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Squeezable Mustard


Marcus Williams yanked his forklift’s steering wheel to the right, ripping past cereals and breakfast snacks. Just beyond miscellaneous condiments, he floored the accelerator and escaped warehouse hell. In his mind, he heard the forklift’s engine respond with the throaty precision of European engineering. Hundred sixty, hundred seventy, hundred eighty kilometers per hour. Bianco Freight and Grocery faded from view as he changed lanes and was swept back to Bavarian Germany, July 1980.
“Go, go!” He pressed harder on the BMW 5 Series’ gas pedal. “Come on,” he pleaded. “You're just tuned up. Now give me two-twenty.”
The car surged ahead, wind sizzling through the vented sunroof. It was 6:30 a.m. as he shot past the Augsburg exit on Autobahn 8. Morning sun shone through the rear window. Too early for Sunday traffic, there were no tractor-trailers, no vacation campers, no families headed home from Oma and Opa’s. Just empty road.
He was twenty-five again, Ranger tough. No belly, only shelves and layers of exercised muscle. His hair, shaved above his ears, yielded abruptly to an escarpment of stubble on the crown of his head. His eyes pierced the morning, clear and alert; and his hands embraced the steering wheel, his reflexes tensed to cat-quickness. Every pore of his body oozed testosterone and a need for speed. He was man. He was machine. They were one.
The BMW tore down the left lane, shooting needle-straight between the painted, dashed lines. Although wider than on U.S. freeways, the lane markers zipped past so fast he couldn’t focus on individual stripes. The car, a driving machine of proud German construction, howled down the seamlessly constructed road. At two hundred kilometers per hour, he would cover 182 feet per second, a speed at which a blowout would mean death. A sparrow would hit his windshield like a brick, a pigeon like a concrete block. He pressed on.
Without warning, a wall of corrugated boxes loomed in front of him. Box was interlaced upon box, a Rubik’s Cube of death stacked amid an array of connected pallets. In real time, he told his body to react, but no highly toned reflexes responded, now too slow and lazy in his jellied forklift-driver body.
He plowed into the boxes. No—he crushed them, skewered them. There was no driver’s airbag. No three-point seat belt. No 5-series driving machine. Just a dreamy-minded man in a sky-blue hardhat with Bianco Freight printed on the front and Marcus written on the back.
As the forklift slammed into the wall behind a row of corrugated boxes, Marcus Williams flew forward. In mid-flight, he glimpsed the large print on one of the containers:  Squeezable Mustard. Hitting the wall, his vision reddened, and only one thought flashed through his mind as his head smashed against the unyielding concrete: Is mustard usually that red?  

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