Still
She is smaller now; her hips have lost their curve. Her hair is longer and hides her cheeks. Her nose ring is missing; its absence leaves a small brown hole in her left nostril. Her lips. They are wrong. They are spread too thin and too wide over the surface of her teeth. I stumbled into her this morning in an apartment building elevator going down. The doors opened. I stared at her until the doors started to close. We both flinched. On our last night she coughed and rolled from her back to her knees. She hadn’t wanted to look at me. In the morning I found a fresh pot of coffee and her key on the kitchen counter. Three years.
I stretched an arm out to activate the motion sensors, to reopen us.
“Hi,” I said. I meant that late at night, I think about the times she used to paint my eyebrows with her index finger.
“Hi,” she said. I can’t say what she meant.
We walked down the grey city street. Drizzle fell and stuck on our eyelashes. We were silent and I think it was okay. There was a diner across the street, old fashioned and brightly lit. She tilted her head to motion toward its thick double glass doors, and for an instant, I saw something about her throat. Something seemed to protrude under the skin. She coughed and it was gone and I didn’t think about it again until later. She raised an eyebrow and shrugged her shoulders. I didn’t have anything to say, so I shrugged mine too.
The diner was full of loud families, happy and hungry. The servers moved quickly and wore black and white; the plastic booth cushions were peach. I watched her as she read the menu. I don’t know what I expected to see. She leaned close to the laminated pages and chewed one of her fingernails. Her mouth, open slightly, was a dark maroon. There were children behind me in the booth. One of them was swinging a leg back and forth. I felt the sneakered heel bounce against the plastic seat.
“Coffee,” I said to the server.
“A blueberry scone, please,” she said.
A man in another booth sat reading alone, the book close to his nose. I spilled four packets of sugar into the mug; I like it sweet. I stirred and watched her. She took a bite of her scone. She made a face and pushed the plate away.
“Is it stale?”
“No, it’s me who’s stale,” she said. I didn’t know what she meant. I took a sip of coffee. A pair of EMT medics on their lunch break was seated at the far end of the room.
“So, how’s—”
“Do you remember that October snowstorm?” she asked.
“What?” I hadn’t expected that. The child in the booth behind me gave the plastic a hard kick. It rocked my seat and my arm and my coffee. The child giggled, and I dabbed at the brown spots which had spilled over onto the table.
“That storm, it lasted for days,” she said and looked at me expectantly. I remembered it, how long it lasted. I remembered how the flakes, heavy and wet, extinguished the electricity. How it left us in double layers, curled under the comforter on the couch. How we ate canned soup and made love with our gloves on. The windows fogged up.
“Sort of,” I said.
“I was thinking about it today when I was getting into the elevator. Isn’t that weird? But it wasn’t really the snowstorm, it was the after.” She tried another bite of the scone. She made another face. “Outside when everything was still new and untouched. There were these birds flying overhead. And it was so cold, but there was no wind. It smelled so,” she paused, “good.”
“Where was I?”
“I don’t know,” she said. By then a second child had joined in with the first; another big kick, an eruption of laughter. She coughed. Her after was not my after. I had asked her to marry me. Then a phone call; they said she collapsed at work. Three days. I found the coffee and the key. Her note said it wouldn’t be fair. I like to forget about the note.
She coughed, and took a sip of her water. The sip made her choke.
“Are you alright?” I asked. She tried to nod her head, and that made it worse too. She raised a napkin to her lips. The children behind me raced to see who could swing their legs the fastest. My seat shuddered and quaked, but she was the one who grabbed the edge of the table for support. “Really, are you alright? What can I do?” Another big kick shook my arm and I lost my sweet coffee. Terrible wet sounds emanated from her throat; she gurgled and sputtered and heaved. “Nina,” I said.
Her jaw cracked.
It cracked open wide, more maroon than ever. Blue veins in her neck and arms bulged. Her stomach and her chest contracted. Bile fell from her too-wide lips onto the table and mixed with the spilt coffee. I stood up. She rocked forward violently and a fat black crow fluttered from her mouth. It flapped its slick wings and ruffled its wet feathers. Beads of saliva flew off it and hit my check. It squawked. The children kept kicking and kept laughing.
Nina heaved again and sticky black feathers covered in blood spilled onto the table. The crow hopped to the edge of her plate. It pecked at the remains of her scone.
She leaned back into the booth and rubbed her jaw, shook her head. She closed her eyes. “What the hell is it?” I asked. She started to cry and the crow flapped its way onto her shoulder. Like a lover, it nuzzled against her ear. When she swatted it away, it lunged and pecked at her elbow. She sniffled and took a deep breath.
“What were you saying?” she asked.
“What?”
“You started to say something before, but I cut you off,” she said. I wiped the spittle off my check with my sleeve.
I stared at Nina and the crow. Both stared back.
“Oh, I was going to ask about work. How things were going at work,” I said. I called the server over to ask for more napkins. The crow flew quick circles around Nina’s head. She seemed not to notice as she slipped a rubber band off her bony wrist and tied her hair into a pony tail.
“Things are decent. I’m not at the same place anymore though,” she said.
“Yeah? Why the switch?”
“I was just sick of the same old people. You know how it is.” The server brought over a tall stack of white napkins with a smile. I cleaned the table and balled the wet paper into a tight mass. The crow pecked at it. The EMT medics were at the register paying for their meal and sucking on complimentary mints. The man with the book hadn’t budged.
“I understand,” I said. I ordered another coffee from the server.
The family behind us asked for their check. As they walked past our table towards the exit, the crow took interest in the smaller of the two children. It followed from behind, darting up into the air above their heads and down close to their knees. They opened the thick double glass doors. I spilled four packets of sugar into my coffee.
“How about you? How’s work?” she asked.
I watched the crow fly out into the grey city sky. “Fine,” I said, “Everything is the same as it was three years ago.”
*
Michele Zimmerman received a BA with a concentration in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College in May 2014. Two of her short stories were Top-25 Finalists for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers. She is excited to currently be working as a fiction reader for both Slice Literary and Post Road Magazine. This is her first publication.