FOUR TACOS
DOLLY
Every war needs a strategy, and every strategy needs a notebook, and every notebook needs a name written on the cover in a marker you found under the couch.
Mine said: OPERATION TATTY DOWNFALL. Underneath, in smaller letters: (working title). Underneath that, smaller still: (the downfall is not the working part. the downfall is happening.)
The plans so far:
PLAN A: Learn his schedule. Be there. Be everywhere. Become weather.
PLAN B: The seagull. (Details pending. The seagull owes me and it knows why.)
PLAN C: Long-term psychological campaign wherein I eat tacos in front of him so deliciously that he understands, on a cellular level, what he took from me.
Honestly? C was the strongest. C had legs.
I got so fired up I climbed onto the bed — carefully, respectfully, the Survivor and I have an understanding — planted one foot on a pillow, and struck the pose. You know the pose. Fist to the sky. Wind in my soul, if not technically in the room.
“MARK MY WORDS, TATTY!” I bellowed to the ceiling, the city, the taco gods, and all applicable insurance providers. “BY THE TIME I’M DONE, YOU’LL BEG TO RETURN WHAT YOU’VE TAKEN! I AM THE STORM! I AM THE RECKONING! I AM THE TACO QUEEEE—”
BANG BANG BANG.
“SHUT YOUR TACO HOLE, YOU DERANGED BANSHEE!” roared the wall, which is legally named Gerald and lives next door.
I startled. The pillow shifted. Physics — a known enemy of the crown — did the rest.
I went down like a chopped tree. THUD. Full spine deployment onto the carpet.
“My back,” I whispered to the ceiling fan. “My beautiful taco-bearing back.”
The ceiling fan spun on, neutral as ever. Switzerland with blades.
And then I heard it. A sound so small and so wrong that my blood ran cold before my brain even finished the math.
crnch.
Not KRUNCH. Not the good sound. The bad one. The small one. The sound of something breaking that was not built to be broken yet.
I turned my head.
The Survivor had fallen with me.
Shell: shattered. Fillings: scattered across the carpet like the world’s saddest confetti. Lettuce — everywhere. A single cherry tomato half rolled slowly to a stop against my shoe and tipped over, done.
“No.” I army-crawled across the carpet, dragging my wounded spine, and gathered the pieces into my hands. “No no no no. Hey. HEY. Look at me. Stay with me. You’re the SURVIVOR, that’s your whole THING—”
The shell fragment I was holding chose that moment to crack in half.
I felt it go through me like a church bell.
Some people, in moments of catastrophe, freeze. Some flee. I am a woman of action. I lunged for my phone, smearing sour cream across the screen, and speed-dialed the only number that matters — number one, above my mother, a ranking she knows about and has accepted.
It rang twice.
“Twisty Tacos, we’re clos—”
“TACO EMERGENCY,” I wailed. “THIS IS A TACO EMERGENCY. I NEED AN EMERGENCY TACO IMMEDIATELY, POSSIBLY TWO, THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
A pause. The pause of a man recalibrating his entire evening.
“…Ma’am, we don’t deliver.”
“YOU DO TONIGHT.” I gave him my address, my cross street, my buzzer code, and a brief description of the fallen so the replacement could be matched respectfully. “And HURRY. I’m on the floor and I can’t emotionally get up.”
“You can’t— physically, or—”
“EMOTIONALLY. Are you even LISTENING—”
“On my way,” said the voice, suddenly decisive, and hung up.
See? See? People say the system doesn’t work.
Nineteen minutes later — I counted, the fallen deserved a precise vigil — my buzzer rang. I dragged myself up, still cradling the largest piece of the Survivor, and opened the door to receive the emergency responder.
Tatty.
TATTY. In my doorway. Holding a Twisty Tacos bag. At nine p.m. Like a fever dream with forearms.
I did the only reasonable thing and slammed the door.
Then I opened it again, because he had the bag.
Then I half-closed it, so he understood the bag was welcome and he was on thin ice.
“YOU,” I said through the gap. “How— WHY— did you STEAL this delivery? Did you hijack a taco shipment? Is there a real employee tied up somewhere, blinking for help?”
He considered this with what I can only call criminal calm. “Would that change whether you eat them?”
“…No. But I’d eat them JUDGMENTALLY.”
“I was in the area,” he said, which is what people say in movies right before you find out they are absolutely never just in the area. “Heard there was an emergency. I moonlight.”
“You moonlight. As what.”
“Taco emergency services.” Completely straight face. Not a flicker. “It’s a small division. Elite. Mostly me.”
I narrowed my eyes at him for a long moment, weighing the many red flags against the warm bag smell currently performing a siren song directly into my soul.
The bag won. The bag was always going to win.
I snatched it, retreated to the couch, and inspected the contents like a customs officer. One taco, correct order, correct everything — and underneath it, two more.
I looked up. “I ordered one. Possibly two. I said possibly.”
He shrugged, leaning against my doorframe like it was load-bearing for his personality. “Figured there’d be aftershocks.”
I opened my mouth to fire back something devastating.
Nothing came out.
Because — okay. Here’s the thing. I’ve had a taco emergency before.
Several. There are people in my life who have received the call.
And every one of them, every single one, said some version of it’s just a taco, Dolly.
My mother said it. Gerald-the-wall has said it through the wall.
A 911 dispatcher said it once, and fine, that one’s on me.
Nobody — not once, not ever — had planned for the aftershocks.
Something in my chest did a thing. A small, unauthorized thing. I made a note to look into it later and never did.
“They’re still warm,” I said instead, suspicious.
“I know a guy with a heat lamp.”
“You’re very committed to this bit.”
“You hissed at me through a windshield yesterday. Everyone’s committed to something.”
I ate the first taco right there while he stood in the doorway, and I want to be clear that he didn’t say a WORD the entire time. No smirk. No commentary. Just waited, quiet, like a man at a graveside, until the last bite was done and the color had returned to my kingdom.
Then he opened his mouth.
“So. The floor. You said you couldn’t get up emotionally —”
“OUT.”
“Because physically you seem —”
“OUT, TATTY.”
“— fully operational, so I’m just trying to understand the medical—”
I herded him out the door with a couch cushion as he laughed that big stupid warm laugh all the way down the hall, and I shut the door, and I locked it, and I stood there.
On the coffee table: two tacos. Aftershock rations. Still warm.
In my chest: the unauthorized thing, doing it again.
“Enemies,” I reminded my chest, out loud, in my empty apartment, at 9:40 on a Tuesday-adjacent evening. “He is the number one enemy of the crown.”
My chest declined to comment.
I ate an aftershock taco about it.