Albany Liquors
Outside the liquor store on Albany, after Maddie had her vodka, an older man in a gaudy tie and trench coat shouldered into her gently but on purpose.
At dusk, Maddie could feel the trees watching her, glowering. She stopped and smiled at their bare branches, looked at the sidewalk, and scuffed her shoes hard on the dark star-stains left behind by dead leaves. “All your leaves are gone now. Just shadows on the concrete.”
She walked through the park and stopped at a fancy house with a black iron fence decorated with strands of cotton. The cotton was damp in her fingers as she watched it shiver in the breeze. “Whitman’s beard,” she whispered, imagining the poet had time-traveled to Chicago and the wind got his beard tangled in the spikes, so he’d just cut it loose with an old pocketknife.
Outside the liquor store on Albany, after Maddie had her vodka, an older man in a gaudy tie and trench coat shouldered into her gently but on purpose. He smiled and said a bunch of things she ignored.
“A real soft silk tie,” he was saying when Maddie stopped sipping and decided to cap her vodka. “Real soft. Real silk. Go ahead. Feel it.”
Maddie waved toward the park. “Do you want to go watch some leaves? The wind is going to build a bunch of new nests.”
The man nodded slowly and left.
Heading home, Maddie stepped off the sidewalk and went into a pleasing shape of darkness the streetlights couldn’t reach. It looked like a good place to sit, but the wet ground soaked through her jeans. “Fuck me,” she said, then took a deep breath and another sip. Her eyes adjusted until she could see everyone else walking nearby but no one could see her.
I’m a black hole, she thought. Black holes absorb everything, even light. From a distance they shine. Things that go in maybe come out somewhere else far away, or get lost in the past or the future, or just get crushed entirely.
Maddie sniffed. Her nose was running but it didn’t matter. What mattered was what Whitman might’ve written about black holes if he’d known about them. “You would’ve loved them,” she said, and kept smiling until she was laughing. The wind kicked up again and as Maddie wiped her face with the back of her hand and laughed out loud in the darkness a wet leaf grazed her lips. When she lashed out at it just for fun, she actually caught it in her teeth, and immediately tasted how soft and rotten her piece of the universe was that night.
Matthew Jakubowski's short stories have appeared in Milk Candy Review, JMWW, and the Best Microfiction 2024 anthology. He lives in Philadelphia and is online at mattjakubowski.com
