Dear Reader,

Welcome to Issue Seven.

Last month I was invited to review a new eBook entitled The Metropolis Organism by Frank Vitale. Mr Vitale, is a New York based filmmaker, teacher and non-fiction writer who studied physics at McGill University, Montreal before becoming an assistant for a fashion photographer. Whilst flying to an editorial assignment in Los Angeles for Mademoiselle Magazine, he began photographing towns and cities from above and imagining the visual comparison between urban mass and other organisms. The Metropolis Organism is the culmination of years of careful observation and study. Mr. Vitale takes on the position of ‘the Scientific Observer’ peering down from a great distance and seeing the earth for the very first time. Using his own photography and film footage along with satellite images, the author argues that the city is a “living, breathing biological organism”.

Although I do not completely agree with Mr. Vitale’s heavily literal reading of the city as an organism, this beautifully assembled interactive e-book is important because of the manner in which it destabilises our perceptions of urban space. Some weeks later I stumbled across this inspirational THNKR video of illustrator and New York Times blogger Maira Kalman discussing the joy of urban walking and veering off the prescribed path. Ms. Kalman comments “I walk everywhere in the city. Any city. You see everything you need to see for a lifetime. Every emotion. Every condition. Every fashion. Every glory”.

The aim of Ms. Kalman’s street illustration and photography is strikingly similar to that of the poetry and prose we publish in StepAway Magazine. She is interested in walking, responding to, and recording the city around her – with feeling. Her work is about “waiting for the unexpected,” “being surprised”. She is attracted by what the passerby says and wears but also strives to peel back layer after layer of meaning from each urban tableau. Ms. Kalman is, in many respects, the consummate twenty-first century New York flanêuse.

In London, precious few street photographers can match the keen eye of Elena Alhimovich. Like Ms. Kalman, she is drawn by the character, charisma and individual style of the passerby, believing that “people are the only worthy subjects for photography (besides cats, of course)”. Her street portraiture has the uncanny knack of looking deep into a stranger’s soul. Her projects include: “Faces of Primrose Hill”, “Londoners I met and liked” and “People and their Hats”. Ms. Alhimovich, whose work has featured in Vogue and the Guardian, generously agreed to donate a striking photograph for our Issue Seven cover. I doff my travel-worn trilby to her.

Discovering the work of Mr. Vitale, Ms. Kalman and Ms. Alhimovich highlighted the infinite number of ways in which we can observe, understand, represent and celebrate the city. It also confirmed that despite being a literary journal about urban walking, StepAway Magazine is in little danger of becoming repetitive or out dated. The city will always be the focus of human fascination. It will always surprise the walker and, in turn, inspire the walker to capture that surprise.

Our latest issue opens with “Muses over Manholes” by Murzban F. Shroff about a dejected writer walking in Mumbai. Breathless in Bombay, Mr. Shroff’s outstanding collection of fourteen short stories was recently included in the Guardian‘s ten best books set in Mumbai, alongside Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh and Vikram Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay.

This is followed by Nidhi Zakaria Eipe’s short story “Found,” a saunter through downtown Santa Fe. Next up is Nancy Scott’s poem San Francisco Redux which skirts around City Lights Books. ”Mirth” by Justin Bond is a poetic wander by the Greyhound Bus station in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Donna Kaz’s poem “To Walk in LA” is an east coast walker’s comment on a west coast state of mind. ”Arbor Hill” by Noah Kucij is a springtime walk in Albany, New York. John M. Edwards’s “Over Six Billion Served” is a micro essay about poverty in Portland, Oregon. ”I Trust My Feet to Lead me” by Nicky Marsh is a solitary wander though a storm at nightfall. Sarah Dobb’s flash fiction “Drifting, Softening, Gone” follows the path of two lovers through the city. ”Dimestore Apocalypse” by Philip Tinkler excavates the seamy side of nocturnal Manhattan. Finally, ”Other Songs (in the Homesick City)” is a homesick saunter in Montreal.

Meanwhile, we have two new additions to Northern Wanderer. The first is an extract from the 1876 publication The Nightside of Sunderland. Urban sensationalism was all the rage in the mid to late nineteenth century. In New York, the journalist George G Forster explored the darker recesses of urban life, whilst in London Henry Mayhew cast his eye over the urban poor. Sunderland, it appears, was placed under similar scrutiny. A Sunderland Echo journalist known simply as ‘Dagoon’ took to the streets to shine a light upon drunkenness and prostitution. One of the few existing copies of this text is held in Sunderland Library. Local historian Norman Kirtlan has reprinted this fascinating text, complete with illustrations for the Sunderland Antiquarian Society. New copies are available here. Our second addition is a piece of flash fiction by Amy Ekins which explores life in Walker, a residential suburb to the east of Newcastle.

Before closing, I would like to congratulate StepAway Magazine contributor Richard Thomas on the publication of his new collection of short stories, Herniated Roots. I would also like to welcome Caroline Brown to the StepAway team, who will take on the role of Development Editor.

I hope that you enjoy our seventh issue. Happy reading!

Yours faithfully,

Darren Richard Carlaw
editor@stepawaymagazine.com

The writer’s pace is slow and unhurried. There is a reason for this. Mumbai rains are here: warm, frantic, and spiritual.

Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, and the road blushes black. The branches of trees spread out eagerly. Leaves and water greet each other like long-separated cousins. The trees shake off their sullenness, in drops. They have been sulking ever since the cabbies refused to abide by emission laws. The trees breathe disbelievingly, first slowly, then rhythmically, all the way down to the roots. So the writer imagines and hopes. So also he breathes, using mouth and nostrils.

Cars slow to maneuver through the downpour. There is water filling up at the sides of the road, below the pavement. Car wipers beat maddeningly against the windscreens. They remind the writer of middle-age women on treadmills, trying to work off their flab. Both face resistance from their own systems. Some wipers screech as they clean; some don’t function; some are conspicuous by their absence; they have been ripped off by urchins and traded in for a meal.

The rain drums an incessant beat on the roofs of shops and against their closed metal shutters. Rats – scarier washed than dry – dart for cover. Taxis cruise by. Big-bellied drunkards lurk outside bars, pondering over the merits of another drink. They pull at their cigarettes and let out a little gas. Silently they grapple with their libidos and contemplate discreet addresses. Paan-beediwallas make the last sale of the night.

The pavement glistens like a black polished landscape. The sky above is velvet and watchful. It pours forth its load as though there is a quota to be dispensed. The rainfall is intense, in sheets of silver, which makes it difficult to see beyond a few feet or more. Small brown puddles well up at the side of the road. Motley garbage – bottle caps, papers, plastic wrappers, vegetable and fruit peels – is pelted and crushed by the rain. The sins of the city trickle into manholes not yet choked. The writer reaches the end of the road. He sees a crossroad that divides the East side from the West. There are more trees on the West side. Plus old stone buildings, new skyscrapers, and a police station for safety.

Safety never did much for the imagination, muses the writer. A city must excite, must provoke, he tells himself. Life, like writing, must annihilate to create. He is pleased with himself for such deviant wisdom. The traffic lights blink. They appear to be mocking him, pulling faces the way schoolboys do. Behind him a cough starts.

The cough is hollow and heinous. The writer recognizes the sounds of ill health. Life ignored is life at risk. This could pertain to the old woman he has just passed, coughing on the pavement, or it could hold for the prostitute soliciting on the opposite side of the road, dazed from the drug she has consumed. The drug is afloat in her eyes, her smile.

The cough settles into a deep, hacking rhythm. The writer turns to see the old woman. Her face is a sheet of quiet pain; her hair is white and inflamed; the rest is all bones and ribs. The writer listens to the cough exploding within her. He recognizes the sound of tuberculosis. Living in Mumbai, he has fought millions of germs. He has held a kerchief to his mouth in the face of polluting cabs and trucks. And he has sprinted past urinals and open sewage, holding his breath.

Coughing, the woman struggles to rise. She draws on a bony arm. Her sari falls and reveals her rib cage, and under that her wild beating lungs, a wilting pouch of breast. There is nothing to cover her chest and ribs. And she does not seem to mind, the enemy lodged within.

Still, life’s lingering shred, muses the writer, as he sees her lift her sari and place it over her shoulder. She does this out of habit, as she might have done in younger years.

For me, nothing, not even a shred of hope, the writer thinks. The publishers don’t even call him by name any more. Dear Author, we regret to inform you – he has read this even before the postman has had time to collect his breath and retreat down the staircase. Earlier, the writer used to memorize the compliments. He used to preserve and breathe in the balms, sweetly, naively, for days. While we must compliment you on a lively sense of observation, we regret your work does not fit our list. Sometimes it specified fit, mellowed it by saying at this point in time. Sometimes it encouraged him to submit elsewhere. Most times, he stayed humble in his replies. Thank you, sir, for the time spent. If you could volunteer an insight, I would be grateful, very grateful.

That’s when they stopped writing to him, snuffed him out like he never existed. That’s when he broke. You realize, sir,what you are holding: a 21 century version of Catcher in the Rye.

For three years he wrote, and for three years it kept coming back. Regrets only: they wrote the book on that! It was like there was some pact with the post office. Like even the postmaster knew the book was going nowhere. “Thank you, Mr. Postman,” he was tempted to say. “Thank you for bringing back the manuscript. Print-outs are expensive, you know.”

The last was the unkindest cut of all. He felt like a Caesar betrayed, a Timon spurned, Lear raging in a storm. We are pleased to accept your manuscript and look forward to sharing our best services for success. There was an expensive-looking brochure printed in extraordinary colors. The paper was rich and glossy, achieved at the expense of some poor sacrificial writer. Or should he say “customer,” since all rights were forsaken once that decision was made? Once you paid to get laid, the principle being the same.

Like a persistent tout, the brochure spoke and adhered to his ear. It whispered promises he didn’t want to hear: “Cut out the misery once and for all; cut out this coupon now. The only thing that stands between you and your future is your pride. The greatest enemy of your talent is you. Why worry about the outcome when you have found an outlet?”

He was smart enough to realize the conspiracy of forces working against him. Not just the publishers who had failed to recognize his worth, and agents too busy with known names, referrals, deals, but his own characters whom he had nurtured adoringly, patiently, sacrificing meals, sleep, and the comfort of a secure job. He had given them lives beyond ordinary fates, added on traits that would be discussed in classrooms. Pomp and success he had dreamt of for them. Like a true father, he was willing to bequeath all.

Yet, they had let him down. Like adolescent sons, they had betrayed him. They had failed to get themselves a career or a life, let alone immortality. The only thing real were the tears streaming down his cheeks, the rain on his face, and the brochure, which he clutched in his hand, creased, because he had read it thrice already.

There was a line in it that had led him to consider the option. “We hope to mature you into one of our finest writers.” Of course there’d be a fee, a pre-editorial fee, to begin with.

If there was a past life, it had caught up with him. If there was an afterlife, it beckoned now. Eventually, everything down the tube, he thought. Because he couldn’t be like Steinbeck and pick grapes from an orchard. He couldn’t serve the earth endlessly and all who lived on it. He couldn’t do that, because his own orchard (in which his creativity grew) was too big and too wide, and the grapes were always sour – unfailingly.

He lit a cigarette and, cupping it, pulled till the tip blazed. He watched the water at the side of the road rush toward an open manhole. The lid of the manhole was lying at the side. It was brown and rusted, like a giant discarded cookie.

The water flowed toward the manhole, carrying the guck with it. The guck fell over the side and disappeared. Truly, thought the writer, what is not seen is not believed. That is as true of sanitation as of writing.

He took three quick puffs of his cigarette. The rain fluttered like window drapes in a storm. It was playing with the city. He could feel a chill at the back of his neck and on his ears. He exhaled smoke over the manhole. It dispersed like a phantom fog. Smoke and water fought each other for supremacy. Smoke lost. It was subdued by the rain. He dropped the cigarette, wet now, into the manhole. Then he crushed the brochure and flung it in as well. He watched the water swirl over it and gobble it. Instantly he felt regret. We hope to mature you into one of our finest writers yet.

A scooter screeched past. It had three occupants, all boys, clinging to each other, and they called joyously to the writer. He waved back sportingly. At least they had the weather to celebrate, he thought. The scooter skidded, regained control, and disappeared. The road appeared empty. The buildings looked deserted. The writer dropped to his knees, at the mouth of the manhole, and with quivering lips, said, “Forgive me Lord, if I appear ungrateful.” The water continued to trickle into the manhole. As it fell, it made a deep gargling sound.

A fire engine tore through the night – a savage, blatant red riding hood, shrieking right of way. On board, the firemen donned their clothes. The ladder was halfway up: hope on an improbable night. In the distance, the cough started again, the same cough, continuous and weary. The rain poured in gray, unforgiving sheets.

An hour or two later a municipality worker would appear. His trousers would be rolled up; in his hand he’d carry a long, thin rod with a loop at the end. He’d use this to dig into the manhole, to dislodge any rubbish stuck there. The water inside would churn like a python emerging from hibernation. But the writer wouldn’t be there to see this. He’d have moved on.

The next day would be declared a holiday. Urchins would rush out to swim in the floods. They would splash alongside red double-decker buses, grinding their way through murky-brown water. They would be joined by bare-chested youths, who’d swim on their stomachs, nosedive, and come up for air each time a woman passed. The youths would splash the woman, again and again, until her sari clung indistinguishably against her skin. Until they saw what they knew was there.

The rain would pour; gutters would choke; water levels would rise. People would stay indoors and find a million ways to relax. Living rooms would erupt in a blaze of cricket matches and Formula One races. Men would wrench open beer cans. Wives would scramble to rearrange the menus. Neighbors would drop in with bhajiyas and vadas. The older boys would play volleyball in the rain. Like incensed cheetahs, they would leap at the ball and scream pass, pass to each other. The girls would phone their boyfriends and whisper about where to meet and for how long. They’d drop their voices if their parents approached. The kids would eye the remote control and resent their fathers’ presence. Staying away from cartoon network wasn’t funny.

By afternoon, the parked cars would disappear underwater. The newspapers would remember to get the picture but not the story. Why bother? It was the same story every year.

By evening, a dull gray cast would appear in the sky. It would spread and obliterate heaven from earth, earth from all understanding. The sound of thunder would roll, crash, and reverberate across the city. Sensitive men would feel it in their balls. Less sensitive men would shut their ears. This is how the earth would be tested. How much of black rain can it take, how much of lashing before dawn, before the final cleansing? Streaks of lighting would flash by windows. It would startle babies and make them cry, and light up the faces of forbidden love.

The writer would be back in his workroom. He’d be sending out emails, query letters, and synopses. He’d change the wordings, more aggressive this time, like the weather, and he’d chip away in Word, and then hit “send” in Microsoft Outlook, and he’d go “yes, yes, yes,” if it went through. And in case it didn’t – it bounced back for some reason like “server connection cannot be established” or “sender unknown” – he’d make a note to resend it later. He’d do so without feeling wronged or misunderstood, without feeling oppressed. For it was only the server that had rejected him and not the recipient, and that he could endure.

Like the weather, that too would change.

Murzban F. Shroff

The first time I met Charlie was at Aztec Café, probably the only place in the country where you can ask for a caffè sospeso and they’ll know what you mean. The place was busy and I thought to take my bagel and leave, but then I saw Blunt on the patio. Blunt was Charlie’s guide dog, a gorgeous golden retriever with eyes the colour of honey. I crouched next to Blunt and rubbed his muzzle. “He loves it when you do that,” Charlie said. I jumped at the sound of his voice, not expecting him to have noticed me let alone know what I had been doing. He laughed—a deep-throated belly laugh—then pointed across the table—”Sit down!” he barked. “Not many folks round here that would know what a caffè sospeso is, though back in the day we’d be more likely to say pagato. What’s your story?”

Charlie had stories. Every Sunday afternoon, we’d walk the streets of downtown Santa Fe together. I’d read him things that I thought he’d find especially endearing or amusing, like the little plaque in the pavement outside Nicholas Potter’s used book store saying ‘Please curb your dog’. What he loved most though were the things that children left behind at cafés, like in the Green Palace Teahouse. “Walk all the way down to the counter, and look to the left, where the Specials board is,” he directed. My eyes fell on a kiddy drawing of a girl, an umbrella and the words:

It rained today.
It’s okay.
It’s only rain.

There was another one at the Burrito Café on Washington Avenue, right next to the library. On a pillar hung with thank you cards and obscure testimonials, was one that had him belly-laughing for three minutes straight:

Dear Burrito Café,

Thank you for the food.
I did not eat your food
but it looked good.

Sincerely,

James.

In all these wanderings, I grew to understand that there had been a time when Charlie had been able to see, with his eyes. I never asked about what had happened. Charlie was never anything less than candid about his life, and it’s not that I was embarrassed—there simply never seemed to be the need for it. I suspected he had been involved in the war, that he was a veteran, that he had a drinking problem, that he’d been a foster kid—don’t ask me how I knew. He told me once about how he’d met a guy, “a Wayne Dyer type who was into multi-dimensional healing.” This man said he could manifest things, and told Charlie “some cockamamie story about black soil and mangoes and Thailand and Swiss Army knives” in support of his supernatural power. When Charlie tried to get him to manifest a pretzel, this fellow declined, saying that he could only manifest things for himself. Charlie snorted at this last part, biscotti crumbs riding the wave of his breath that Blunt absently licked up from the floor as we lingered over coffee at Louie’s.

Charlie often had questions that he’d pose with all the gravity of Zen koans, like: Why is it called shortbread? and What do firefighters do when they’re not fighting fires? Whenever we ordered French toast at Pasqual’s, he insisted on calling it pain perdu—in reference to lost or wasted bread. Occasionally, when the crowds had thinned, we would visit the Loretto Chapel—home to the Miraculous Staircase. The spiral staircase, with two 360 degree turns and no visible signs of support was supposedly built by a mysterious carpenter who appeared one day with donkey and toolbox, spent months cloistered in the Chapel constructing the wooden spiral, then vanished as strangely as he had arrived: unpaid, unthanked, unseen. Some believed it to be St. Joseph himself, the patron saint of carpenters, who had built the legendary staircase. “Codswallop and balderdash!” Charlie bellowed at the young docent halfway through her spiel. I think he had always wanted to say that.

“Truth is,” he breathed heavily, as Blunt and I escorted him out and back up towards the Plaza, “the staircase was built by a Francois-Jean Rochas—they called him Frenchy—a shady member of Les Compagnon,” he was gripping my arm, almost whispering now. Les Compagnon, he went on to explain, are an initiatory guild of craftsmen sworn to secrecy and celibacy rumoured to have connections to the Benedictine and Templar orders. After he built the staircase, Frenchy bought up some ranch land in Dog Canyon (now Alamogordo) and lived the life of a recluse, tending cattle and fruit. They found him, eventually, dead in his Dog Canyon cabin shortly before Christmas one year, a bullet in his chest. “Called it suicide, but ’round here, we know better. Plain cold-blooded murder, it was.”

It would be years later—long after I had found love, healed my heart, and left Santa Fe—that I would hear again about my old friend Charlie. He had died on a cold winter’s night, shortly before Christmas one year. They found him, dead, in his small room on Old Santa Fe Trail, a bullet in his chest, Blunt by his side. Victim of a robbery, the obituary said. But I knew better.

Nidhi Zakaria Eipe

From the second floor balcony
of the Mustard Building, when the fog
has lifted, pigeons stand watch

for stray sourdough crumbs,
and escape from Alcatraz looks possible
across the length of my finger.

Strong currents harangue the Bay,
difficult for anyone to reach
the B&B in a lighthouse off San Pablo.

A tattooed man, no shirt, shopping cart
parked at a broken meter, sips
from a Starbucks cup,

while further up the block,
two sleeping bags side-by-side
murmur and squirm.

At City Lights, I slip the last copy
of Unlocking the Exits
from a dusty second floor shelf.

A Tibetan monk and a white-haired
woman wearing a neck brace sit
in the storefront window eating sushi.

Later that night at the Plush Room
Rita Moreno in lilac sequins
croons Gershwin.

Nothing has changed, San Francisco,
just you and me, and the corner grocer
setting out sweet melons.

Nancy Scott

at the end of sleep’s long dark hallway.
Down on Detroit the Greyhound station is teeming
with life, so many comings and goings

as if the city were a room to be walked into or out of.
The fat woman with her stern face and trash bags full of secrets glowers
like a matriarch from her perch in the blank space between the streetlights.

I could measure beauty in half truths and still
never in my life feel this honest.
Thirty-one years and these hands are as idle

as an empty cigarette case, fingers that remember in stains:
a long and solitary train ride, the platform of lessons taught by the body.
The art of gathering flesh the way a milliner gathers yards of silk,

pinning and tucking the feathers and lace to recreate
the memory of a lady’s hat on a hot summer afternoon.
A laugh on the breeze tinkling like the trees shaking

February from their branches.
The arteries of this city rupture and bleed asphalt.
A ruined mansion, unwilling to surrender its ghosts.

Justin Bond

Now addicted to mocha iced coffee drinks
and valet parking
the light of the sun so bright
you get away without reading glasses
five more years than you should
wear shorts 363 days
even though your bottom has spread
like an IHOP pancake
from sitting all the time
driving driving driving

But you can’t drive now
your car broke down
a fate worse than your screenplay being passed on at Paramount
your new bungalow in the hills on a fault line
your herbalist dead from lyme disease

So you walk in LA
and to walk in LA
is to
stick out in LA
the face without the lift
the extra roaming the back lot
searching for the studio door
an entry into the world

Donna Kaz

In slush-blue light of March, new lovers,
still in separate quarters, breakfast-shy,
suspicious of the budding, walked
the sloped length of the ghetto, holding hands
then not, befriending skinny pitbulls
all the way down to the crystal Hudson.
Makeshift kills bled from the shrunken
snowbanks, hymns from storefront churches, paint
was peeling from a revelation: we were in love

with a city that wasn’t intended -
brick banks full of pigeons, Dutch
mansions turned state’s evidence,
lyric garbage clumping into
stanzas of the blocks. Imagine:

we had meant to leave this place
in separate cars, elope with our ambitions
continents apart. That Sunday
morning as the river froze and shattered
in our earshot, we could still have gone
that way. And then the sun
hit one more spiral fire escape, surmounted
one more scarred rotunda, one more
ragged singing elm, and we were home.

Noah Kucij

John M. Edwards

I trust my feet to lead me. Motion. Momentum. Slugs and leaves streak the street. Hood over my eyes, sky over my hood, I pass no one. These familiar streets, these streets that are known and mapped and travelled. Feet, carry me. Feet, find the threshold, take me beyond. Roundabouts and sickly grass verges, grass verging on yellow, grass verging on dead. Cars tremble in garages, huddle in fear of water. I light a cigarette, bent, wet-mouthed, not breaking step. I cup it in my damp left hand. Grey pavement, grey sky; I suck grey into my lungs and expel it greyer. Greyness lives in me, lives on me, like mould, spreading, parasitic. Feet, lead me to colour. Grey birds roost in the roofs. I throw my cigarette butt into the road; it is swallowed and lost.

My feet lead me onwards, around corners, breath snagged on tangled half-hope, then exhaled in bitter clouds over the ever-familiar, the ever-known. Street signs name the same town, street signs flash grey eternal home. All roads lead to walls, all roads are dead ends. Houses rise up like mocking teeth. Hedges are thorny and will not be scaled. All roads a blind fumbling circuit of the maze, all edges and no centre.

In the distance I hear the rushing hum of a motorway, like a river heard from over the mountains, from over sheer rain-strafed walls of coral. Unreachable. Feet, please. Lead me. From behind the endless draped veil of net curtains, the grey faces of everyone I have ever known. Trees loom uniform in the new dark. Circles, circuits. The map spins and shakes me. I pass and re-pass the same grey litter bin. Blisters swell and burst. Rain plasters hood plasters hair plasters face. I am rain-blind in these same streets. I do not stop. Night falls, is held by the weak arms of yellow streetlamps. My body strains towards the unknown. I trust my feet to lead me where I need to go.

Nicky Marsh

He raises his eyebrows.

She bites her lip, eyes wide. She catches his fingers – they’re sweaty – and yanks him close. She laughs.

‘Lace.’ He kisses her neck. ‘Missed you.’

She glances about. The bar is abuzz with shaggy-haired people cupping wine glasses, talking about books. Nice coats. Most of them are wearing glasses, too. Square, black-framed.

‘Come on.’

Outside, their breath whispers. Wreathing white in the city’s amber-warmed navy.

*

She holds his hand on her hip. That usual before-sleep-hold. Her arm twined around his.

‘That’s the first time since – you know.’

She turns to look at the shape of his face in the darkness. Her fingers trail his chin. She turns back.

‘Lace?’

*

His voice is thin with the miles. ‘Be with you again in a couple of hours. God, so sick of these over-nights. Honey?’

She pins the phone to her ear with her shoulder. Lifts her leg, water crashing. The razor scratches her skin. ‘I’m just shaving my legs.’ A small bubble of blood pops on her shin. She dots it with an index finger. It spills, dilutes.

‘Getting ready for tonight?’

‘Swimming with Karen.’

His sigh clouds the earpiece.

*

Lace pulls the spoon out of her mouth, pressing the chocolate-rimed metal tight. She licks her lips. The teaspoon clatters onto china.

‘So?’ Karen says.

She shrugs. ‘No.’

Karen checks her iPhone, thumb swishing the screen. ‘You probably were, you know. It just doesn’t always. . . catch.’

Lace looks at the steam from a silver machine behind the counter. It rises up against the back window, revealing the thickening grey of the pre-winter afternoon. The city’s inhabitants with rough faces and white tights, hunched shoulders and pockets full of cold fists. Drifting, softening, gone.

Sarah Dobbs