Absolution by Einstein
What are the odds, Dad?
A tire explodes on the treacherous mountain curve with missing guardrails, jolting me from a dream about meeting the girl later this morning. The road spins like the windshield’s in slow-motion Panavision, and I hear my dead father pontificating on randomness, choice, and predetermination. Take what you can, however you can, because it’s the only way to get a share, he said, in herringbone and bow tie, teaching me that we control the random by making choices. Dad argued that Einstein was wrong for concluding the universe is predetermined and thought the genius’s philosophy was a recipe for passivity. He once told me, if allowed to ask the dead a single question, it would be, Why get out of bed, Albert?
As the car skids off the cliff and into gentle free-fall, I’m astonished how the blowout’s timing converged with this precise location. What are the odds, Dad? Maybe Einstein was right, and God doesn’t play dice. It’s all prewritten, and even our choices illusory. If so, the girl I planned to meet today—the one I found online, who believed I was just twenty-one and had gifts and a job offer for her at my nonexistent startup when she turns eighteen next month—was destined not to meet me and not have her life derailed. Accelerating toward the rocks, I’m convinced this accident was inevitable. She was never in danger.
And the others? Not my fault.
Barry Yedvobnick’s fiction, forthcoming at Literally Stories, appeared recently in The Phare, Sky Island Journal, Neither Fish Nor Foul, 10 by 10 Flash Fiction, CommuterLit, and Wordrunner eChapbooks. His nonfiction writing received a 2025 Georgia Press Association Award. A retired biologist, he narrates stories for AntipodeanSF radio shows. www.chillsubs.com/profile/barryyedvobnick
