Scareship_Issue8

within. She associates all of them with him... and what if there are
people... doing what? Skipping though alternate universes? Time
traveling? No, his clothes looked in fashion, or at least current.
Was he as lonely as she seems to remember him looking, for that
brief moment he was there?
She shakes her head. Enough. A trick of the light, or a
moment’s dizziness on her part (she’s been working long hours),
during which he moved away. The bar was crowded, as it usually
is. That’s all.
She forces herself to look at two more stores, and stops in the
second, to pick up milk and snacks. She waits on line, refusing to
look around her, lest she seem to herself searching for him—then
contrarily looking around, to prove to herself that he isn’t there,
and she knows it. He isn’t. Just the standard faces of New York,
mostly tired, mostly walled away by thoughts of their own lives, as
if they all carried their apartments with them psychically, like
shells on snails. That would make a good painting, she thinks. She
hasn’t done anything in so long, really. Drawing his picture earlier
was the first thing.... Oh the hell with it.
When she leaves the store, she shivers as she sees the
construction paper leaning against the wall of the alley behind the
store near the business-sized green metal garbage container, folded
in half and thrown away, but opened enough to read the name:
TOMMY MARTIN. And phone numbers, when she goes closer to
look: work, home and cell. She thinks that it has to be him,
although she isn’t sure why she believes that. She writes the
numbers down on the grocery bag, shaking her head as she does
so. She wishes the sonofabitch had appeared out of nowhere in
some other bar. Of all the gin mills... Gin joints? Whatever.
When she gets home and unpacks, she goes to throw away the
bag on which she’s written the numbers, then tears off that section
of the bag and puts it on the kitchen table, under the salt shaker.
She reads a bit, then starts to prepare dinner, then grabs the paper
and calls his home number. Maybe he’s not there yet.
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