. The sound it had made striking was terminal. There could be no possibility of life after such an impact.

And it had been too nice a day to die.