BY Tina Zhu
A car breaks down in the desert. There is no cell phone reception. Yenyen and Maggie discover
they are down to the last bottle of water. They could try to walk to wait for someone to help them. They
fight. They cannot agree over who will be the one to stay. Yenyen says Maggie should, Maggie says
Yenyen should. What happens is that in the end, neither of them stay in the car, and neither of them make
it to a gas station. In three days, the highway patrol starts searching. One month later, their families meet
for the first time at the spot where their car was found.
A car breaks down near Big Sur. The roads, S-shaped through the trees. Maggie pulls over on the
narrow shoulder. Yenyen is still sleeping, tied from yesterday’s hiking. They are on their honeymoon.
Another car pulls over on the shoulder. Nobody knows what happens after that. The eyewitness accounts
contradict each other on what happens next. Some say there is screaming, others say nothing looks wrong.
But what is certain is that when Yenyen wakes up, she is alone. She drives back to the hotel. Instead of
calling the police, she wonders whether Maggie decided to leave her. The week before the wedding,
Maggie was texting her friends about whether this was the right decision or whether she should leave.
Maggie is never found.
A car breaks down by a cornfield. The two women inside are not speaking to each other. Yenyen
is driving, and Maggie has her headphones on. This is the fifth cornfield they have passed in a twenty-
mile span and as many deer signs. The road is nearly empty. By the time Yenyen sees the antlers, it is too
late. You would have had to start braking multiple football fields away to have a chance of saving the car.
They sit by the cornfield, vultures and crows already descending on the stag lying on the car hood. What
happens next, nobody can agree on. An old man driving by claims the vultures carried Yenyen away when they were done with the deer and that Maggie tried to pull her out of their grasp but was too late.
The old man and Maggie are both arrested as suspects.
A car breaks down in the snow. The driver, a local musician. What happens next inspires his
magnum opus, a sweeping symphony that will make his career. He hears scraping sounds when driving,
so he pulls over to the side and discovers a flat. This road is notorious for accidents—they say a couple
died in a crash here last year. There is another car pulled over not too far away, and two women in long
parkas approach him. They ask for a ride to the university—there are no tow trucks available for their car
because there was a pile-up on the highway, and there is an important event they have to be on time for.
He lets them inside. He asks what kind of music they’d like to listen to, and when neither of them answer,
he puts on NPR. They are quiet, looking out the window and not at each other. When he pulls into the
parking garage, he glances behind him. There are no passengers in the backseat.
A car breaks down on a five-lane interstate. Its driver, new in town, with a license plate from out
of state. Yenyen is a recently-hired lecturer, and this is her first permanent-ish job after several semesters
adjuncting. She pulls over to the side and calls AAA. She is grateful her parents made her get the
membership. While she is waiting for the tow truck, another car pulls over. A woman emerges, and she
has a nametag on that says Hello! My name is Maggie. When Hello! My name is Maggie asks Yenyen
whether she needs help, Yenyen says that she's got it covered already. Maggie gives her number anyway,
just in case, then returns to her car. Later that day, after the car is repaired, Yenyen decides to text
Maggie. She could use some local friends. She thinks to herself, what could go wrong?
Tina S. Zhu is a 2024 Lambda Fellow who also co-edits for WYRMHOLE, a terminally online speculative fiction newsletter. Her work has appeared in The Journal, The Cincinnati Review, milk candy review, and Strange Horizons, among other places. You can find her at tinaszhu.com.