She held the phone in her hand delicately, balanced on one palm while the fingers of the other dangled over the screen, as if it were an animal rescued from the wild that she was trying to introduce to a human touch for the first time. The green "call" icon glowed a soft and inviting green, but rather than be soothed she felt like it was trying to lull her into a false sense of security.

The halogen strip bulbs buzzed overhead, and their light glinted from the dark glass in a far less healthy-looking yellow. Her index finger dropped another half-inch towards the screen, leaving scarcely a centimetre of empty air between them, and she was on the brink of closing that distance when something clanged loudly from the direction of the kitchen, causing her to jolt backwards and almost drop the phone entirely.

Fuck. Why was this always the hardest part of a call?

She dithered for another few seconds before finally deciding that she was being silly, and stabbing at the button. The speaker buzzed unpleasantly as she held it up to her ear. She counted six rings before the sound gave way to soft static, followed by a cheery voice.

"Hi! It's Michelle. I can't answer the phone right now, so please leave me a message, and I'll try to get back to you. Peace!"

She swore softly, then just as rapidly clapped a hand over her mouth in case the microphone was picking her up. Thankfully she had managed to pre-empt the recording tone. She let it play out, then affected a casual cheerfulness as she spoke down the line.

"Hey Shellie, it's, uh, it's April. I just wanted to apologise for running out on you the other night, and... for, you know. For what happened. I know I should have stuck around for a little longer but, I was embarrassed, and... and I know that's not an excuse, but I hope I can make it up to you? I had a really good time, and-"

The metal kitchen door popped open, revealing the head, shoulders and single arm of a tall, large-framed man with long hair and a biker's glove. He opened his mouth as if to say something, paused when he saw that April was on the phone, and instead settled for frantically waving at her, then beckoning her towards the door, emoting something indistinct with his eyes.

"-hey, sorry. I have to go, I'm on break. But maybe call me back later? Or I'll call you? If that's okay. And- uh, let me know if you want me to come around again this week, we can finish watching that thing with the cannibals and I can buy take out to make up for-"

The man in the doorway was shooting her an increasingly exasperated expression.

"-okay, yeah. Speak later, have to go. Bye."

She pressed the end call button and gave the man a hard stare.

"What is it, Fabian? Not a good time."

"Hey, hey, don't shoot the messenger now." Fabian stepped into the break room fully, revealing the rest of his plaid shirt and the other biker's glove. "Kate's getting off early, so you need to take over."

"What, so I don't get my 30 minutes? Whatever happened to workplace rights?"

Fabian glanced at the wall clock, which was ticking away avidly despite being well overdue for a new set of AAs. "April, it's five past. You're already over."

"Crap, really? Crap!"

"Were you on the phone that whole time?"

April pulled herself to her feet and started shrugging her apron on, struggling to unknot the cords, but managing to tighten them even further in the process. Eventually she gave up and threw the loop of fabric over her head, letting it dangle down behind her.

"No, I was just... you know, looking at it."

"You were... looking at your dial pad?"

"It's a smartphone, Fabe. They can do things other than just make calls now."

"Right. And, were you doing any of those things?"

She dithered for a moment. "Well, no, but-"

Fabian snorted. "Right, right, I see."

"You stop giving me that look and let me through. Don't you have deliveries you're supposed to be making about now?"

"Not now, no, so you're stuck with me."

Fabian grinned, stepping out the way as she walked through the door and into the kitchen, bee-lining for the sink. He trailed after her as she twisted the tap and started scrubbing her palms.

"So, was this a Michelle thing?" he asked.

She scrunched up her nose at him, squeezing a glob of soap out into her hands.

"None of your fucking business, Fabe."

"Come on, I'm happy for you! I was the one who told you you should give it a try, right?"

"Yeah, Fabian, but that's always your advice."

"Because it's always good advice." He grinned placidly. April sighed.

"I think it's more a matter of a stopped clock being right twice a day."

"Ouch, April, that's rough. Give me some credit here."

She relented slightly. "Okay, fine. Thank you for the push."

"You're welcome."

There was a few seconds of silence while April dried her hands off with a square of blue tissue.

"So, did you guys get to like, second base? Or-"

"Okay!" interrupted April, as she walked over to the counter, squinting up at the incoming order board. "How about we change the subject."

The screen read, ‘Sporks Rings of Fury! 2x. Extr. Pep.ni'. She reached up to a shelf above her and grabbed blindly at the chopped onions container, discovered it was empty, and sighed, reaching for the unchopped onion container instead.

"Sure. Hey, wanna hear about this guy I just delivered to?"

April sighed internally. Great, one of Fabian's famous delivery anecdotes. Still, it was probably better than talking about...

"Yeah, Fabe, lay it on me."

He cracked a grin.

"Okay, so this place was down in Wanstead, right? On those little roads by the Tesco. Anyway, I got there, and I walked up to the door and rang the bell and, like- okay. At first I thought, 'well, the bell must not be working,' because I wasn't hearing shit from inside the house, or- well, I was also thinking, like, 'maybe their door is just really thick.' So I reached out to knock instead but then the bell does start ringing—I guess it was, like, on a pretty major delay?—and it's this classical music shit, you know the one? 'Dun dun dun dun, dun dun dun-' you know, that one."

April nodded, vaguely.

"Anyway, so I'm hearing that and its playing for like a good ten or twenty seconds before the door starts to unlock, and- hey, hey- you still listening? Hey, April?"

Even if the honest answer was probably ‘not really', her typical modus operandi during Fabian's delivery monologues was to let him get on with it and enjoy himself. She nodded at him in half-hearted encouragement, trying not to lose focus on the onion she was now idly chopping with one hand.

Fabian seemed to be catching onto her, however. He walked over and snapped his fingers in front of her face in an irritating manner. April waved him off, causing them to briefly engage in a bout of one-handed arm-to-arm combat.

"Hey, come on now, you were the one who told me to change the subject."

"I'm listening! But I also have to, like, actually do my job?" She pushed the trayful of sliced onions to one side with a dramatic flourish of her knife, an action that was undermined by a couple of loose pieces falling to the floor. Fabian watched as they landed, wetly.

"Aw, come on April, you could drop those onions on the floor in your sleep, and you know it. Look, I understand if you're distracted..."

Fabian had a glint in his eye, so she did her best to cut him off before the topic steered back towards more dangerous waters.

"No, no, stop, none of that. Please go back to telling me about the house you just delivered to. Trust me, I'm riveted."

"You better be!" He grinned. "Right, so, the door unlocks, and there's this guy there, right? Completely shirtless, which- well, you get that all the time, but this guy- whoof! - this guy was something else, man, I tell you, I've never seen a dude with so much hair. For a second I thought he was literally a gorilla, except he was also wearing this shitty wooden bead necklace from a charity shop, and he had a waxed moustache and I thought to myself, this guy- this guy- wait, hold on a moment."

April glanced back up at him, seeing that he'd been distracted by the monitor that was displaying the list of outgoing orders. He snatched up a worn-looking motorcycle helmet with his left arm, and then was forced to set it down on the counter-top again almost immediately, in order to shrug into the strap of an insulated messenger bag from the loose pile by the door.

"Shit, I've gotta head out again in a minute. Kate left one in the heater, one in the oven. Let me know when it's done and I'll take them both."

"Yeah, sure." April paused in her chopping for a moment as she watched him fumble with the keys in his jacket pocket, considering whether to throw him a bone before finally deciding that she probably owed him it. "So, uh. What happened?"

"Huh? What?" Fabian shot her a vaguely confused glance as he looked up from the keys.

"What happened? With the, uh- the hairy guy?"

"Oh. Well, uh, to be honest? Not actually that much really." He shot a bright smile in defiance to her unimpressed expression, then stuck the helmet over his head. "But he was really fucking hairy."

"Sure." April looked back down at the chopping board, her hands now working automatically.

He grimaced. "One of these days I'm going to find something that will actually hold your attention more than your cooking does."

"The cooking's a job, Fabian. I genuinely find hearing about your, uh, like, your hairy guy and all that- it's more interesting than making pizzas. I'm just... dedicated to my work is all."

"Still, clearly I need to up my anecdote game. If you ever hear about, like, a crash-landed UFO you could tell me about, or if you decide to set Sporks on fire in a blaze of retribution for its sins against our fellow proles- both of those would make pretty good stories for my next gig, I reckon."

April scoffed. "Well I'm not burning the place down when I still need to get paid this month, Fabe, so I'm afraid you're out of luck on that front."

"Fine, well, you can keep an eye out for the UFO instead. If you can hook me up with an alien I'll forgive you for burning the place down."

"Hook you up with-"

"Noooooot like that." He turned back towards the door. "Look, I'll be back in a bit. Keep things chugging while I'm gone?"

"'course, Fabe."

"Oh, and April?" Fabian was still looking at her.

"Yeah?"

"Please, don't actually set the place on fire."

April could almost feel the wink behind his visor as she scoffed, but before she could say anything, he had walked through the door and out of the prep area. April indulged in a sarcastic eye-roll that only she was party to.

Fabian was far from the least tolerable guy she'd had the pleasure of working with in this place, but he had a certain non-stop pace to his conversation that made him best experienced in short doses. That said, it was probably that attitude of transforming mundane everyday interactions into conversational fuel that was allowing him to stand against the tide of Sporks' typically rapid employee turnover rate. A speedy arrival and even more speedy departure for colleagues had been the norm since the eight months since April had been brought on. Seemingly, Fabian wasn't the only thing about Sporks that was best experienced in small doses. There was also the pizza itself, for example.

"The problem is," she thought to herself, scraping loose onion pieces into a cheap plastic bowl with the company's logo embossed at the bottom, "that this place has almost no redeeming qualities whatsoever."

Sporks was one of those corporate chains that had managed to streamline and optimize away most of the common sense out of its business model. Sure, the pizza got made quick, the menu had pretty much anything you might want out of a self-respecting delivery chain, and she was sure it made more than enough money to keep her and the ever-rotating cast of motorcycle jockeys employed. But she couldn't help but notice that there were several basic questions about the place that seemed to have been overlooked by whatever anonymous suit set the agenda.

"Like, for instance, why is a pizza chain named Sporks, after a piece of cutlery that isn't even actually used to eat pizza? What the fuck is up with that? Hell, is a spork even a real piece of cutlery anyway, or is it just a weirdo hybrid? And why do we still have to put the little white plastic pizza tables in the boxes, even though the cardboard boxes have their own tabs built in to stop the food getting crushed? Is there actually somebody in charge of thinking about this stuff, or does it all just manifest out of the ether, in defiance of all fundamental laws of physical reality?"

She pushed her bowl of onion to one side, muttering something indistinct about the inefficiency of corporate bureaucracy, and was just about to grab another onion when the heating element on one of the oven racks clicked off, the timer buzzing as it hit zero to indicate the termination of its "bake" phase. April reached over to pull out the finished pizza that Fabian had wanted.

She wondered why it was that she had stayed at Sporks, instead of following the example of her former co-workers' consensus good sense. For all her complaints, she was still on the staff roll after more than half a year. Perhaps her managers looked favourably on her for that, believing that after years of searching they had finally found the dedicated long-termer they had been looking for. April cringed internally at the prospect.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

No, it wasn't personal loyalty that had kept her from moving on like the others, nor was it any particular passion for preparing mediocre stuffed-crust. If she was honest with herself, it was more a sort of apathetic disinterest in moving on to anywhere else. Taken charitably, she stayed because she didn't want to uproot her life. Less charitably, and probably most accurately, remaining at Sporks was the path of least resistance.

Sliding one of the cardboard sheaths out of the stacked pile behind her, she twisted the tabs until it snapped up into its pizza-ready configuration. Manoeuvring her other hand, which was holding the pizza tray, she slid the cooked pie down into the box, then reached behind her for a pizza wheel, the final step in the pizza ritual before dispatching her newborn circular offspring to whichever weirdo had wanted both pineapple and triple olives.

It was on the third slice of the wheel across the pizza-face that she looked up and saw the monkey.

April had been to a zoo once, and so she was familiar with the concept of monkeys, if not quite enough to identify species at a glance. It reminded her vaguely of a video she had seen once of urban monkey populations in India, although when she thought about it she decided that the face was probably a little too flat, and given that she didn't have any other leads at that moment decided that she probably had more important things to worry about.

"Like, for instance," she thought as her thoughts stuttered and caught up with the present, "the fact that there is a monkey perched on the counter-top in front of the window at Sporks". "Yeah," her brain decided, "that is really not where a monkey is supposed to be." For one thing, any sort of animal in the kitchen was a big hygiene no-no, potentially even a store-closing and pay-check-impacting event. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the last time she had checked wild monkeys were not typically native to North London.

But it couldn't be a wild monkey, could it? If it were a wild monkey, then how could she explain what had been done to its face?

If this monkey had escaped from a zoo and made Sporks its first port of call, perhaps for a quick snack on its whistle-stop tour of the city, she would have expected the typical plain-faced monkey look. Instead, the little animal looked like it had been preparing to attend some sort of exotic carnival.

Across its tiny face was an intricate blossoming flower of colour, mixed into the fur as if somebody had splashed it with a handful of powder paint, somehow managing to apply that handful in perfectly symmetrical floral flourishes. Vibrant burgundy stripes contrasted violently with delicate blue-violet filigree, all set against the backdrop of a yellow-orange starburst pattern, which dissolved outwards at the edges into a tight gradient of gradually diminishing dots before ultimately fading away into the baseline brown of the creature's fur.

If somebody had decorated the monkey in this way, they had done an extremely thorough job. April wondered how they had applied the dye without the monkey moving and disrupting the exacting precision, but then again, in the entire time that she had been taking the creature in—a full fifteen seconds by that point, standing there slack-jawed and dumbfounded—it hadn't moved a muscle. It just sat there, stock still, staring at her with saucer-like, slightly-too-large-eyes. The eyes, she noticed with a shock, were twin spheres of uniform, glassy scarlet.

"Twelve," said the monkey.

April jolted backwards, her back jerking into a rigid upright pose that almost scattered the pizza slices she had been excavating out across the tile floor. As it was, the box slid out precariously far over the counter's edge, and the cutting wheel she had been holding came loose from her grip, flicking upward in a curving arc that saw it clatter against a pile of stacked steel pans behind her.

The loud crash that this made distracted April for long enough that she almost lost track of the monkey as it darted backwards out of the window behind it, to a mixture of her relief and confusion as she tried to remember when it could have been unlocked and opened. As she moved her eyes back up to where it had been, she caught a flash of brown and scarlet that quickly disappeared out of sight behind the pane. April stared instead at the spot on the counter where it had been.

She had never been the type of person to be one-hundred-percent certain of her overall mental stability, but even she had to admit that hallucinating talking monkeys would be a pretty dismal development for her mental health. Nonetheless, it had definitely at least sounded like the monkey had spoken to her. Or...

"Maybe," she muttered to herself, "it was a trained animal." She thought of how parrots were able to repeat the sounds of human speech, and considered that, after all, hadn't the monkey been decorated as if it were accessory to some kind of performance? Yes, it was probably some sort of show monkey, that had escaped from a wandering circus, and its act was that had been taught to... speak? Could monkeys usually even make those kinds of sounds? And why would you teach it to say "twelve"?

While one half of her mind wondered what sort of travelling circus could have so close to her workplace that its counting monkey had shown up there during her shift, and the other continued to doubt the evidence of her senses, she slowly walked across to the counter-top where the monkey had been sitting, reaching a hand out across it. Her fingers rapped against the cold surface of the window pane.

The window which was still locked firmly shut.

"Hey, so- I remembered something else about the hairy guy," said Fabian conversationally as he strolled back through the door, startling April out of her reverie. "I thought there was something else, but I guess I forgot? Anyway, see, he had this tattoo—I could see it beneath the hair, kinda stretched out over one peck and going under his armpit. And at first I thought it was like, a flexing bicep or something, but. But, uh. Hey, April, you okay there? What's wrong?"

April had whirled around and was staring at him, wild-eyed. Fabian looked at her with a slightly concerned expression as he scooped up the box of pizza she had been midway through cutting and folded it up under his arm alongside the box that he was already carrying.

"I- I thought I saw something?" April's voice was uncertain.

"Yeah? Like what?"

"Like..."

She couldn't bring herself to actually say it out loud.

"Fabian? Did you ever see, like... animals, around here? By the window, or...?"

"What, like, a dog or something? I mean yeah, I think there's a stray or that's been hanging around the bins recently. It's like- what do you call them? Those little things with the- the fur-" He made vague twisting motions with his hands. "The curly fur, you know. Did you see it?"

"I- No, I don't think think it was, uh, that."

"Well let me know if you do, because last time I saw it I told myself, 'I should probably call animal control to come pick the lil' guy up', but then I thought, if I did that and they came out, I'd be the one who has to find it, and it's not like I really know where to start. I haven't seen where it sleeps or anything, just seen it after we put the bins out some days, and hey, Kate probably wouldn't want me taking time out of my shift to go look. But if you manage to figure out where it's hiding most days we can probably..."

April let him keep speaking as he slide his cargo into the delivery bag and shouldered it, his keys awkwardly dangling from an outside finger. As she watched him, she suddenly noticed a faint tapping sound coming from somewhere in the vicinity of the counter-top, and spun back around to look out the window, fully expecting to see a faceful of red-painted fur peering back at her. Squinting out through the glass, she lost the thread of Fabian's ongoing monologue as he walked back out through the door.

No monkey.

No, because she realised now that the faint tapping noise wasn't tapping at all, but rather a slightly irregular drip of liquid falling onto the faux-marble counter-top beneath her. Looking down, she realised with a sudden shock that she was bleeding. A straight, thin gash had been sliced across the edge of her palm up to the base of her pinky finger. A surprisingly large volume of blood had already seeped out of the shallow wound, which she belatedly realised must have been the result of her earlier mishandling of the pizza cutter.

Something inside April froze ice cold. Moving automatically, her heart thudding, she ran over to the sink to stem the cut with a balled-up wad of kitchen roll, and wrapped an additional strip over the top of that to secure it. The shock of seeing the monkey had totally numbed her to the pain, but she was feeling it now; the throbbing beat of her pulse, the sharp sting of severed tissue, the dark red stain dripping from her fingers. She saw the loosely spattered red trail of droplets marking her path as she had walked across the room. Her blood.

Blood.

April felt the rising bile of a queasy horror in her throat. The horror rose until it was something closer to sharp panic. and her eyes traced the trail of droplets to where they terminated, at the counter-top where she had been doing her slicing earlier. A watery red stain traced out a line with a sharp right-angle, the outline of the cardboard box that had been sitting there until a minute prior.

Fabian, you fucking idiot, how could you not notice?

It wasn't a fear of blood that April had; not exactly, anyway. Her specific phobia stemmed more from what the blood represented; a near irrational, almost extra-physical sense of blood as a vector contamination. A biological contaminant, spilling free from her body to soak into the surfaces, the floors, the slightly-grimy-but-still-nominally-mostly-sanitized cracks and crevices of the Sporks kitchen food prep area.

"And," thought April as she hurried towards the door to the motorbike bay, "into the fucking pizza that we are supposed to be serving to our fucking customers. I swear to god Fabian, if you spent a fraction of the time observing your own surroundings that you spend prattling on about people you delivered to one time..."

She burst out through the door of the delivery bay just in time to catch sight of Fabian, battered red biker's helmet affixed to his head, speeding off around the corner. For a few short moments, she considered just leaving the matter there. It was only blood, after all. She was pretty sure that it was inside of most people. She had no logical reason to suspect that her blood in particular would cause undue harm to anyone, even if it were mixed in, near invisibly, with the tomato sauce...

She suppressed the gag reflex that accompanied her next stab of panic, and realised that something inside her just wasn't going to let her live with that image, not today.

Their Sporks outlet had three motorbikes set aside for regular deliveries, and one backup bike, sans-brand-livery, that was kept as a spare in case of mechanical issues. Fabian had one of the regular three, and one of their other delivery staff, Nadine, had taken a second out on a long distance call some forty minutes previously. This was the Sunday shift, though, and despite it being late evening they typically only fielded two riders, leaving the third bike unused in addition to the backup. That gave her two to choose from; she opted for the spare, figuring that it would probably be the least missed.

Should only be gone for a few minutes... Be back right away... God this is so fucking stupid...

April didn't typically ride delivery, but her staff keyring had a key to the bike lock-up that she used to secure it when she worked closing. This meant that, while she technically wasn't supposed to be able to actually use the bikes, their keys were accessible to her on their hooks in the lock-up, and she had taken them out once before when a complacent former manager had found himself short-staffed. At least she could ride a motorcycle, unlike the other poor guy who he'd tried to put in the saddle. That had been one of their shorter-term hires, even for Sporks.

She grabbed the spare bike by the handlebars and, straining, shuffled it out to the centre of the space, giving herself enough room to kick up the kickstand and wheel it out of the door. She struggled slightly against the weight of the bulky machine as she shoved it over the slight bump that marked the threshold.

Somewhat surprisingly, the spare bike did come with its own helmet, but after wasting precious seconds unfastening the thing and forcing it over her head, it became clear that the battered apparatus was several sizes too large. She decided that on balance it was probably a smarter idea to just steal the helmet from the unused third bike, instead of taking the hit to her visual field. She yanked off the spare helmet, shook her hair out, and jammed the replacement on her head in its place. All in all, she had lost nearly a minute since Fabian had left, time that she would now have to make up.

No time to waste, then.

The bike jumped underneath her as she urged it out of the lot and pulled onto the A1400, thanking the universe at large that the order dispatch screens displayed a recipient address, so she at least knew where Fabian was going. A fifteen minute ride, she would've roughly guessed, or at least it would be in a scenario where she wasn't chasing down another bike that was carrying her bloody fuck-up. She would have to cover the route faster to catch up, and so she gunned the throttle, weaving around the few cars that were cruising down the highway.

Unfortunately, this was the one day that the city had decided not to cooperate with one of its typically unavoidable traffic jams, which Fabian would have at least had to slow down for in order to pass through. As it was, there were just enough other vehicles on the road to force her to regularly swerve off of her course, rocking back and forth slalom motion that was probably outside of her comfortable skill ceiling. She didn't ride bikes that often, and certainly not while play-acting the part of a reckless stunt racer.

There was still a part of her brain—a fairly sizeable portion, in fact—that was yelling at her that this was a fucking stupid thing for her to be doing. It was just a damn pizza, after all. The customer would probably notice before actually biting into the thing, and then they could call up and complain, and really the worst case scenario was that she got- urgh!

April winced as she was forced to narrowly weave between two vehicles that were driving far too slow for the fast lane.

Worst case scenario, she got fired. No, a little spilled blood was probably not worth risking life and limb over, but then on reflection the core struggle of her life was doing dumb shit for one nonsensical reason or the other that her brain had decided she could not ignore. She wondered if acknowledging this and allowing herself to be pulled along anyway was her being wilfully complicit in her own bad choices, but she was too stressed out about not crashing to really worry about it right then and there.

When April had been a teenager, she had been taken on a weekend camp-out with her local Scout troupe; her once-weekly attempt at seeking out those rare and highly prized "grass touching" vibes. It was the sort of thing she enjoyed, usually, except that on the first day she had tripped over a stump on the hiking trail and cut a gash in her knee.

That would have been bad enough on its own, but the wound had soaked through the little stick-on plaster the Scoutmaster had provided as she slept, and she woke up to a messy scarlet stain painted across the inside of her sleeping bag. 'There aren't any spares,' the camp staff had told her, 'it's just a stain, it won't hurt you.' She hadn't disputed the fact of it, but she had slept on the cold ground for the rest of her stay, shivering next to the bedclothes she couldn't bring herself to touch. She hadn't gone to camp again, after that.

"Self-sabotage at its finest," she thought to herself as she pulled off of the motorway, narrowly scraping past a car as it tried to do the same thing, its horn blaring at her. "Some things never change."

Despite the fact that she had been gunning it close to the speed limit, she still hadn't caught sight of Fabian. Now however, as she straightened out onto a smaller, more residential street, she saw the flash of the single rear light of another bike, a few hundred meters in front of her, turning out of her sight at an upcoming intersection. She couldn't check her phone for the time—curse modern society's disdain for the wristwatch—but going by a fuzzy judgement, they were both still far enough out from Fabian's drop-off point that she should be able to catch him before they both arrived.

"Good," she thought to herself, "this ridiculous bike chase can be over with and I can get back to the important things, like preparing bad pizza and hallucinating primates." Christ, what the hell was happening with her today? Her shifts at Sporks usually weren't nearly this eventful, not even the time Fabian had knocked a box of tomato puree off of the shelf and it had self-decanted across her active stove-top.

As she leaned sideways and rounded the corner, her eyes were busy searching the middle-distance for Fabian's bike. As such, it was not until too late that she realised she would not have to get back to the kitchen to reprise a part of the earlier strangeness.

The monkey was now perched upon a man's shoulder, and the man in turn was standing in the middle of the road. Their eyes—the monkey's bulging red and staring, the man's a dark black—reflected the surrounding streetlights and her own headlamp with a sort of faintly bemused surprise, as she careened straight towards them, watching her but making no effort to move. April yanked the handlebars hard to the right, not succeeding in meaningfully altering her trajectory, but absolutely succeeding in inducing the bike to fold up underneath her, tipping over as it twisted sideways, its tires screeching laterally as they slid horizontally in her direction of travel. For a perilous two seconds, April was able to maintain a precarious balance in that tilted pose, suspended above the flying tarmac as she braced for impact-

In the moment when the impact with the pair should have arrived, it suddenly and conspicuously didn't. The man and the monkey, who had been standing directly in the path of the skidding vehicle, were in front of her one moment and then seemingly behind her the next. Her path was unaltered by what had seemed to be a near certain collision along the straight-line vector of her motion.

April didn't have time to dwell on the matter, because that was when she crashed. The balance of the skidding bike, always a temporary thing but which had nonetheless held on prodigiously for the past few seconds, tipped downwards, her left handlebar making contact with the road. The entire vehicle flipped out from under her, its twisting wheel smacking against her leg, hard, as she was cast onto the road surface, her head whip-lashing within the helmet as the brittle plastic of it cracked against the tarmac.

The bike continued forward, rolling over a few times as it shed various loose fragments of metal and plastic bodywork, before finally jumping up against the edge of the pavement, half caving in a flimsy metal bar fence, and sliding to a halt against a brick wall. April continued forward at a slightly different angle, staying on the road and bleeding off velocity via the helmet, her left arm and left shin, which were her primary contact points with the ground. She could feel the heat of that friction slicing into her leg, followed swiftly by the pain, as the fabric of her jeans proved insufficient padding to protect her body from the contact abrasion.

"Thank God I at least put on a jacket," she thought to herself as she blacked out.