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said. “Just a
blown tire, right?”
    “ Yes sir.”
    I got dressed, brushed my teeth and ran a
comb through what little hair I have left and walked the half-block
to the garage. Eric was entranced in his Game Boy, while some
out-of-towner sat on the hood of his Rav-4, the front passenger
side’s tire a spare.
    “ Sorry to keep you waiting,” I said.
“I’ll have the thing fixed in no time.”
    “ Good. I thought I had a bad case of
B.O. or something, the way that other guy left.”
    “ Sorry about that. I guess he had some
emergency to get to.”
    I jacked up his vehicle and replaced the
spare with a new tire, and then checked the pressure on the rest of
them. He was good to go. As he paid Erik, I grabbed a coffee from
the break room. When I came out, I noticed Mort’s office door was
open. Nothing unusual about that, since Erik has a key in order to
get change for the register drawer. But I asked him, “Was Glen in
there?”
    Erik shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess so. I
mean, actually, yeah, he was, now that you mention it. He came out
like he’d seen a ghost and took off.”
    “ Huh.” I went into the office and I’ll
admit, the first thing I looked at was that damn calendar, my eyes
lingering on a young Marilyn Monroe. If you had to pick a Grand
Poobah of oozing sex appeal, it would have to be Marilyn. My eyes
slowly moved down to the days.
    I caught my breath.
    The days .
    The calendar went up to December twentieth
and stopped. Underneath was empty space, all virgin white.
    My stomach knotted. I felt dizzy.
Nauseous.
    Stop it, I told myself. Stop being so damn
ridiculous.
    I took the calendar off the wall, carried it
out to Erik and showed it to him.
    “ What do you see here?” I
asked.
    He glanced up from his Game Boy. “Some hot
chick in an old swimsuit.”
    “ But what about the days?” I
asked.
    His eyes were back on his device. I jerked
it out of his hands and shoved the calendar in front of his face.
“What about the days?” I asked again.
    He stared at me a moment, then looked down.
“That’s messed up,” he said.
    “ Why do you say that? What’s messed up
about it?”
    He looked at me like I was an idiot. “Looks
like they ran out of ink.”
    “ It only goes up to the twentieth,
right?” I asked.
    “ Well, yeah.” He looked at me like I’d
turned senile. “What do you see, Mr. Conrad?”
    “ Same thing,” I muttered. “And that
doesn’t bother you?”
    “ It’s a printing error,” Erik
said.
    I slowly backed away, nodding, staring at
the blank space on the calendar. So he saw it, too. It wasn’t some
mystical, magical calendar then, showing us our dates of death.
    Unless…
    I ran outside. A couple kids were filling
their bicycle tires with the air hose. I held out the calendar to
them, folding it over so that only the page with the dates was
visible. “Tell me what you see,” I said.
    They glanced warily from me to the
calendar.
    “ What do you mean?” one of them
asked.
    I tried to keep my voice calm. “How many
days do you see here?”
    They looked closer. “Twenty,” one of them
said.
    I held it up to the other kid. “And
you?”
    He nodded. “Yeah. Twenty.”
    “ Okay.” It really was just a printing
error after all. I took the calendar back into the office and
placed it back on the wall, making sure it was straight. Not worth
getting fired over.
     
    Monday. December 3rd.
    I walked into the break room and poured a
cup of coffee. Ben came in, smelling of bourbon. No, he reeked of it.
    “ Jesus, Ben,” I said. “What the
hell?”
    He looked up at me. Pale. Sweating.
Trembling. “I…” He pulled a chair out from the card table and
slumped into it. “Fuck,” he muttered. He looked up at me
glassy-eyed and shook his head. “I guess my time has come,” he
said. He pulled a bottle of Jim Beam from his pocket and took a
slug.
    I grabbed the bottle from him. “Cut it out,”
I said. “It’s the calendar, isn’t it? It’s just a printing error.