Every City a Small Town
The street was a Cubist assemblage of unrelated elements, the signs upon signs all with their different color schemes and sensibilities, the jarring bright and rough unclean surfaces. It still looked like a city street, but since the ECAST campaign, it had been transformed.
Annette was just heading back from lunch but still wanted something more. The scents of garlic and grilling pork and curry mingled in the hot dry air. The rhythm of her steps became irregular.
Approaching a familiar food truck, she asked, "What’s the special?"
The young man turned sad eyes down on her and said, "Just sold out, so sorry." His partner stirred steaming chicken in a pan behind him.
Of course. She’d walked only 6500 steps today. Sellers could offer water or perhaps a salad, nothing more.
She still wanted something. She passed a little dress shop, a seller of long-ago bestsellers, racks of bejeweled handbags. Something, something.
Within the shallow grotto at the next corner, two druggists stood in purple and green motley.
“Hello, Annette. Would you like to come rest your feet inside the shop?” the blonde one said. He was indelicately made and formal in bearing. Annette knew she would someday grow comfortable with strangers calling her by name, but not today.
His details appeared in her left eye just then, and she said, “Hello, Arvid,” thinking to keep pushing ahead. But then a devilish little thought stopped her.
“Do you happen to have any marzipan?” she asked.
“Malziprine?” he said. He paused, staring at the center of her face. “Excellent choice. But I see you’ve been fixed for that. And cigarettes, and most of the usuals. Someone’s been a busy bee.” Annette saw that Arvid’s reputation was immaculate.
Just as she began to turn back to the sidewalk, the lanky sidekick with his long dark hair leaned toward her. Remington’s record was less pristine. She could see he’d been flagged for some insensitive comments and had been fixed for quite a few substances himself.
He spoke, low and confidential: “You could still try something more intensive.”
“Intensive?” she said.
“Oh yes,” said Arvid. “Perhaps for your next day off?” Warning labels scrolled along with the rundown on how various substances would be administered. They would check a client had the day off and let her use the product right there in the shop, and then an aide would escort her to her apartment. There were video testimonials playing, showing the plush interior of the shop all dim and seedy, but still, how nice that might be. Annette looked to the side, considering the offer.
She realized Arvid and Remington were holding back chuckles, trying to keep their earnest smiles.
“Of course not,” she said and started off again feeling paranoid about the whole interaction. Would they begin speaking about her, and who might hear? She looked back but could not see if their lips were moving. They’d backed into their grotto and she could see just a pair of long noses turning toward the next pedestrian.
She would not look their way again, the next time she came this way.
The Malziprine, though, the luscious feeling it had given her that one and only time. It had been like flooring the gas on a country road. And then that was maybe all she wanted, to drive a car past the speed limit, after the speedometer hit fifty-five just keep stepping down like you used to be able to do.
The Malziprine had been not much more than a thick almond-flavored liqueur, after all. Why she’d needed to be fixed for it was a mystery to her.
And now she saw the talk with the druggists and the lingering had made her late. ETA was 1:05, and she began to hurry.
Just a few blocks past the druggists’ shop was where the street started to look cleaner and trees provided a pleasant dappled shade. Just a few blocks more, where offices started to outnumber the retail businesses, stood the building where she worked.
Last week, a stray dog had run down this street and past the kitchenette window while she was making coffee. When had she last seen a stray dog? A mutt, probably lab and some bully breed, it was headed south with a joyous expression on its face. She stood to watch it go down the sidewalk and saw it upset a nice couple walking with a baby stroller. It kept trotting after the brief encounter, and then she noticed the bouncing gray-brown scrotum.
All the time the dog was in her view, she was speaking the details: “mixed-breed dog approximately sixty-five to seventy pounds. . .” No more than three feet behind her, Doug from reception stood recording as well: “unaltered male gray dog approximately fifty pounds accosts family. . .” and out on the sidewalk, others were speaking and tracking the dog with their eyes. The rest of the day they’d shared theories about how a dog like that might have lived unneutered and how it had gotten out, and why.
All the time seeing the dog, thinking and speaking of the dog, all that time the feeling of something very wrong—the feeling of creeping dread—had sunk her in place. She could feel it again now.
Her step count was closing in on 8000. Once she had her car back, in ten pounds or so, she thought she was going to see about finding something outside of the city. How far would she need to drive? What would the something be, and would she recognize it when she found it?
Annette was almost running now. Her abdominals tightened and heart rate rose to 152. Her ETA showed as 1:02 p.m. The thought of tardiness made her urgent, but then too, people in pastel workshirts seemed to be gathering on the sidewalk outside her building up ahead. Not a few were, like Annette, rushing back from lunch, and so their convergence on the closed door took on drama. She spotted Doug and Lydia and now a half dozen others from different floors. One was testing the door and others were speaking the details. Her watch began to vibrate, and without questioning the decision, she unclasped it, let it fall.
Annette could not believe herself. She crossed the street and began to run in earnest. She ran until she stopped and clutched her knees, bent over sweating. She moved slowly then, past a tiny bistro. She kept her face turned away from the people seated there.
She made her way, in bursts and gasping stops, all the way to the edge of the city, sat in a littered weeded stretch of underpass, took off her shoes. She thought of what a downfall might mean in these times and imagined sirens, someone coming to take her back to work, but no one came.
She pulled up headlines in her eye: “Lorem Ipsum,” each one stated, and under each headline, row on row of dolor sit amet.
Christi Nogle’s fiction has appeared in publications such as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, The Arcanist, and Three-lobed Burning Eye. Her debut novel, Beulah, is coming in 2022 from Cemetery Gates Media. Follow her at christinogle.com or on Twitter @christinogle