Downtown LA, 2060. Air pollution has gone unchecked and is reaching a critical point. Emergency message gets sent out to everybody's neural link. "AIR POLLUTION LEVELS HIGH - STAY INSIDE" People rush to the grocery store to get toilet paper and canned food and vodka. The air is thick. You can see it. Public service workers and emergency personnel wear filtered full-face gas masks. This goes on for weeks. Birds have been found dead in the street, supposedly having fallen from the sky. Mass evacuations to the inland empire have been increasing the air pollution from all the automobile and gas-powered hovercraft traffic.

The headset dings in your ear. You close your eyes. On your way here a bird fell from the sky onto your windshield. You gasped, swerved, almost crashed. Luckily the streets were almost empty. You pulled over, put on your mask, grabbed some napkins from the floor of the passenger side, and stepped outside your car. You gingerly grabbed the dead bird with the napkins. Looked into its cold, un-moving eye. This innocent creature, made to be free and soar through the open skies above God's green earth. Poisoned, for reasons beyond its understanding and control, by creatures intelligent enough and powerful enough to have the responsibility to --


"Hello?"


The present comes rushing back at you like a nightmare that ends with you falling into your bed.


"Hi, welcome to Starbucks. What can I get started for you?"

"Yeah could I have uhhhh a mocha frappuccino with 3 pumps caramel, chips on top, and sunflower seed milk."

"Sure what size?"

"I SAID a mocha frappuccino with 3 pumps caramel, chips on top, and sunflower seed milk."

You press grande. "Sure. Will that be it?"

"Yeah that's it."

"I'll have your total at the window."


The car rolls up. You open the window and the air rushes in, hot and sickly. You imagine the bird. It's 102 degrees outside, a nice low for mid-January. You think you can smell more birds rotting in the heat. You hold your breath, staring as she fumbles into her wallet for her cash, your eyes burning. You can see the bird's cold, empty eye. She finally gets it and hands it to you. You can see the blood on your windshield. You're about to close the window and take a breath when she says "wait! i have 45 cents". The bird looked broken. You're forced to hold your breath longer as she fumbles for a quarter, and two dimes, when you know she's reached past like 6 dimes and 4 nickels and could have easily gotten 4 dimes and a nickel by now. Kind of fake-looking when it was dead, you know? Finally she gathers the coins, puts it in your hand, and you can close the window. Like it was a puppet with a frame made out of wood and it was left on the floor and somebody stepped on it. You breathe a sharp breath in, and it burns from the residual air that rushed into the store. It felt weird to pick up. You finish the transaction, keeping the window open only for as long as you have to, each breath searing as your eyes burn and well up in pain. Lighter, but more rigid than you thought it would be. You just threw it off the side of the freeway onto the shoulder. You didn't really know what else to do. It felt dirty, like you were committing a crime. Maybe it technically was a crime. You didn't take the napkins back with you into the car, you left them on the side of the road. That's littering. But what were you supposed to do, bring bird guts into your car? The bird made a splat noise when it hit the concrete. Why did you toss it? Because you didn't want to walk over to the shoulder and hold it that whole time. That would have been gross. But that splat sound was grosser. It was lighter than you thought it would be. But somehow more rigid. And kind of fake looking? Like a puppet --

"Thanks for working!" She says. She drops a dollar in the jar and drives away.

The present comes rushing back at you like a nightmare that ends with you falling into your bed, or like a bird falling onto a windshield.

The window is finally closed.

You're lightheaded.

You want to make fun of that person on headset, but your coworker is on lunch.

Your neural link notifies you that you have a new alert text from Starbucks. You open it, praying for a paid shutdown, and the neural link thinks you the message:


"We are still maintaining our policy of closed lobby and open drive thru. Restaurants without a drive thru will be closed. To minimize risk, drive thrus will only have 2 people on shift. Make sure to only open the window when a customer is present. Remember to breathe at least every 30 seconds. Gas masks create a barrier between you and the customer and do not help to create the Third Place!"

You think about the bird.

The headset dings in your ear. The present comes rushing back at you like a nightmare that ends with you falling into your bed, or like a bird falling onto a windshield, or like you, collapsing on the floor of a drive thru Starbucks, coughing up blood, thinking about a stupid fucking bird you never would have thought about in your life, thinking about puppets and how the bird is rigid and how weird the word rigid is because of, you know, boners, and thinking about that god awful fucking splat sound that bird made when you threw it on the concrete and if birds had myths that they passed down about the "Clean Times" when the air was clear and breathing was easy and you could see a mouse from 100 feet up in the air and how you learned that at bird-watching camp in 2nd grade which was a sick 2 day thing the local National Park did for kids where you would