// NATURE NEWS — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
Somewhere over the transcontinental burrito tunnel
Elitsa Dermendzhiyska is a BSFA-nominated writer, a former science writer in psychology, and the co-creator of a mental-health fantasy game. Her stories have appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Small Wonders, Flame Tree Press and others.
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Lenny fell in love with Bea around burrito number five. He recognized that dizzying jolt to his brain the instant the tunnel’s mouth sighed with a sweet pneumatic hiss and the vacuum-sealed burrito glided in.
Three hours and twenty-one minutes earlier, 2,553 miles away, at her end of the tunnel in the East Bay facility, Bea had been thinking of him. She must have. He wished he could trace her regard for his existence beyond the minute or two it would’ve taken her to pluck the flash-chilled burrito from the sorting dock, nest it in its carbon-fibre pod, and send it in the near-vacuum of the tunnel deep into the Earth to be blasted across the continent at just below the speed of sound.
Lenny worked the subterranean off-ramp in New Jersey, where multitudes of the famed Mission burritos of the Bay Area arrived levitating on magnetic currents, ready for dispatch to the ravenous gullets of the five boroughs of New York City. Since the blast aboveground, the flow had dwindled to one burrito at a time. Lenny stared at each with longing, wondering if Bea had tucked a note for him into the Mylar pocket.
When her first message arrived, the eerie rumble still vibrated through the basement walls. Lenny was pacing in circles, running through scenarios — alien invasion, given the contact the year before; nuclear war, given … many things — and going mad at the thought of dying underground, alone. He was ready to venture out and face the radiation or the new overlords when the first burrito slid out with a note attached to it. Here: an end-of-the-world burrito. Best you’ve ever had.
Apparently Bea had never expected her message to reach anyone. Who knew insomnia would drive them both to work before clock-in time, saving them? Now she was sitting on a dragon’s hoard of burritos, that morning’s shipment enough to feed them both for weeks. They could stay put, wait for things to blow over.
The problem wasn’t food — or the aliens, or the bombs. It was, as usual with Lenny, love.
Around burrito number nine, he wrote on a whim, Folks might get the wrong impression if they saw you spoiling me. He slipped his note into a Mylar pouch, which he placed inside an empty burrito pod and sent down the tube.
Bea volleyed back, Yeah, they’ll think you’re my grandson. PS What folks, Lenny???