“I told you to ‘pull over’, not send me through the damn windshield,” grumbled Cassandra, gingerly extracting herself from her seat belt and clambering out of the car. “Whoever taught you to drive should be taken out back and shot.”
“That was you,” he said flatly. “This morning.”
She slammed her door and walked around to the driver’s side window, slapping her hand on the roof of the car and peering in at him. “Well! Hurry up and get out. I’m going to teach you something else now,” she said. “Let’s hope you’re better at divination than driving. Ever tried reading entrails?”
“Entrails?” he echoed. She must have seen the trepidation in his expression, because she waved her hand in a cutting motion and snorted dismissively.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You won’t have to kill anything.”
She led him across the road and back about a hundred yards, towards whatever had caught her eye. It was a dead sea bird, he realized–a seagull, maybe, or a cormorant. It was still intact, but its milky, shrunken eyes and ragged feathers suggested it had been dead for several days. He looked up at the seer uncertainly.
She broke off a long, slender stick and came to stand beside him. “In the old days, they used to sacrifice animals,” she said, prodding gently at the dead bird’s feathers, turning it over so that its mud-caked underside was exposed. “The ancient Etruscans would divine the future from the entrails of livestock and poultry. They believed they could predict the weather from the shape of a dead goose’s liver. You’re not squeamish, are you?”
He hesitated, and then shook his head, wondering exactly which choices in life had led to him standing over roadkill with a strange woman and a stolen car. He was in too deep now to turn back.
“Open it up,” she ordered, pressing the stick into his hand. “Tell me what you see.”
He steeled himself with a deep breath and pierced the dead bird’s breast. He had expected blood and wet brown flesh, but there was surprisingly little meat on the carcass. The skin parted easily, splitting down the middle to reveal the bird’s stomach. He yelped and jumped back, dropping the stick. “What is all that?!”
Cassandra did not flinch. “Look closely,” she said. He shot her a furious glare, but did as he was told.
“Bottle caps!” he exclaimed. He lifted the stick again, pushing them aside. There were tangles of electric blue and yellow, rings of orange and red and chunks of mint green plastic. “It’s all garbage,” he said, caught somewhere between disgust and fascination. “There’s so much of it…”
She sighed, sadly, and crouched beside him with a crackle of aging joints. “All too common nowadays,” she said. “It’s amazing the sort of things you get used to. I used to do autopsies when I worked for the state ornithology lab…” she trailed off, shaking her head. “Fucked up shit. What do you suppose it means?”
“Why, you’re a natural,” she said wryly.
They crouched there in silence for a long moment, staring at the carcass and thinking their own thoughts. Eventually she rose, using the top of his head to pull herself to her feet with a groan.
“If there’s one thing an augur and an ecologist have in common,” she said, “It’s the right to say, ‘I damn well told you so’. Come on. Ever tried edibles?”
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