Page 7 of The Glass Empire
"Thank you, Monika."
And then he's gone. The door chimes behind him, cheerful and cheap, and the wind whistles through the gap before it closes, bringing with it the smell of exhaust and wet concrete and something else. Something that might be cologne or might be gunpowder or might be nothing at all.
I stand behind the counter with a stack of hundreds in my hand and a bullet on the counter and blood on my apron, and I think:I'll never see him again.
I'm wrong.
But I don't know that yet.
Del wakes up at four, rubbing his eyes and complaining about his back. He doesn't notice the blood on the floor—it's dark in here, and the linoleum is already the color of dried rust—and I've already scrubbed the counter twice, so there's nothing to see. The bullet is in my apron pocket, next to the money. I don't know why I kept it. Maybe because I needed proof that it happened. Maybe because I didn't want to throw it in the trash like it was nothing.
"You look like hell," Del says, lighting a cigarette even though he's not supposed to smoke inside.
"Thanks."
"Rough night?"
"Something like that."
He doesn't ask follow-up questions. That's why I like Del. He's not curious. He's not kind. He's just a man who shows up, does his job, and goes home, and he expects the same from everyone else. We've worked together for eight months, and I don't know his last name. He doesn't know mine. That's the way things work in this city.
The sun rises at 6:45. I know this because I watch it through the window—a thin smear of orange between the buildings, like someone spilled paint and couldn't be bothered to clean it up. The city wakes up slowly, reluctantly, like a creaturethat doesn't want to face another day. Cars start honking. Sirens wail in the distance. A woman in a business suit orders coffee to go, and a man in a hard hat orders eggs over easy, and life goes on the way it always does.
I clock out at seven. The walk to my apartment takes fifteen minutes, through streets that smell like garbage and hope and the faint, sweet rot of something that used to be alive. My apartment is a studio on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator. The lock sticks. The radiator hisses. The windows face a brick wall, which is fine because I don't like looking at the city anyway.
I shower. I wash the blood off my hands, off my arms, off the places where it splattered when I pulled the bullet free. The water runs pink for a long time.
I lie down on my bed and close my eyes.
I dream about the barn. About my mother. About a man with grey eyes and a bullet in his side, and the way he looked at me like he was seeing something no one else had ever seen.
When I wake up, it's dark again. The clock says 9 PM. I have four hours before my shift starts.
I have four hours to pretend that last night didn't happen.
I have four hours to tell myself that I'll never see him again.
I almost believe it.
3
The Return
Monika
The bullet sits on my nightstand for three nights before I throw it away.
I don't know why I kept it. Sentiment, maybe. Or proof. Or something else entirely—something I don't have a name for, something that makes me pick it up every morning and turn it over in my fingers before I start my day. It's small. Smaller than I expected. A misshapen lump of metal, cold now, inert, nothing like the hot thing I pulled from his side.
On the fourth morning, I drop it into the trash bag with the coffee grounds and the empty cans of beans and I don't look back.
The diner feels different after that night. Not the building—the building is the same tired collection of vinyl and fluorescent light and the faint smell of bacon grease that never quite comesout of the upholstery. But the air inside it has changed. Charged. Like the moment before a thunderstorm, when the sky goes green and the birds go quiet and every hair on your arms stands up.
I tell myself it's nothing. I tell myself I imagined the whole thing—the blood, the bullet, the grey eyes that looked at me like I was something worth looking at. I tell myself that the stack of hundreds in my apron pocket is just money, and money doesn't mean anything, and I should spend it on something practical like rent or groceries or the electric bill that's been sitting on my kitchen counter for two weeks.
I don't spend it. I fold the bills into a neat rectangle and tuck them under my mattress, and I tell myself it's an emergency fund, and I try very hard not to think about whose blood is on them.
The first night he comes back, I'm not ready.
