The crash happened on a rain-slicked highway outside Youngstown, Ohio, on a Thursday in March of 2003. Tyler Briggs was seventeen, driving his uncle's Ford Taurus at sixty-five miles per hour. He was alone when he hit the guardrail. The car spun, flipped, and came to rest on its roof in a drainage ditch.

Tyler walked away without a scratch. When he woke up in the hospital, everything had changed.

It started with the nurse. She was checking his vitals, smiling, asking if he needed anything. Tyler looked at her face and something in his brain fired that shouldn't have fired. He could see, in the slight tension of her jaw and the tremor of her left hand, that she was worried about something he couldn't name.

"She's pregnant," Tyler said.

The nurse dropped her clipboard.

ACT II

Tyler spent two weeks in the hospital and three more at his grandfather Earl's house, a sagging bungalow on the edge of a town whose population was steadily shrinking because there was nothing left to do there. His mother had left when he was six. His father had left when Tyler was twelve. Earl had been raising him ever since, between disability checks and the occasional poker game at the VFW.

"You got lucky, kid," Earl said the first morning Tyler woke up staring at the water stains on the ceiling.

Tyler wasn't thinking about luck. He was thinking about the nurse. He was thinking about how he had known—without a shadow of doubt—that she was pregnant, from the way she stood and the way her eyes moved when she thought nobody was looking.

He tested it. At the grocery store, he watched the cashier and knew she was worried about money despite the expensive shoes. At the gas station, he saw the attendant and knew he was afraid, though he couldn't tell who of what.

It was overwhelming. Like turning up the volume on a radio that was already too loud.

Tyler started using it. At school, he walked past the kids who had made his life miserable for three years and said things like "I know about the drugs in your locker" and "I know why you're really skipping class." They stopped walking past him. They started looking at the ground when he came near.

His grandfather noticed. "You're not yourself," Earl said one evening, sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, watching the rain collect in puddles on the asphalt.

"No," Tyler agreed. "I'm more myself. That's the problem."

ACT III

Tyler found the factory in September. He was working part-time at a warehouse for twenty an hour, stacking boxes, when he noticed something every time he drove past the chemical plant on the edge of town—a sensation like the taste of copper on his tongue.

He began noticing things: the brown grass growing in a narrow band between the factory fence and the river; the way the factory workers' kids had higher rates of asthma; the way the town doctor prescribed more inhalers than anything else.

Tyler went to the public library, looked up chemical discharge regulations, found public records of water quality testing, and cross-referenced hospital data from the county health department.

The results were incontrovertible. The plant was dumping a regulated toxin into the groundwater at levels three times the legal limit. The children of the factory town were breathing and drinking poison every day.

Tyler took his findings to the local paper. The story ran on the front page.

The reaction was immediate and, in a way Tyler had not anticipated, not hostile but resigned. The mayor gave a press conference about "economic feasibility." The factory owner talked about "four hundred families." The town doctor said quietly: "Yes, it's bad. But this is a rust belt town. We don't have leverage."

Tyler sat in his living room watching the mayor's press conference on a small television with rabbit-ear antennas, and he felt something collapse inside him. It wasn't that nobody cared. It was that everybody cared, and nobody could do anything. The system was not evil. It was indifferent.

ACT IV

Tyler sat on the steps of the abandoned gas station off Route 45, the kind of place that still had a hand-pumped gas model from the 1980s, rusted orange and useless. He was twenty years old now. The rain was warm. He had a warm beer in his hand.

He thought about the factory. The story had run in the Cleveland paper a week later. An environmental agency had announced an investigation. The mayor had promised a hearing. The kids with asthma were still getting sick.

Nothing had changed.

Tyler closed his eyes and tried to turn it off. In the eighteen months since the crash, he had learned to control what he perceived—to focus on one person's face and read everything in it, to walk into a room and feel the emotional temperature. He had learned to use it. To weaponize it.

But he had never learned how to turn it off.

He opened his eyes and looked at the rusted gas pump. The sun was going down behind the chain-link fence. Somewhere in the distance, a train was going by.

Tyler took another drink from the can. The beer tasted like metal. Everything did.

Nobody's Gift --- OTMES-v2 Code: OTMES-v2-0700201531-55-M1-10A 0-FF00 E_total: 12.84 Rank: 9 Dominant Mode: M1 (Tragedy) Dominant Angle: 270.0 Dominance Ratio: 0.60 Irreversibility: 0.90 M_vector: [7.0, 0.0, 5.0, 2.0, 2.0, 3.0, 2.0, 0.0, 1.0, 3.0] N_vector: [0.50, 0.50] K_vector: [0.80, 0.20] Style: Dirty Realism / Absolute Nihilism ---