I wanted to hide. I wanted to turn around and run. Because I knew all the sorrow I’d experienced in my life was a deep, deep well I did not want to fall to the bottom of.
I held on to all the other sounds in the place: the upbeat song, the wind against the windows, theclick, click,clicking of the toys, and Crow’s off-tune whistling as he rummaged through the storage shelves behind the counter.
Sad, sad, sad.
I pushed the feeling as far away as I could and drilled my way through the unnaturally thick air toward the first window.
So many little plastic smiling things. Cat in a swing, chick in an egg, and the monkey! Could it really be that easy? The first window I searched had the one cursed toy I needed to find?
I snatched the toy off the windowsill. Disappointment pressed hard on my sternum, mixing with the sadness I was barely keeping at bay. It wasn’t a monkey, it was the Pope.
Dammit.
I replaced the Pope with a mumbled apology, then moved to the next window. Flower, flower, snail, alien, double flower, camel on a toilet, bear.
No monkey.
The farther I pressed into the diner, the louder the voice became. I was losing track of the peppy color song, losing track of the sound of semi-trucks driving across wet road, losing track of the sound of my own voice in my head, naming eachclicky-clackyplastic wavy-wacky thing.
I didn’t know why I hadn’t noticed all of them when I was in here yesterday. I didn’t know why thatclack clack clacking hadn’t driven me out of my mind.
Probably because there hadn’t been a Pandora level curse in action when I’d last been here.
But the one thing I could hear above all thesad, sad, sadwas Crow’s stupid whistling. I thought he might be trying to do the song from the Robin Hood cartoon, but I couldn’t be sure. Whatever he was trying to whistle, I was pretty sure he owed Roger Miller an apology.
The next window was tricky because a young couple sat in front of it. I didn’t recognize them, so they were probably just traveling through.
“Sorry,” I said, as I leaned over the ham-and-cheese omelettes they were ignoring. I was all but invisible to them as I studied the click-clackers.
Scarecrow, flower, witch, farm girl. Okay, I could see this windowsill was themed. Apple tree, tin man, lion, dog.
No monkey, flying or not.
“Got it!” Crow called out.
I glanced over my shoulder. Crow was grinning behind the counter, a red-and-gold-embossed cardboard box in his hand. “Find it yet?”
I shook my head because words felt a little unstable with every other thought in my head dripping,sad, sad, sad.
“Hurry up, Boo Boo,” Crow said. “I think we’re losing them.”
To my horror, an old guy at the far booth slumped forward, his beard landing in a pillow of biscuits and gravy.
“No!” I rushed to the far end of the diner. I didn’t know what I could do to stop this, but no one was going to die in their breakfast on my watch.
The voice grew louder, the clacking clacked louder. I made it to the man’s side and reached for my phone to call an ambulance.
I patted my pocket over and over before I remembered my phone was toast.
“Dammit.” I checked for the man’s pulse. He was alive, his pulse strong and even.
Not dead. Just knocked out.
“Delaney?” Crow asked from what seemed like a world away, his voice somewhere out there on a distant horizon, all but smothered by another voice.
Sad, sad, sad.
It was so loud, so in my head, it was like it was right next to me, screaming in my ear.
