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In a town by a lake, in a pie shop called The Pie Hole, a woman named Chuck and a man called Ned sliced strawberries so luscious and ripe you'd have sworn they had just been plucked from the stem.
In fact, they had just been plucked from death. You see, Ned had a gift. With one touch, he could bring life; with a second touch, death again. Forever.
What he didn't know, as he sliced strawberries that morning, was that everything was about to change. Also forever.
Chuck, too, had no inkling that events would soon conspire to shake up her life.
As she placed lattices of dough over mixed-berry pies, her only thoughts were of how clear the sky was that morning, how happy her bees sounded, and how wonderful Ned looked in his tight shirt and apron.
"Isn't it great to be alive," she said.
Ned smiled in a way that never failed to make Chuck's breath hitch in her chest.
She smiled back at him. Sometimes, she wanted to touch him so much that she wondered if she could stand it. But this was how it was, she reminded herself. She loved him and she was happy. She could stand it. She would stand it. She picked up the knife he'd laid down - it was still warm from his touch - and began to slice strips of pastry for the next pie.
~~~
At that very moment (in the sense that the infinite encompassed all moments), the narrator was making himself a cup of tea.
Unlike those he observed, he had no phobias. He wasn't afraid of touching or being touched or Halloween or abandonment. He lived austerely and simply and enjoyed a rich inner life. His only vice was a certain nosiness, and in the greater scheme of things, he thought, that was hardly a vice at all.
The truth was, though, it was more of a vice than he liked to let on. You see, the narrator was the kind of person who would sneak a look at the last page of a book, and then smugly dole out hints about the ending to his friends.
"The sad truth is that some romances don't work out," he said the time his bookclub decided to read Jane Eyre. He said it airily, as though he were speaking about life in general, but everyone knew he'd just spoiled something about the plot.
Today, he took a peek further into the story. He flipped forward and forward and forward, to the part of the story where Chuck and Ned were getting married.
~~~
They married on the freezing peak of Copper Mountain. When the celebrant said they could kiss, they bumped ski masks and skiied to the bottom of the run.
The narrator laughed and clapped along with the rest of the witnesses (and then flicked forward, forward - he always got bored by speeches - to their honeymoon in the Arctic).
During the day, Ned and Chuck watched penguins slide on their bellies across the ice. At night, the narrator politely averted his eyes as they pressed up against each other, safe behind their bundled layers of clothes.
And then they'd gone back to The Pie Hole to bake pies and live their lives.
Over the years, The Pie Hole grew into a mini pie emporium. Ned and Chuck branched out into a line of gourmet honeys and jellies. They never got rich, but they always had enough.
"You never seem to touch," people would say occasionally. Rude people.
"We're not very demonstrative," Ned would tell them. And then he would look over at Chuck as though she were the only person in the whole world.
Perhaps it was an unconventional life, but they were as close to happy as any two people could be.
The End.
~~~
It wasn't the done thing to insert yourself into the narrative - not among the narrator's circle of friends. Oh, there were those who did it, but it was considered a little tacky, a little déclassé.
Really, though, the narrator reasoned, where was the harm in an anonymous piece of pie?
It wasn't easy to navigate from inside the story, though. When he arrived, it turned out he'd overshot the mark.
He'd been aiming for a busy afternoon, around the time Ned was 36 years, 10 months, 17 days and 23 seconds old. He'd imagined Olive would be serving coffee and Emerson would be serving pithy remarks about the sad state of elegiac poetry, while he read the obituaries section of The Day.
Instead, the narrator found himself in a near-empty diner on the day after Ned's funeral.
Olive's daughter Mabel was making coffee - or she was trying to. "Dad," she yelled towards the kitchen, sounding uncannily like Olive. She tapped the espresso machine. "This old thing needs your help again."
Someone appeared in front of the narrator. "Who are you?" the someone said challengingly. It was Olive herself. The narrator stared at her. She was tiny, he thought. She was old.
The narrator looked at Mabel again. She was older than he'd realised - somewhere near forty, perhaps. He'd have known to the second if he were watching from the outside. Where was he in the story?
"We're closed," Olive snapped at him. "Death in the family."
Oh, the narrator thought. That's where he was.
"Is there a customer out there?" Chuck wandered in slowly from the kitchen. Her face was young - much younger than Mabel's, but her eyes were full of pain. "Oh, hello. There's plenty of pie if you want to sit down," she said. "No coffee, but we do have tea."
"Oh." The narrator stepped back. "No." He stepped back again. "I'll come back later." Or earlier, he hoped. This wasn't the right time at all.
~~~
"If you could bring yourself back, would you do it?" Chuck had asked Ned once.
They were lying in their bed - beds. Every night was like a slumber party, Chuck thought sometimes.
"You mean, if I could touch myself?" Ned said. "Wait- that came out wrong."
Chuck grinned up at the dark ceiling. She loved him, she thought. She loved him, she loved him. She hugged herself. Sometimes, she loved him so much that it hurt.
~~~
The narrator's next attempt at inserting himself into the story was initially more successful. He aimed for the day that Ned proposed. He was only two years out.
The Pie Hole seemed empty, but nosing around the narrator found Chuck in the kitchen. She was baking and she seemed startled to see him.
"Oh hello. We're not really open yet," she said. But then she grinned at him as though they were conspiring to do something a little shifty. "Since you're here, though..."
She ushered him into the seating area. "Now," she said. She handed him a menu. "What do you feel like?"
What did he feel like? After years of describing mouth-watering pies, the narrator wanted everything. He wanted the three-plum. A la mode. And the rhubarb and the tart apple and the pumpkin and the lemon, lime and pear. And he wanted them to keep coming.
Chuck looked amused, but all she said was: "Pies to be kept coming, coming up."
She was playing with Digby when, tottering a little, the narrator went up to the counter to pay.
"Labrador?" the narrator said.
"Who, Digby?" Chuck sounded surprised. She blinked down at Digby as though she hadn't realised he was a dog. "I'm not entirely sure." She started to ring up the narrator's change. "How were the pies?"
"Delicious," the narrator said. He tried not to look at Digby's disapproving stare. 'A Labrador?' Digby seemed to be saying.
"Wonderful," the narrator added. Exactly as he had described them. He had to do this again.
~~~
If the narrator had to pick a favourite scene, disregarding the one in which Chuck was resurrected, it would have to have been the one in which Ned proposed.
It was winter. Ned and Chuck were alone in The Pie Hole, keeping a prudent distance from each other while they closed up for the night. Ned swept the floor. Chuck collected dirty plates from the last customers' tables. They worked in comfortable silence, scooting neatly around each other, careful not to touch.
When they were done they sat in one of the empty booths. Chuck looked out into the night. She thought about all the years she'd stayed in Coeur d'Coeurs - all the places she'd wanted to see. She and Ned could go together. She'd been brought back from the dead. Almost anything seemed possible now.
"Chuck," Ned said suddenly. And there was something in his tone that made Chuck jerk her head round to look at him closely. His face was tight. "I was thinking about us," he said. "I mean, I think about us a lot, but I was thinking specifically about-" he started to fumble for something in his shirt pocket. His forehead was a little sweaty. Chuck's heart started to race.
At that very moment, there was a crash as the door opened. Emerson and Olive tumbled through. "We were at the new 24-hour plumbing store," Olive said. "The one with the roof shaped like a giant toilet lid? And we- there was a man."
"Got onto the roof," Emerson said, "and he slipped-"
"Was pushed," Olive corrected.
"Off the toilet lid."
"And we might have a new case," Olive finished. She frowned. "Does it still count as ambulance-chasing if you're there before the ambulance? Because we were definitely there before the ambulance. And they couldn't do anything. He was just-" she spread her hands and Chuck could see that they were trembling. "He was real dead. Real, real dead - squashed bug on a windscreen dead."
Olive seemed pretty shaken up. While Ned sat her down, Chuck put together a hasty medicinal platter for her - a creamy fior di latte to calm the nerves and a strong harzer to revive the spirits. (Other people's aunts had herbal remedies. Chuck's aunts had cheese remedies. Pecorino for heavy colds... Sharp cheddar for shiny hair...)
Ned went upstairs and came back with a good bottle of red. He poured everyone a big glass. "I think we've all had a bit of a shock," he said.
Later, after the cheeses and the wine (a lot of wine - Ned went back for another two bottles) had worked their magic, Chuck went out for some air. She took a wedge of fior di latte with her and sat down on the stoop outside to eat it. Her nerves weren't quite calm yet, but they were getting there.
She sat there for some time. She thought about banal things: she couldn't see any stars, maybe there was going to be rain.
After a long while - long enough for cold stoop to have started to lose its charm - the door squeaked open behind her. There was a warm rush of pie smells: cinnamon and nutmeg and baked apples. The door closed again.
"Cold out here," Ned said.
Chuck nodded up at him. "Colder than it ever got back in Coeur d'Coeurs."
Ned shrugged off his jacket and slipped it over her shoulders. Chuck closed her eyes and pulled it around herself. If she concentrated hard, she could imagine it was Ned's arms around her, and not his coat; she could imagine that they had more than touches from behind clothes and plastic wrap. She imagined what his skin might feel like against her own. What his mouth might taste like.
Ned sat down beside her, a careful half-foot away, and held out a wedge of cheese. "Brought you a refill," he said.
He dropped it into Chuck's hand. It was a big hunk of harzer. Apparently, Ned thought her spirits needed reviving.
They sat quietly. Chuck looked at the sky. She couldn't see clouds. She couldn't see stars. It was just black.
"So I was wondering-" Ned started. "I've been thinking a lot about-". He took a deep breath. "I've been thinking ahead."
"The next Tuesday kind of ahead?"
Chuck watched him swallow. "The next fifty years kind of ahead. Have you? Been thinking ahead?"
Chuck slid her gaze from his throat to his eyes. "Yes."
"And was I- were we-"
Chuck thought about all of the years of their lives stretching ahead of them. She thought about waking up with Ned every morning and looking over at him from the other side of the room. She thought about the children she would never have with him.
She loved him, she thought. She could bear it. "Yes," she said.
Ned closed his eyes for a second, like he couldn't believe it. Then he opened them again, and Chuck couldn't stop looking back. Without his coat, she could see that his shirtsleeves were a little short. She looked at his bare wrists and thought she'd do anything - anything at all - to touch him skin to skin. Just once. Just tonight.
She dragged her eyes back to the sky, and took a bite of the harzer. The flavour was enough to make her eyes water. "Good cheese," she said. She smiled at him.
Ned smiled back. "Yeah," he said. "Good cheese."
~~~
There was a reason why narrative-insertion was looked down upon. Outside the story, the narrator saw immediately where he'd gone wrong.
The facts were these.
Chuck woke early that morning. She indulged in a couple of minutes of Ned-watching. He was an entertaining sleeper: his eyebrows twitched and he tended towards surreal mutterings. Today, he murmured with some intensity that the rabbits were armed for attack.
Chuck grinned to herself. She'd ask about it later. She kicked back her sheets and hurried through her shower, and then tiptoed down to The Pie Hole's kitchen. Once a week she baked a pear pie for her aunts, with gruyere baked into the crust. But as she started to slice the pears for this week's pie, she was startled by a sound. "Oh," she said, as the narrator bumbled in. "Hello."
From outside the story, the narrator watched himself eat pie (and eat pie and eat pie and eat pie - watching himself back was a little horrifying), and then he watched himself leave. (God, he looked short in those pants.)
A few minutes later, Ned appeared. "Good morning," he said. He stretched extravagantly. "Feels like a good baking day."
Chuck beamed up at him. "We had the most amazing customer," she said. "He ate an entire three-plum pie and-" here, the narrator winced, "almost all of a rhubarb one too."
"So we need more plums?" Ned said.
"More plums, more rhubarb and more pears."
Ned hummed to himself as he pulled on his coat. "Won't be long," he said to Chuck cheerfully.
Then he stepped out onto the street, right in front of a speeding bus.
~~~
It was inevitable, among a circle as gossipy as the narrator's circle, that people would start to talk.
"There's a rumour that you interfered with your plot," one of his friends murmured to him at a party that night. "People are saying that you actually changed the story. I told everyone it couldn't be true."
The narrator laughed, trying to make it sound hearty. "People say the most ridiculous things," he said. "Believe me, everything is progressing exactly as it should."
Later, as he stood numbly by the punchbowl (he'd killed Ned, he'd killed Ned, he'd killed Ned), someone else tapped him on the shoulder. "Was that supposed to happen?" she said. "Ned dying? Quite an odd direction for the story to take."
"All according to plan," the narrator mumbled, gulping down the punch so fast that a couple of grapes went down whole. There wasn't enough alcohol in the punch, he thought. Also, there was no beer. What kind of a party was this anyway?
God, he'd just wanted pie, he thought. And it had all gone terribly wrong.
~~~
The thing, he told himself when he finally stumbled home, was that it wasn't unsalvageable. He could fix it. He was pretty drunk by that point. He'd stolen some scotch from the host's liquor cabinet - originally to pour into the punch, but now he was gulping from the bottle.
He flicked forward into the story, forward, forward, forward, forward.
Chuck was alone and running The Pie Hole. Chuck was alone and running The Pie Hole. Chuck was alone and selling The Pie Hole. Chuck was alone and a recluse in her aunts' mansion. Well fuck, the narrator thought.
He flicked backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. He gulped more scotch.
At one point (and he was very, very drunk by this time), he watched mesmerised as Emerson knitted a purple tea cosy, four valances for his favourite chair, and then a cosy cosy for the cosy.
At some point after that, he passed out.
~~~
He woke up to a raging hangover and to a soundtrack of Chuck talking about the nature of humanity.
"I've found myself wondering, lately," she was saying, "about how I've changed since I died."
"I'm intrigued," someone said. Emerson. He did not sound intrigued. What he did sound was loud. The narrator groaned. Aspirin, he thought. He needed some.
"I think I'm getting smarter," Chuck was saying.
"Smarter?"
"A little smarter."
"What's 719 divided by 17?"
"Forty-two point three. But that's inconclusive - I've always had a head for figures."
There was a muffled noise as though Emerson were trying not to yawn. "You have three bites of pie left of this conversation."
"Sometimes, I make connections faster."
"Like train connections?"
"Like thought connections."
"Two bites."
"Also," Chuck said. Her voice lowered. "Have you had a close look at Digby? He's giving Penny at the ice-cream shop a run for her money on the eternal youth stakes. Did you know that Penny is 63?"
"Wow." Emerson sounded genuinely surprised.
"Yeah, well if you think that's wow. In human years, Digby is 105."
The narrator forced one eye open and then the other. He could see legs. And shoes. He was watching them from under their table, he decided slowly.
From somewhere very close by, Digby whined.
Chuck's face appeared beneath the table. She seemed to be looking right at the narrator, but after a moment he realised she was looking at Digby. "I'm not saying you've had work done. I'm saying you look incredible for your age." Her face disappeared again. "Anyway," she said to Emerson. "Something to think about."
The narrator's motor skills were all off, so he was forced to watch the rest of the scene, even though nothing happened at all.
Chuck tapped her feet idly under the table. Emerson drummed his fingers on his knee. Digby trotted to the kitchen and then trotted back. The narrator napped and woke to see Digby curled up and sleeping beside him. Chuck kicked a stray blueberry with her toe, just barely missing Digby's nose. In a funny trick of the light, it seemed to get plumper and bluer as it hit the ground. The narrator shook his head. He napped some more.
After a while - a long while - Ned came over to the table with a new case. The narrator had eaten a bacon and egg sandwich by then, washed down with two aspirins. He was feeling considerably better. He struggled into a more dignified seated position and concentrated.
The facts were these: one Mildred Montgomery, fourteen-time Lakeside County chess champion, was murdered in her sitting room by the white king from her personal chess set - the jewel-encrusted piece was jammed deep into her skull.
It was a crime of passion, Mildred said when Ned resurrected her that afternoon. Her archrival, Rufus Slate, had passionately wanted to kill her.
He was jealous of her superior ability, superior chessboard and superior interior decorating skills, friendship circle and fashion sense.
"Funny thing is," Chuck said, when it seemed like Mildred had finished, "you were about to lose in seven moves. Black knight to E5 takes pawn, white pawn to E5 takes knight, etcetera, etcetera, white king to G3, black knight to E5, pawn takes knight, pawn to H5 and check mate."
Mildred opened her mouth in outrage. "What are you saying?" she said.
"I think she's questioning," Emerson said. "Wondering. Why Rufus would have killed you if he was about to kick your ass."
"Well, it's not like I realised I was about to lose, demanded he go home, and then slipped and fell head-first onto the king," Mildred snapped. "That would have been a pointless way to go."
"The chess piece was pretty pointy," Chuck pointed out.
Before Mildred could answer, Ned had poked her on the forehead, and she had slumped back onto the slab.
"I didn't know you liked chess," Ned said to Chuck.
Emerson rolled his eyes. "Me, I hate chess," he said. "I hate all games. Time wasted that could be spent making money, spending money or counting money. Speaking of which, let's go collect the money."
~~~
Observing Chuck was painful after Ned died.
She had always dreamed about seeing the world. She had imagined living in all of the great cities. Now, she dreamed about smaller things. She thought about Ned - his smile, the way he had babbled when he was nervous. She dreamed about planting particular flowers for her bees and teaching new words to her birds.
She thought a lot about the past. She remembered what she'd said to Ned when he'd first revived her.
"What if you didn't have to be dead?" he'd said.
She'd grinned. "Well, that'd be preferable."
But was this preferable, she wondered. Being alive again had seemed great at the time, but now she just had to go on living and living and living.
~~~
At a bar, someone sidled up to the narrator while he was ordering his second vodka and cranberry. "Olive just disappears in your story."
"What?" the narrator said.
"Olive," the guy said. "She was my favourite. I know you've been in there before. I was thinking maybe you could go back inside and... pep up her part."
"Uh. I think you're confusing me with someone else," the narrator said. "I don't do that kind of thing." He edged away. The barman was starting to look at both of them disapprovingly.
Turned out, though, he did do that kind of thing.
He was getting better at navigating. He aimed for a story shadow - a moment when the audience would be watching Ned. He hit the mark perfectly.
He found Chuck sitting on her rooftop under the falling snow. Below them, Ned was calling her name.
"Sounds like he's looking for you," the narrator said. He walked over to the edge of the roof. As he watched, a man opened his window to yell at Ned to stop squawking. Ned picked up a snowball and threw it at the man's face.
"I'm not too happy with him right now," Chuck said. "He kind of killed my Dad." She stood up slowly. "Do I know you? Your voice is very familiar."
The narrator took a deep breath. "Chuck was not afraid of him," he said. "She decided to listen to what he had to say." And intrusion was one thing, but changing a character's thoughts was considered extremely unethical. He was stepping over the line, he knew.
Over the line or not, though, Chuck was now bound to listen to him. He told her that he knew she had died. He told her that Ned was going to die. He told her everything.
"Why are you telling me this?" Chuck said. She sounded numb. Snow was still falling around her. She was shivering hard.
"Because I don't think you're exactly the same as you were before you died," the narrator explained. "Because I don't think Ned has to stay dead. You think you're getting smarter. But you're getting more than smarter. Potentially." He handed her one of the rotten strawberries he'd brought with him.
She took it. Nothing happened.
The narrator frowned. "You might need to work at it, though," he admitted. "Maybe a lot."
~~~
Chuck was experimenting with resurrection, someone told the narrator at the next bookclub meeting. They were reading Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The narrator was not a fan.
Chuck had almost revived a pea, the guy continued. Everyone was talking about it.
The narrator winced and changed the subject. What about the narrator of Chronicle, he said. What a bastard that guy had been.
~~~
"Why is it," Chuck said to Ned one morning, about two months before Ned's death, "that when you touch a rotten strawberry, the strawberry becomes perkily perfect. But when you touch a decomposing body, the alive-again person stays mushy?"
Ned frowned down at the pastry he was rolling out. "I've never really thought about it before," he said. "To tell you the truth, it makes me uncomfortable to think about it now."
"It's just odd," Chuck said. "It doesn't make logical sense."
"I touch dead people and bring them back to life," Ned pointed out. "Nothing about that makes logical sense."
Chuck sighed. "All I'm wondering is if you could do it better."
Ned stopped rolling his pastry. "Better?" he said. He sounded a little annoyed.
"Maybe you improve the process - give them longer than a minute, heal them. Maybe you could get some control over the process."
"Maybe I should just finish baking this pie," Ned muttered.
After the pies were done, Chuck went into Ned's dead-fruit room and locked the door.
From outside the story, the narrator watched her frown at a gooey raspberry. She reached out and prodded it back to fresh plumpness. Then she prodded it back to death. Then - and the narrator started to sweat - she frowned harder and prodded it back to life again.
~~~
The narrator hadn't even known it was possible to do some of the things that Chuck was doing. Once, when he got up in the middle of the night (sometimes he got cravings for Cheetos), he caught her kneeling outside The Pie Hole in the wee hours of the morning. She had found a dead squirrel on the road.
As he watched, she brought the squirrel back to life. It wobbled to its feet. There was a gash where one of its eyes had been. When Chuck touched its head, the gash started to heal. After a few minutes, the squirrel had two perfectly normal eyes. There wasn't even a scar. And nothing else around it seemed to have died.
Afterwards, the narrator went back to bed, but he couldn't get back to sleep. He lay in a cold sweat, staring at the ceiling. He could get thrown out of the union for this, he thought. What the hell had he done?
~~~
"Look," the narrator said. He'd found another story shadow. Chuck was sitting through a long and boring stakeout while Emerson and Ned ran for their lives from a rabid rabbit. He remembered narrating that chase for hours. "You've done very well in such a short time. I was really impressed with the way you revived that squirrel. Bravo. I just don't understand why you're now trying to make improvements."
"I think it could be better," Chuck said. She wasn't even looking at him. She had her binoculars trained on the house she was staking-out. "I mean, the single touch. And someone else dying. Why does it work that way? Why should it work that way? And the thing about one minute - a minute is an artificial construct. Doesn't that imply that the rules are artificial too?"
"The rules are there for a reason!" the narrator said, annoyed. He'd had a hand in creating those rules. "It's so you don't go reviving people willy-nilly."
Chuck put down her binoculars finally. "What makes you think I would do that? I wouldn't do that."
"Because you're human," the narrator pointed out.
Chuck glared at him. "So I can revive Ned, but I can't heal him? And if I keep him alive, someone else has to die? And then we can never touch again? It's unacceptable."
The narrator ground his teeth. "It's just the way it is."
Chuck was quiet for a moment. "You know," she said. "You're a little intrusive at times."
The narrator rolled his eyes. Everyone was a critic.
~~~
There were some serious rumours flying around. Suddenly, at every party the narrator went to, there was someone who'd corner him at the bar or on the dance floor or - God - at the urinals.
"Okay," the narrator said finally, to one of them. He'd been trapped in the cloakroom for 45 minutes while the guy told him about how great Chuck was, and how he'd cried when she and Ned danced in the beekeeping suits. And that maybe the narrator could - not do anything improper of course - but everyone knew he'd intruded into the plot already. Why not give it another gentle nudge, just to make sure the story fulfilled its initial promise.
The narrator finally got close enough to his coat to grab it. He really had to go now, he said.
In private, the pressure was getting to him. He narrated the next two months in real time. He didn't sleep. The minutes and seconds ticked closer and closer to Ned's death.
When the day finally arrived, he could hardly drag himself out of bed. He forced down a cup of coffee while he watched Chuck watch Ned sleep.
The coffee churned in his stomach as he watched himself arrive at the pie shop and then leave the pie shop.
Ned stepped out onto the street. The bus hit him. He'd never stood a chance.
Chuck was crying by the time she reached Ned's side. "I can do this, I can do this," she was muttering.
She hovered her hand over Ned's face as though she couldn't decide where to touch him. Then she seemed to steel herself. She put a finger against his lips. A spark jumped between them, and Ned blinked once, then twice. His body was a mess. The narrator could see bone sticking out of his leg. His left arm was smashed. He was breathing shallowly. He blinked again.
The narrator watched him take in his surroundings. He saw him realise that he was on the road, that his chest was crushed and that there was a tire mark over his shirt. He saw him realise that he was dead.
Ned rolled his head to look at Chuck. "Oh, Chuck," he said, sounding terribly sad. "Was it you? Did you bring me back?"
Chuck was crying too hard to speak. "I love you," she mouthed.
"Love you too," Ned said. He shook his head and smiled at her crookedly. "Funny thing, I'm not feeling any pain at all."
Chuck smiled back at him through her tears. "Good," she said. She leaned towards him to kiss him.
Ned's forehead creased in puzzlement. "Has it been a minute already?" he said.
Chuck shook her head. "Close your eyes," she managed. Ned did.
When her lips touched his, Ned's body twitched violently. Then, for a long, horrible moment, he was still.
The narrator felt cold all over. He could feel Chuck straining against the rules. She was stronger than he'd realised.
He had to do it now, he thought. This was where he was supposed to enforce the rules. He looked at Chuck and Ned. Suddenly, the rules seemed very arbitrary.
He put his hand theatrically against his mouth. "Did I leave the stove on?" he said loudly enough for anyone peeking to hear. He ducked into the kitchen to check.
When he got back, Chuck had had her way with the rules. Ned's wounds were starting to knit. As the narrator watched, the splintered bones receded into his body. His torn skin smoothed.
By the time the ambulance arrived, there were only cuts and bruises left to heal. It was a miracle, the medics said. Ned must have tripped at just the right moment. And the bus must have hit a pothole and lifted just long enough to skim harmlessly over his chest.
"A miracle," Ned agreed. He couldn't take his eyes off Chuck's face. When he reached for her, she clutched at his hand greedily. They held hands all the way to the hospital.
~~~
Ned was a local celebrity for a while - the Lucky Piemaker, the papers called him. People flocked to The Pie Hole at first. But then - as Ned's celebrity slowly petered out - business went more or less back to normal.
For a time, the narrator was a bit of a celebrity too. He got invited to a lot of good parties and, for a month or two, got quite a few free drinks. Not everyone was impressed though. ("A bit deus ex machina, no?" one of the ladies at his book club said, disdainfully.)
As for Ned and Chuck, they married at Coeur d'Coeurs in a field full of daisies.
When the celebrant said they could kiss, they smiled at each other. And they kissed.
They were as happy as any two people could be.
The End.