Stevenson started his live news broadcast for KTBU fully not expecting to shit his pants.

The story didn’t start there, however. Definitely not at this Oakland convenience store by Interstate 980 where armed men pistol-whipped and robbed the clerk. That would’ve made sense, anybody would’ve understood. Nope, nuh-uh, the shitting of the pants had its origins at lunch where Stevenson treated himself to a sixty-dollar grilled cheese sandwich from a gourmet restaurant on Piedmont Avenue. The chef⁠—did it take a chef to make grilled-cheese?⁠—had “constructed” this sandwich with heirloom tomatoes and semi-firm organic cheese sourced from a family farm in Sonoma. The menu was clear about this. And Stevenson only indulged so gratuitously because this sonuvabitch had just won the lottery. Four hundred million if you took the lump sum, and he fully intended on taking the lump sum.

As for the robbery scene, it didn’t bother him much. Been there, done that. The Oakland policemen gave him zero details, probably because they had none. There was a seventy-five percent chance the crime would go unsolved, born of a cancerous belief that no one person could make a difference, not a policeman, not a reporter, not anyone. Oaktown, now, always, a community of head-down, hardworking people, full of love in their hearts but under siege by the violent few. So it went, in a city they all loved but would never love them back.

Stevenson stood in the chill of the night under a starless sky, the galaxies lost in skyglow fueled by city lights brightening their collective gutter. His camerawoman, Zuri, powered on the LEDs above her camera and inspected the monitor.

“Fuck me,” she said, checking her watch.

“We’re platonic.”

“Don’t be cute. This shit’s overmodulated.” She leaned back from the monitor and squinted. He studied a small scar above her eyebrow, inscribed from a childhood bicycle accident. In fact he had a small crush on her. Her hair was drawn into bantu knots and her skin was copper and poreless. Sitting on the can in the restroom at work he’d overheard echoed chatter from the other gendered restroom, Zuri telling a colleague over the wash of water through pipes that he was pasty but funny and not unhandsome. And there was his Scottish brogue, watered down from years in the States but still music to her ears.

His eyes flitted from Zuri’s tiny circular scar to the beaten clerk in the store, an elderly Sikh man with his own forehead split and gushing just below the wrap of the turban.

“Dude better stock up on Neosporin,” he said.

“They don’t sell that at the Quik Stop.”

“That looks like fourteen stitches, easy.”

“You’re a shitty doctor now? Not just a shitty reporter?”

“Wanna bet? Fourteen stitches. Ten dollars.”

She fiddled with a knob on the camera. “What was the stich count for that ax attack in the Home Depot.”

“The one in Emeryville or on High Street?”

“High Street.”

“That one wasn’t an attack. It was an ax-ident.”

Zuri big-rolled her eyes. “Outta pocket, friend. Keep those jokes to yourself. Puns don’t play in Oaktown except with unenlightened white boys. The rest of us detest puns.”

Through their earpieces the anchors read through the story before theirs. Zuri adjusted the light. The B-roll had turned out crappy so they were going all-in with hot footage. The plan was to pan and zoom to the pistol-whipped clerk through the store’s plate-glass front with Stevenson doing voiceover. They glanced over and wanted to feel sad, but locked eyes and knew they could not feel sad. Not anymore.

“You sure about this?” Zuri said. “He’s hella-bloody.”

“Trust me. Let’s put this in the viewers’ face.”

This would be his last broadcast, one to remember.

It wasn’t necessary to rehearse. “Evening, lads and lassies,” he’d begin. “Another robbery today, just blocks from the police station. Response time? Eighteen minutes. Almost nineteen. I know you’re muttering to your drowsy spouse some decrepit platitude, dully acknowledging this happened, what a terrible thing, but inside you think it means there’s less chance you’ll get pistol-whipped tomorrow. But let me tell you something. Nobody wakes up thinking they’ll be cracked across the forehead with a revolver, but some of you, tomorrow, are in for a surprise.”

Would he really do this? Pressing ‘send’ meant torpedoing a shot at the morning anchor job. Nighttime anchor Stan Kashlee was retiring which meant a reshuffle at the station, the morning anchor moving up and leaving that spot up for grabs, and it was between him and the South Bay’s plucky, sexpot reporter who did everything right except shout at the audience like an old-timey war reporter from the 1940s.

Stevenson wondered how far he’d get into his monologue before the control room killed the live feed and square-jawed Stan Kashlee fed the audience an apology and sedated them with happy talk.

But, in his heart, Stevenson knew there was a chance the technicians would let it run. All these grips in the play of life knew what he knew: that day after day of temperate, 72-degree weather and generous sunshine blinded these inhabitants of the Bay Area, this beautiful world, to the reality beneath the daydream, a place mired in homeless encampments and open-air fentanyl use and callous, callous robberies while douchey tech bros zipped through in their Model 3’s wrapped in matte vinyl. The upshot of everyone acting in their own self-interest, winner take all, and the only way out was to win it all.

Which he did, in a way.

It was then the clerk’s wife arrived on-scene and staggered into Zuri’s shot. She pressed her palms to the convenience store’s glassy front, beholding her husband, and she opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out.

He and Zuri exchanged another glance and shared the same horror.

They still felt nothing.

In the night air, the whine of a sideshow, elsewhere in the flats, rose above the drone of highway traffic.

Stevenson sighed. He still gave zero fucks, and he was settling already into a dream, a very real one, that saw him in a villa in Portugal lording over the Atlantic. Though was that the best ocean? The Pacific? Indian? He decided he should pick the best ocean. With four hundred million smackaroos, he should have the best ocean.

Zuri snapped her fingers.

Her fine, slender fingers, those snaps crisp. Precise.

He’d ask her to go with him, he decided. They could live in bliss in a cocoon of immeasurable wealth. They could create their own universe.

Zuri snapped her fingers again. “We’re live in ten,” she said.

“Ten minutes?”

“Kid’s got jokes.”

Stevenson asked himself again: would he really do this? He thought of his mum and dad in their small village outside Glasgow, living their tidy lives, so proud of him for making it on-air in the San Francisco Bay Area. “So prestigious!” they told neighbors who’d watched him grow up. But they didn’t know, they just didn’t know. His thoughts settled on his wallet⁠—in there lay salvation. He reached into his pocket and thumbed along the edge where the lotto ticket stuck out.

Where it should’ve stuck out.

The wallet’s bifold seam was smooth.

He fished it from his pocket. Juices in his organs gurgled with lumpy cow’s milk. He splayed the wallet and looked into its pocket and there was nothing.

“They’re moving to the outcue. Five seconds,” Zuri said. “Drop that.”

He dropped the wallet on the asphalt, splat, and raced his hand back into his pocket and explored its bottom.

Just lint and a seam.

When had he last opened his wallet? At lunch, it must’ve been. Hadn’t the waitress caught his eye, just a moment before he left? A knowing look, one he’d mistaken for interest. Had he paid in cash? He had. Had the lotto ticket wafted out with Mr. Andrew Jackson’s papery face? Stevenson checked his other pockets⁠ ⁠… pants, front and back, his jacket⁠ ⁠… and then there were no more pockets to check.

The red light of the camera blazed on, the big lens pointed at him, to the side the annoyed twist of Zuri’s mouth. In his earpiece the anchor and his pretty cohost Alma Tates set the table for his story. Stevenson’s fingers were numb, his head swimmy.

Stan Kashlee said, “And we go to Alan Stevenson who is out at the scene.”

“Thanks Stan and Alma,” he said. “We’re at⁠—“

His bowels erupted and Stevenson shit his pants.

He’d shit himself so hard it filled his boxer briefs and welled over the belt buckle. There was no hiding it. The microphone, too, had captured the squish of it.

He’d quit the next morning, to the station’s relief. The first month thereafter was the worst. The video went viral, made it onto Jimmy Kimmel, became the backdrop for top-ten memes (“When You Wish You Shit the Bed” and “Massive shitstorm” were favorites). It was everywhere, and Stevenson’s friends and family treated him like the victim of a gruesome, cancerous disease that made sympathetic frowns of their faces but drove them far, far away. This would brand him for life, there was no coming back. If he’d ever wondered whether the world would judge a person by one moment, the rules of this universe were clear.

Five months later, Stevenson sat alone at a counter in a burrito shop at the top of Lake Merritt. He overlooked the darkening waters girded by string lights and reflecting the same. His mouth bulged with carnitas cooked to perfection, a slight crisp on the outside. This was a good moment. He’d resigned himself to the ontology that life was just long sentences packed with shame and drudgery, punctuated here and there with small bursts of joy.

He wondered, what if he died here?

In this restaurant.

Right then.

No one would miss him, not even at work. He worked remote, copyediting Japanese advertisements for Tokyo companies. His latest assignment involved an egg yolk with a face and buns.

“Mister Stevenson, is everything okay?” A fingertip grazed his shoulder.

He looked up.

Rosalia was his favorite waitress and she always seemed present during those off-peak hours when he took his meals. Three-thirty p.m. for lunch, eight or nine p.m. for dinner. When customers were most sparse.

She tied her hair back neatly and perennially wore ironed t-shirts and had dimples and smelled like cinnamon and vanilla.

He’d been taking Spanish lessons online, and his heart raced, for he’d never spoken the language aloud to a native speaker. “Que vas a hacer este fin de semana?” he said, his tongue clumsy, as if he had coins in his mouth.

Rosalia gave him a funny little half-smile. She motioned to a darkened television near the ceiling. “I will turn on your lottery program, yes?”

“Por supuesto,” he said, his mind stuck on that half-smile. Not a full smile.

Did she know his reputation? She had the bottomless eyes and the broad smile of a kind person, the type to look past someone’s worst moment. They’d known each other for a while. He’d walked in every few days for a half-burrito, always polite, still trim, not indulgent, not like the herd of customers who guzzled down burritos the size of forearms, guac dripping from their chins.

He and Rosalia, strangers in a strange land, observing Americans from the outside. If she judged, she judged things within people’s control.

His mind alit on that pivotal lunch so long ago, that grilled-cheese sandwich.

The television woke and he checked his watch. Almost eight p.m. Every week he played the lottery, recreating his original trauma in hopes of reaching a different ending, and he’d noticed a startling pattern during the past six months.

For the most part he lost the lottery like all the other suckers but, on monthly anniversaries of the day he’d won and then lost four hundred million dollars, Stevenson always came away with money. Not change-your-life money, but small sums, each month steadily increasing. Last month he’d hit four numbers and came away with twenty grand.

Something cosmic was at play, it had to be. In the immediate wake of his pant-shitting debacle he saw his humiliation as a punishment for vanity and then, over time, he began to believe there was no higher order, that the lives of humans were as meaningless as the lives of beetles, that millions of each would live and die with no purpose but to perpetuate their species. But to win money, without fail, on the anniversary of his literal and proverbial shitstorm, he re-believed that the universe had its plans.

All he could suss out here was that throwing money at problems worked, because it was only money that could lift him from his current circumstances, that could offer him the opportunity to create a new world forever insulated from the sharp and immutable verdicts of thoughtless people.

But as he watched Rosalia straighten little bottles of salsa on the tables and her fingers sweep up, skimming her collar bones to adjust her necklace, Stevenson understood there was a richer way to escape. Love, to fall in love. In fact, this was a burrito shop born in love, owned by the son and daughter of rival taco trucks who overcame competition, got married, and birthed this place, Hijo-Hija, an unsung success story of the community, a bloom in an otherwise leaden landscape.

He sat there satiated with a belly full of horchata and carnitas, watching the tail end of Jeopardy, the final answer “The Treasure of Montezuma” scribbled by two of the three contestants on their blue screens. An omen of Stevenson’s promised financial windfall.

He would get the girl too, it was all connected.

So when the Latino man entered and approached Rosalia⁠—a man with a strong, clean jaw and hazel eyes that matched his honeyed skin⁠—and when this man tapped Rosalia on the shoulder and made her smile like he’d never seen her smile before⁠—definitely not a wan half-smile⁠—Stevenson felt a twist of steel in his bowels. He doublechecked her fingers and confirmed there were no markers of matrimony, no ring of any type. Had he waited too long? She and the stranger chittered in their language, Rosalia looser in her posture, her face less reserved.

And wait, was she touching his arm?

The man also had dimples and a thought dawned. Could this man be a relative? A brother?

The universe responded: the man gave a slight pat to Rosalia’s backside, just a tap, and she covered her mouth and volleyed back a playful push at his shoulder.

On the television, the Powerball logo filled the pixels and a sexless woman in cat-eye glasses told them it was time again to play America’s favorite jackpot. Two enormous glass globes swirled with ping pong balls.

Stevenson pulled out his wallet. These days he packed a wallet with a zippered pocket and he unzipped this pocket and fished out a neatly folded lotto ticket.

The broadcaster read aloud the first number and it wasn’t a number on his ticket.

“Chufter-fucker,” he muttered.

His eyes flitted back to Rosalia and the stranger. The man was showing her something on his phone and she threw her head back and laughed with her perfect white teeth.

He’d missed the second and third numbers and when he checked them against his slip of paper he found matches.

He blinked.

His gut buzzed.

More ping pong balls dropped from their swarm in the globe and lined up in a tube, shuddering to a stop, sitting like a row of eyeballs with their printed numbers.

“… followed by fifteen, twenty-one⁠—” the bespectacled woman leaned in for a better look “⁠—and the Powerball Number is eighteen.”

He’d won. Five friggin’ numbers.

But really?

His focus bounced between the television and his ticket, his vision glitchy. But yes, it was so. He fished his phone from his pocket and ignited search algorithms and learned he was due an amount swollen with seven figures.

Stevenson excused himself to nobody and holed himself up in the bathroom, quadruple-checking the ticket numbers. It matched, it really matched, and with utmost care he folded the ticket, matching corner to corner, and restored it within the zippered pocket of his wallet.

So much money. Not never-have-to-work-again money, but enough for a new life. A different country? He thought of Rosalia, of her sumptuous lower lip. He wanted to buy her a new life, one rinsed of all-day shifts in a burrito shop. It wasn’t like they were strangers. It wasn’t like she was married. The worst she could say was no.

Stevenson’s whole body buzzed. His belly was heavy with burrito, but no matter. He’d make his move, he’d seize this day.

He emerged from the restroom and she was there, serendipitously, coursing the hall to the kitchen.

“Rosalia?”

She turned.

The scent of cinnamon swam up his nose and he kissed her. Just like that, no más thought whatsoever.

In the nanoseconds before her kneecap smashed his testicles, he spied a modest diamond ring peeking out from above her shirt collar, looped into a necklace, and a great flash, like a photo flash, illuminated a domino chain of truths. That she was married, that only a restaurant owner would spend so much time grooming the store at all hours day to night, that the man who’d met her was the Hijo to her Hija and that Stevenson, in the suffocating haze of loneliness, had woven a different narrative that suited himself and which positioned poor Rosalia as the antidote for his solitude, discounting that she, herself, had a rich interior life that situated him as a customer, nothing more, just a small rock in the Kuiper belt of her solar system.

The pain of the kneecap squashing his testicles, captured in electric signals surging through the thready neural pathways from testicle to brain, took a blink longer to process. When it hit home, asterisks blared across the dark hallway, stopping everything, his body suspended for a solitary moment before its inevitable collapse.

In that tick of spacetime, Montezuma had his revenge and, naturally, Stevenson shit his pants.

A month later the lottery stood at two billion dollars.

Stevenson headed first thing in the morning to the nearest gas station, along with his short, roly-poly neighbor Jax, who was a second cousin of Zuri.

He thought of Zuri often.

He never contacted her, no sir, for she’d been there on that nuclear day, had seen it with her own eyes, had driven him to the station while he sat on a garbage bag with all windows fully open and the air putrid nevertheless. What Stevenson knew of Zuri was whatever he gleaned from Facebook pics. She’d quit the news station, met someone, and was already glowingly pregnant and headed into an ordinary life. A beautiful life, he thought.

A car jammed its horn and Stevenson jumped. Lost in reverie, he’d stepped into traffic.

Jax tapped him on the shoulder. “Did you shit yourself?”

“Instantly.”

Having shat himself twice now, he could laugh at it⁠ ⁠… sometimes. It’d been six months since the original incident, and the attention-challenged world already forgot him, had already beheld and giggled about a dozen similar humiliations. But this amnesia was conditional. Foremost, Stevenson couldn’t re-emerge from the shadows and step back into any spotlight, lest he remind the world of that splattered broadcast. The video would resurface, multiple platforms buzzing with push notifications, those memes again traded for chuckles.

And for fuck’s sake, he didn’t need the limelight, that’s what he told himself, because the cosmos had been paying him back. That day in the burrito shop, he’d won two million dollars off five matching numbers. With the money he bought a simple, 1,615-square-foot bungalow near Dimond Park, across the street from a former mayor. And he settled in under a spell of anonymity because he went through the bureaucratic hassle of changing his name. And so when his neighbors Googled him, they wouldn’t land on any videos of colossal diarrhea. They’d see that Bob Smith’s life was indistinguishable from the ten thousand other Bob Smiths, a soppy oat in a bowl of oatmeal. Just another tale of a person who’d never done anything heroic nor anything barbaric, just a person living a simple, quiet existence, which fairly accurately described his life absent the fecal incident.

But Jax had put 2+2 together.

Jax knew his distant cousin had filmed that notorious, evacuatory event outside the Quik Stop by I-980 and had remembered Stevenson’s face, had laughed about that face, had ingrained that face into the farthest recesses of his gray matter, that mouth forming an “oh” as the body below shit its britches. Jax laughed and laughed until he awoke one day to find an image of his naked pelvis and his stunning micro-penis headlining a revenge porn website. The commenters called it a truffle, after the dark little mushroom unearthed by French piggies.

So Stevenson had a home and an empathetic friend, but was he happy? Yes and no. He had a buddy, but he did not and could not land a romantic partner.

He’d tried to date. He could make it through small-talk and even a bone here and there, but snuggling intimacy required telling tales about one’s family life, one’s career, ones triumphs⁠—all threads that, if pulled, would lead to a great unravelment.

He’d have to settle for lottery wins.

So, on the month anniversary of the burrito shop win, expectations were high. He suspected the passage of six months meant six matching numbers, which meant a big payout, a massive infusion of cash to dull the pain.

In the 7-Eleven the wares smacked him across the face. A bazaar of snack foods⁠—Bimbuñuelos, ChocoRoles, Gansitos, Donettes⁠—all those bubbly letters shouting at him from their shiny packaging. An odd place where summer bucket hats sat side-by-side with motor oil, suntan oil, and beef jerky, each sale item uniquely capable of causing colorectal cancer.

They were halfway towards the back when Jax said, “You buy the tickets and I’ll get us drinks?”

“We each buy our own.”

“That’s fucked up man.”

Stevenson thought of his shitscapade and his friend’s baby-sized dick. “Fine, mate, sure. I’ll buy the tickets. Get me a horchata.” That made him think of Rosalia. “Actually, get me a kombucha.”

“You got it boss.”

“Thanks. If we win, we’ll split the pot.”

And why not? Luck was a gift. Those who were successful in life never acknowledged it, and he’d no reason to hoard something that wasn’t truly his.

“You want any special numbers?” he said.

“All good, that’s your department.”

Jax turned and positioned himself at the coolers in the back, arms akimbo, beholding an encased wall of drinks blended from corn syrup and coloring dye, and Stevenson trudged to the front toward the clerk, passing sad food under warming lights and a single hotdog on rollers spinning to infinity.

He saw the mask first. Passing outside between ads pasted on the glass front windows. He saw it and disbelieved it, something his brain refused to process, but the masked man threw the door open and fired a pistol into the ceiling. Powder sprinkled down in a column that made Stevenson think of sand in an hourglass.

Now the gun, held sideways. Aimed at the face of the cashier. She was an Asian lady, and her nametag said “Faye.” She looked at the nozzle of the pistol, that tiny black hole, her eyes nearly crossed.

“I want five thousand lotto tickets bitch.”

“Quick picks?” she said.

The cashier hadn’t meant to be funny. Her hands hovered over the cash register, tremoring.

The gunman pulled down a rack of potato chips and stomped a bag. It blew open with a pop not unlike the gun, jolting the heavy air once more. A pregnant woman near a swivel rack of miniature license plates with boys’ and girls’ names was praying on her knees, hugging her belly.

“Bitch, I am not⁠—” the robber struck the butt of his pistol against the counter “⁠—playing the fuck around.”

Stevenson flinched, expecting an accidental discharge.

The robber’s mouth lay pulsing with breath under the balaclava. His hands were gloved, he was more an entity than a person. A bogeyman. For the briefest of moments, Stevenson locked eyes with the gunman and saw reflected back only deadwood pupils, behind them a howling moonscape where nothing bloomed, where conscience was extinct.

Stevenson looked away.

And a cold front descended through his intestinal lining. He considered that buying the drinks at the back of the store would’ve given him more options. He considered that his body existed in this convenience store next to a rolling, lethargic hotdog, but was also nowhere and everywhere.

To do, what to do, and what went through Stevenson’s head was this: He’d never done anything too terrible or too heroic. Yet he knew that life at certain times, perhaps once or twice, would throw out decisive moments, moments that showed you who you really were, showed the world, and that this moment here was such a moment, a chance to do something which would erase all that came before. A chance to be born anew.

His feet were rooted. Was he afraid? He couldn’t explain what he felt. A buzzing in his chest and stomach. Terror, yes, but exhilaration too.

His feet wouldn’t work, and Stevenson told himself to move them. The thought of going back to his life, whatever cosmic treasures it held, wasn’t something he could stomach. It was sickening. With a side-eye glance through the shadow of peripheral vision, he appraised the distance between him and the gunman. Ten feet? Three lunging steps? How far would he get before the gunman swiveled? How far before a shot was fired?

The Quick Pick machine was chittering, branding hundreds of tiny black characters onto an unspooling strip of thermal paper. The robber leaned over the counter, watching the tickets coil and gather in a pile, the clerk mesmerized too.

Stevenson caught Jax’s eye, a certain glint evident, and knew his little friend was sizing up the situation, thinking the same exact thing for the same exact reasons.

What Stevenson knew was that he had to act first if he meant to obliterate the narrative of his life. Going along with another wasn’t heroic, at least not enough to wow the media and its audience or himself.

He moved.

At two steps, the gunman hadn’t cogitated the situation, but stood footed and spellbound by so many lotto tickets, all that possibility. On the third step, the gunman looked over and his eyes widened and filled the holes in the balaclava and he half-turned, his arm following, the gun and the little black hole shifting its focus of doom, but Stevenson got there in time, into the man’s defensive space. In this moment, he couldn’t believe the plan⁠—was it a plan?⁠—had worked, and then they were on the ground wrestling.

The gun, where was the gun? It hadn’t discharged, it was somewhere on the floor or between them, this object and its location the most important thing in the room. In the fugue of limbs and struggle, the only move was to pin the man, to immobilize the moment. Jax was there now too, the backup arrived, and his friend stomped the robber’s head and Stevenson heard it crack like a ceramic bowl. In this instant, in this briefest of instants, relief suffused the universe, him, and his surroundings, there being no distinction between physical things. He was swept in the warmth of an interdimensional current, flowing through the multiverse, the past, present, and future all visible and demystified. He knew then he’d be on television again, held aloft to the world as a local hero, the news anchors gushing, his past erased, the community in agreement because they, that ubiquitous they, wouldn’t sour heroics with trifling gossip about past misfortunes. There was incontrovertible proof one person could make a difference, and if each of them could all make small differences⁠ ⁠… in those briefest of moments, Stevenson knew he’d be okay. Perhaps they’d all be okay.

And then he saw the gun. The robber held it in an outflung hand and, still somehow conscious, he bent his elbow inward. The pistol’s nose turned upward, toward Jax who stood above them, the gun’s hammer cocked and poised to fall, and Stevenson seized the assailant’s wrist and wrung it like a wet towel, catching skin through the cotton sleeve. The man groaned and the gun dropped from his hand.

It hit the ground and discharged into Stevenson’s face.

He died.

Then he shit his pants.