Jeff walked around the column of runoff pouring down from the interstate above. The voice in his head told him if he kept taking care of Harper, even in the smallest of ways, it was like they were still together. And this, her car in the same lot, just two spots down from where he parked, was the opportunity to do just that. He cupped his hand to her driver’s side door handle. The battery in Harper’s clicker had died toward the end of their relationship. Without it, she couldn’t remember to lock her car. 

“I need to see a man about a snake,” a woman said from behind him. 

When he turned, he slouched against the car before making himself stand straight, light between his shirt and Harper’s vehicle. A tan pit bull heeled, panting, on a leash at the woman’s side. Jeff judged the danger of the dog to be low without full knowledge he was assessing the situation. Then, he studied the woman intentionally. Messy shoulder length red hair. Oversized t-shirt, dull Superman holding the globe in his capable hands, telling Jeff and the rest of civilization to give the earth a hug. The word homeless did not fully form in front of Jeff before an autonomic reaction formed inside. Walls went up. Forced smile spread across his face.

“Excuse me?” 

“Can you take me to Broadway?” she asked.

He wanted to say those weren’t the words she’d spoken before. He wanted to tell her the road she wanted was a ten, twelve-minute walk at most, wanted to tell her even with the rain, she would make it easy enough. He wanted to tell her to do that, to walk it, but she spoke again. 

“Us,” she said, gently tugging on the pit’s leash to get him to stop licking himself, to get him to look forward, to get Jeff to look the pup straight in the eyes.

“This isn’t my car,” Jeff said. 

The woman let out a theatrical breath and all softness dissolved. “Dick,” she said, already moving her life beyond him. The dog did not want to go, and she had to pull him to her. The woman ran a hand through the column of water. Jeff opened Harper’s door, leaned just far enough inside to hit the lock button. He closed it but did not immediately take his hand from the handle. 

It’s my girlfriend’s car, he said to himself. She forgot to lock it and she’s stuck at work. She asked me to check it for her. Calling Harper his girlfriend again, even if only in his head, filled him up with something like wholeness. The handle’s reality, the reality of checking it again and it not opening, almost made his thought words feel real.

The woman spoke to a new man, but Jeff could not hear her words over the throb of cars, the column of water falling and falling. Two women passed where the unhoused woman ignored her dog for the moment in her implorations of this stranger. She said nothing to them, and the man turned his back to her. But there was another. This one, when she approached, stood too closely to her, gestured too energetically with his hand, teeth-bared smile pasted across his face. Hand resting against the back-passenger window of Harper’s car, Jeff wondered what kind of man he would need to be to intervene, to go and offer the ride he’d already refused. This man, evidently, would give her that ride. Jeff watched them walk to the man’s car. She opened the backdoor and the dog hopped in. The man turned the engine over. They sat. There was some type of animated conversation happening. It looked like the man was yelling. More energetic hand gestures. Jeff felt like he could feel their words. The man propositioning for sex. The woman saying she just needed a ride. Him telling her no one rides for free. The dog’s thoughts push up into the air like scent of rain up from concrete. In his muscles, he wants to know if it’s time to protect. To get between. To give himself over for his person.

Jeff stared through time, not noticing the man and woman had pulled from the spot and were driving toward him. There were no longer any words passing between the car’s occupants. The man met Jeff’s gaze for just a moment and lifted a middle finger.

***

Harper was wrapped in anxiety like a thin sweater and a thin sweater too. She had a date in 45 minutes. Enough time to drop the last of her salaried day in a mailbox, stop by her car, fix her makeup, and straighten her posture as she walked back up here for drinks. Maybe dinner, too, if the drinks went well. Puddles stood in the street’s gutters, but the rain had stopped hours before. Her stiff toe-heel steps made time against brick. The sound shifted when the ground shifted from brick to concrete. The rhythm remained steady. 

A car honked. Slowly, it rolled beside her. The driver waved and smiled. An exaggerated wave. Harper recognized that smile before she placed the man. Tevis. Second picture on his profile. Same wave. Same smile. A self-professed goofball. Harper had a weakness for goofballs, despite using the word weakness to describe her attraction. 

“We’re both early,” Tevis called from the open window. 

Harper paused, her step hovering a second before she allowed her foot to drop. She didn’t want to break this unearned connection Tevis had made but lying wasn’t part of the dating equation for Harper. Not now. She thought about Jeff, about lies they’d told each other, about lies she’d told herself. 

 “Actually, I’m not early,” she said. Laughed. Like a lie, that laugh. She gestured toward her car, toward a parking spot blocked out of sight by three buildings, a hill, and an overpass. “I’ve got to run to my car real quick.”

 Tevis held up traffic. The woman behind him held both palms to her ceiling lining, stared up and between them for strength or deliverance. He smiled his teeth-bared smile, inching along next to Harper without speaking.

 “But I’ll be on time,” she said. The feeling she had at reassuring this man made her feet move. She waved. “See you in a bit.” She thought he’d leave it there, but he kept pace alongside her.

 “I can give you a ride.”

 “It’s fine. Really.” Harper did not smile this time.

 “You don’t like to sweat,” he said, repeating words she’d typed to him on the dating app. And that was it. No, she did not like to sweat. She absolutely hated sweating. The feeling of it sliding down her skin. The wet circle forming at the small of her back. Worrying whether she smelled, if she’d know if she did. But Harper hated presumption, hated having her words thrown back at her even more. 

 Deep breathing had not worked for the woman behind Tevis and she was now honking. Harper waved him ahead, away, off without looking. A word or a word-like sound escaped his window and he didn’t blast off in rage, but he definitely got over the speed limit too quickly. She counted. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. She disguised the turn to look behind her as if the sign on the side of the building interested her. Harper had already decided not to walk back for drinks. She’d drive home, put on the softest pajamas she owned, and watch something trashy and dramatic that would make her feel better about the way her evening had deflated before it had even begun to fill.

 As she walked to her car, Harper tried to find that rhythm, that steady beat of her shoes that could separate her from the world. But there was no discernable pattern in her steps. She was thinking too much about making it happen, about the comfort she’d felt with Jeff, about Tevis knowing her last name, her phone number, the company where she worked, her nieces’ names.

 The keys were buried at the bottom of her purse and though, really, she doubted Tevis was a come-out-of-nowhere-to-abduct-her creep, she went into practice mode. If I were in a situation with a man coming after me and I had to get my keys out, unlock the car, jump in, and lock it behind me, how fast could I do it? The timer started when she touched her keys.

***

 Jeff’s cell phone was set to perpetual silence. He worked as a customer service rep for a major credit card company and on busy days he fielded over 130 calls. But even on an average day, which this one had been, he made 93 contacts. He told himself the last thing he wanted to do was answer a phone when he got home. But like its silence, the phone was always close by, always next to him. Even with the little lies he told himself, Jeff couldn’t deny the voice that popped up when he was lonely, that reached through everything else when no one called or texted for hours, days. He felt a hurt he didn’t want to admit, this pain especially cutting at night. 

 The moon, full, tried to light the dark apartment. Jeff took the stepstool his mother had given him and used it to reach the top shelf. Up there was his childhood, distilled. Skittles, Air Heads, sour gummy worms, gummy bears, and what he was poking around for tonight, Starbursts.

 He took down a package of the original flavor and sat at the coffee table with two bowls. He placed the naked Starbursts in one, the wrappers in the other. He put his fingers up to his nose. Starburst clung there like squeezed lime, like memories of easy passage through years at a time. He put the bowl with the Starbursts in the microwave for 14 seconds. When he took them out, the Starbursts weren’t hot but malleable, more so than when they were cold, room temperature. He balled them together until they formed a sphere of colored sugar halfway between golf and baseball. He was just about to take a bite when he looked at his phone. A call was coming through. Harper Jane. He’d never thought to enter her last name.

 Jeff answered it. “Hello?” he asked. On the other end, silence. “Hello,” he said. “Harper?” One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. The counting made him think of her as much as the call. “You didn’t mean to call me, did you?” One. Two. Three. “You know,” he said, “you’re the one who ended things.” He took a breath. One. Two. “If it’d been anyone else, I would have let the call go. I would have ignored it.” 

He took another breath and sat in silence. No counting. No thought of what came next. He hit the speaker button and thumbed through meme pages. He took bites from his Starburst ball. When he wasn’t chewing, Jeff imagined he could hear Harper breathing or maybe it was just her television. Any moment the call would be through. Harper would realize she’d butt-dialed him. It would just end, and Jeff would sit the phone back on his chest, wanting not to hope.

There was a meme of a girl at a fast-food restaurant holding her foot in her hand as she ate. The suggestion was that she was so lonely her toes would feel like another’s fingers wrapped up in hers. He looked at his foot. His toes were hairy, chubby. They’d never pass for a woman’s fingers. Not that he actually considered trying it.

 Jeff asked the quiet on the line if it, if she had ever seen the meme, if she’d ever been so lonely she cradled her toes as if they were a lover’s. He asked Harper if she’d ever been so lonely she called her ex and let the silence fill the container of her world. “Have you ever been so lonely,” he said, “you answered an ex-partner’s call and held onto the silence on the other end of the line like it was her hand?” There was a buzzer. Shuffling. A moment of quiet he held onto. The phone call ended. The quiet pushed air aside, surrounded him. The light from his phone hurt his eyes. She didn’t mean to call, he thought. She doesn’t want you.

“And. You. Don’t. Want. Her.” He said these words aloud. But there, tangled up and poking from what he knew had to be truth was this thought: maybe. Maybe she did mean to call and my asking those questions  made her hang up. He pulled a blanket up around him and tried to push what he knew to be false hope down. Two or three bites of the Starburst ball remained uneaten in its bowl. He pressed his fingers to his nose and inhaled.

***

 Harper didn’t normally smoke cigarettes, but she walked with Misty and Ester who did. The smokers were the only ones who utilized their morning and afternoon breaks without being chastised for their absence. Harper was fine letting people think she smoked if it meant stretching her legs, if it meant moving through space like water. If it meant her days shrank by thirty minutes. 

 “I don’t think I’d give him another chance.” Misty answered an unasked question. And, of course, Misty would give him another chance. She’d give him three more chances and buy him his next dinner. She’d lend him her car and would cry over him—not the stolen car—when he never came back.

 Harper wanted to tell Misty that giving Tevis another shot was never on the table but instead, she nodded. Work friends were repositories, places to put what happened yesterday. She’d give them summaries of breakups and describe penises she seen, but knew not to give too much of herself over to them. 

 Ester took a drag of her cigarette and started to say the thing about online dating Harper and Misty had heard enough times before to quote her words ahead of her. It’s good for getting dick but that’s about it. Harper asked for a cigarette.

 There were giggles and fake protestations from both of them, but Ester pulled a Marlboro Light from her pack and somersaulted it to Harper. She plucked it from the sky and put it between her lips. Ester let out a dramatized gasp and Misty laughed, awestruck, when Harper lit the cigarette and coughed, doubling over.

 The two women stopped walking and Harper thought they were waiting for her but when she gathered herself, she saw them. The woman and her Pit Bull. The boa constrictor wrapped around her neck like a scarf. The woman and her animal kingdom walked directly toward them. Harper pressed herself back until her dress rustled against the building’s brick façade. The snake raised its head, seeming to look at Harper as it passed. The snake’s black tongue tasted air. And then it, she, they were gone, and Ester and Misty laughed again.

 “Did you see that?” Misty said. Harper realized the cigarette between her lips had gone out. She pretended to smoke it anyway. Ester took up the conversation, telling about her new boyfriend’s motorcycle or motorcycles. Harper wasn’t following close enough to tell singular from plural.

 Ester laughed as she told them they should both come to the party she was having that weekend. She still had a key to her ex’s spectacular condo downtown and she knew from social media that he was travelling for work as he always was. In fact, Ester was going to bring this new boyfriend with his motorcycle(s). Harper kept her head from shaking no. From making a noise she might regret later. She needed these women. She admitted it to herself as she thought about the snake’s tongue flicking black, as she considered the Pit’s muscles, the woman’s tattoos on her thighs, covering her forearms.

 “You think you can make it?” Ester said.

 “No,” Harper said, lost for a moment in replayed life. No one said anything as they closed the distance back to work by half. “I’ll try, I mean,” Harper said. “Text me the address.”

 Ester didn’t miss a beat. “Good! I have someone I’ve been wanting you to meet.” When Harper didn’t say anything, Ester went on. “The best thing about him is that his name isn’t Tevis.”

 Late that afternoon when the women took their next break, Harper did not go. She shifted papers around, piled papers into stacks that meant nothing other than they’d need to be unstacked and separated later. She had already finished all her tasks for the day and was alternating between online shopping and listicles about astrological signs and their healthiest matches. She could hear Ester’s heels clicking toward her office and directly before Ester and Misty appeared in her doorway, Harper opened a spreadsheet she’d done weeks before. Marginal Analysis of Production Efficiency. 

“Another fifteen minutes of freedom?” Misty said. She shook her unlit cigarette at Harper, but pointed at the piles. Spoke of making spreadsheets match up with raw numbers. The women only half-heartedly tried to coax her from behind her desk. When Harper could no longer hear their voices, she pulled out her phone and looked at the call history. Jeff A. When she’d found out he didn’t have her last name in his phone, she’d deleted his surname and added his middle initial. She thought about deleting his number right then, but that didn’t seem right as she sat behind her desk thinking about calling him the previous night. She realized it was a mistake immediately and thought quickly enough not to hang up, to let it stay connected. The longer it sat there the more, she knew, it would seem like a butt dial. She had carried her phone in her pocket down to the basement of her building, waited for the washer to go off. But something about the deception made her shoulders tighten. Harper went into his contact, added the rest of his middle name. Alex. 

Harper hated layers right then. Maybe, she thought, I’ll like that man Ester wants to introduce me to. She laughed at that. More likely Ester’s ex would show up with all of them there at his place and she’d see some drama. That much, Harper thought, I can hope for.

***

 For two days Jeff worked his job and went home and resisted the urge to call Harper. Candy was involved. And bad 90s movies where the protagonists only seemed as such because the stories are told from their perspectives. And stretching out on the dirty carpet he needed to vacuum and vacuuming the dirty carpet to deal with his guilt of being an adult who ate too much candy and had been neglecting his household responsibilities. And, of course, there was swiping. 

 He swiped left and right through all of the people in both dating apps he’d downloaded since the breakup, swiped until there was no one new in his area, swiped left and right and waited as long as he could to check the apps again, hoping there’d be a few new people to be swiped. 

 On the second day, Jeff finally got to the point where both apps were empty and stayed that way. I Know What You Did Last Summer wasn’t cutting it on the TV, and a cavity in a molar was causing a headache such that he couldn’t think of biting down on another Skittle. He stared at the recent calls on his phone. A friend from years ago. His mom. His dad. The same friend and his parents on repeat like a pattern broken only by debt collectors and, just once, Harper Jane. He hit info on her call. August 4. Incoming Call. 8:13 PM. 28 Minutes. In her contact picture Harper wore bright red lipstick, a bandana tied around her head. She was a last-minute Rosie the Riveter for Halloween. That smile. Playful. But like there might be a hidden message there for the current him, and if only he could decipher it, she would come back.

He could see the two of them on the couch the night that picture was taken, her friends calling, he and Harper chugging drinks to help them get ready for a party that had already started, that they’d never planned to attend in the first place. Her bending over to kiss him. But he didn’t kiss her. He told her to hold like that. Right there. He pulled up his phone and took the picture. He took the picture and there was that look and there had been other kisses, sure, but not that kiss. He stared at her on his phone. The only time he remembered Harper wearing that shade of red lipstick. He exhaled in a way that made him laugh. His heart beat hard. He knew he was going to call her. It was only a matter of when.

Once the question of when was phrased in his thoughts and not just a vague sensation stalking there at the peripheral of everything else, he could lock his phone, plug it in, pull it back off the charger, turn on a song, turn on a game, flip through meme pages, put it in Airplane Mode, turn that back off. He could do every one of these and did, but there was only one remedy. He went back into his recent calls and touched her name. For a microsecond that feeling shot through him like when he first touched her, before they were together in anything he would call a relationship, before touching her became only another thing he did.

The phone rang and rang and rang and Jeff was just about to hit End when she answered. Not answer exactly because she did not speak but Harper accepted his call. There wasn’t silence on the other end, either. There was music and yelling and a voice closer to the phone, too deep to be Harper’s. Jeff listened, but no sounds the man made could be put together into words and meaning. Then he heard Harper’s voice closer to the phone. Jeff could understand her like she was talking directly to him. She said she’d been with her company for three years. He heard her admit she wasn’t happy there. An awkward laugh followed. It wasn’t hers. Music filled the gap in conversation.

When the man continued talking, Jeff knew it was about himself because there was no pause in his speech. There was no including Harper and this fact made Jeff smile. He told her—though he knew she could not hear— “He doesn’t have room for you.” That smile stayed in his voice. “And he never will,” Jeff said.

He continued to listen. The man’s voice went on and on until he heard Harper’s as she excused herself. The man’s voice did not return. The music faded like an ellipsis. The quiet between them, then, sounded like night. Like the space between lovers that an arm can breach.

“I miss how you make me feel,” he said. “I miss knowing where we were going, the potential of where we’d be in another year or two.” There was a shuffle and Jeff knew Harper was hanging up. But he was wrong.

Harper said, “There’s nothing about me in what you miss.” The directness of her words, her voice speaking at all, shocked him empty. Jeff waited for thought to come back. He waited for her to say more.

 Harper had stepped outside onto the balcony. She waited for Jeff to defend himself, but he didn’t. He told her she was right, that nothing he said had anything to do with her. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” he said, but Harper’s focus had turned. Walking across the road, illuminated by a streetlight, was the menagerie from the afternoon before. Woman. Dog. Snake. Harper started to tell Jeff about the trio, about dating apps, about why she let him listen in on the guy talking to her, about how hard it was to close the door with him, and how sick she was of this party, but she watched the woman and her pets part a sea of people down the street. Harper and Jeff didn’t exist anymore, not as a pair anyway, and Harper spent a moment of silence accepting this as truth. “Good luck, Jeff” Harper said and hit the End button. She ran for the stairs.

***

In the dark, the sidewalk opens like breathing, like violence, like canned peas willed open in a makeshift tent on a day much colder than this. Marlow can step over the cracks that reach out like dark veins. They are not deep enough to swallow her whole, wide enough to make her consider selling everything she owns for another man. Not too long ago, she sold her pit bull and boa constrictor in the same day to open up an opportunity for a man who thought love was her selling her pit bull and boa constrictor for him. 

“Rufus,” she says. “Rufus.” When he doesn’t turn to look at her, Marlow’s tone grows desperate. "Who’s a good dog?” she asks. He answers these words with a turn of his head and the dog winks at her—she’s never seen a dog who can or will wink. 

Marlow crosses the street to claim that sidewalk, too. She knows it can be hers if she chooses. If she wills it. Like she wills rides when she needs them. Like she willed those peas open. Like she willed her dog and snake back into her life. Like she wills people to watch these miraculous animals from time to time for her. One sidewalk is already hers. The middle of the road, too. Cars stop for her without honking.

Marlow sees the crowd outside the bar ahead of her, taking up the entirety of the sidewalk. But this is Marlow’s city from cracked sidewalk to cracked sidewalk, from parking lot to parking lot, from Jackson to Broadway and beyond. She bleeds the graffiti spilled here. It is hers and too many of these people wear hats, she thinks, too many buttons on their clothes. She reigns in Rufus. She knows people will call the police on pit bulls, their owners.

“Marcus,” she says to Marcus the snake. “It’s okay, Marcus. You can be yourself, Marcus. You are the best you there ever was.” Marcus moves but slightly. There is no immediate flicker of his tongue. They, the group—Marlow and her boa constrictor around her neck like a scarf and her tan pit bull on his leash—are upon the bar and the lives lived there and there’s a parting like no one ever blocked her way at all. They’ll never know, she thinks, the tenderness of being gripped by scales, of the love held in a wink, of the miracle of buying your life back when you thought it was gone. Marcus raises his head and licks the air closest to a woman who just walked outside. Her taste is familiar. It could almost be home.

——————————————————————

Shane Stricker holds an MFA from West Virginia University and is a PhD candidate at the University of Tennessee. He has been awarded a fellowship to attend the Writing by Writers Workshop at Tomales Bay and the Mike and Frieda Mullins scholarship from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. His work appears in Passages North, The Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Lake Effect, Bull: Men's Fiction, and other magazines and journals.

ART:
Lauren Farkas
Persian Speedwell (Veronica persica)

ubiquitous, abundant, herald of spring. ornate architectural leaves lightly haired. four petaled bloom borrows blue and white from the sky.

black walnut ink and white gouache on kudzu vine paper
5x7”
2021