Lake Effect

{working towards being urban fantasy, but currently self indulgent with a touch of unexpected lesbians. This is the kind of story that I'm leanring about as it goes along. Destination: unknown.)

The first time she wrote a letter, she scribbled it in messy ballpoint pen on the back of a napkin from Dunkin’ Donuts, coffee and crusted sugar making the ink skip and blotch. At the counter, a homeless man was buying a small coffee and crawler with pennies and dimes. At the ledge table near the door, Marilyn hunched her shoulders, ran the tip of her tongue over her teeth, and wrote:

There are days I think this city is going to eat me alive.

The air tasted like sulfur and snow - city in the winter time, muck and frozen, grimy puddles. She stuffed a five in the homeless man’s hand as he passed her on his way out, opening the shop’s door to let the sharp fingers of winter briefly grapple inside.

“My name is Marilyn Lorentus. I’m 28, I am twenty eight years old. Right now my baby’s mixing slow rock and hipster hop on invisible waves that roll through the air. I love her, I think. I love her, I think, for now. I buried my father this year - he died of cancer, which is a condition in which your body forgets what it is and grows little patches that kill you slowly {or quickly} in a lot of different ways. He was a smoker and a longshoreman. He always called me by my middle name.”

She paused, staring down at the chicken scratch words and chewed the end of her pen, tasting the metal of the clasp on her tongue.

“There are days I think this city is going to take care of me until the day I die.”

She folded the paper four times, remembering a story she’d heard when she was younger, that you couldn’t fold any piece of paper more than seven times, and if it was true, and if it was - why - and then she walked into the cold predawn light, letting the fingers of winter wrap around her and drag her outside. The El was idling above her on the tracks, speakers drowning, drunks and young couples laughing as they shuffled between car and platform. Somewhere, there were sirens. Somewhere, presumably, alarms were going off to start a few million people’s days.

Marilyn took a deep breath and idly lit a cigarette. In the first alley she came to, she bent, and wedged what for all the world could have been just another piece of trash under a loose brick.

She laughed and turned in a circle, and then she disappeared up a flight of stairs, racing for her train.

Eventually, a plow came down the narrow one way street, sloshing black snow off the roads and into the gutter, splashing onto the lone brick in the middle of the alley, covering it utterly until spring. But by that point the trash, the letter, was long gone.