An Object in Orbit (Part 4)
serial fiction, wherein one man has extraordinarily good luck
You are reading part 4 of the 9-part serial story An Object in Orbit. Go here to start at the beginning.
Is luck genetic? Or is it something more than luck? Is it a familial disposition toward being at the right place at the right time? Or perhaps an intellectual and physical proclivity for avoiding the wrong places?
Only one migrant survived to tell the story of how the electric car landed on the transport bus and crushed it to bits. The migrant who survived had come down with food poisoning and had taken longer than the others to return to the bus after the pit stop at the Seven-Eleven. The bus left him behind.
Stragglers could not be tolerated, not with the route so carefully planned to avoid the border patrol agents, one of whom had been persuaded to leave his post for precisely ten minutes at precisely 3:17 a.m. on the twelfth of November to assure safe passage for the migrants from the United States into Mexico. He had a soft spot for the migrants. Only by the grace of God had he himself been born on the right side of the border; he could imagine himself in their shoes.
The migrant with food poisoning exited the Seven-Eleven only seconds after the bus had departed. Hearing a whirring through space, a high whistle, he looked up and saw the cherry-red object hurtling through the night sky on its trajectory toward earth, toward Interstate 5, just south of the Seven-Eleven. He saw it crash into the bus, heard the terrible grinding of metal on metal. But no shrieks because it was too fast. It was, mercifully and unmercifully, that fast. Too fast to feel anything, and also, of course, too fast to run.
As he stood in the parking lot of the Seven-Eleven, still puking his guts out, feverish, sweating, he could not believe his good luck. Or could believe it. Except for the one time, it had always been thus. Except for the one time, his luck had always been exceptional.
As soon as news spread, there were the jokes on the internet about two worlds colliding. Or three, if you connect the dots.
Thank you for reading my author newsletter. “An Object in Orbit” originally appeared in Boulevard in 2019.