It is 1956 and Elsie steps out of a taxi on 10th and Broadway. The city is quiet, a Saturday morning, and the golden hour casts everything in halo: the bodega owner watering his plants, the diner worker prodding a trash bag out the door, the taxi driver yawning as he pulls away. It has rained overnight, and the sidewalks, slicked wet, make a hazy mirror for the Manhattan skyline. Elsie’s heels click on the pavement, and her coat, a shimmery blue, swells in the spring rain’s belated breeze. On mornings like this, the city, cool and ethereal, feels like walking around inside a pearl. It is all hers.
She steps around the stack of morning papers on the doorstep. Her silk-gloved hand reaches for the door handle, and she sees the doorman shift inside. His silhouette is warped through the beveled glass door, and as he approaches he is broken into fractals—a cap and moustache mosaic—until the door opens, and he is whole again.
“Morning,” he says. He is out of breath. He smells like a cigar. He has wriggled out one of the newspapers from the stack, the print so fresh it lines his right thumb.
She grants him a smile on her route to the elevator. Her heart shimmers beneath her coat; she breathes some secret joy, still dressed from the night prior while this doorman has remained stationary, watching the empty lobby for hours. As the elevator soars upward, Elsie flies on the adrenaline of the night, her shoulders hitched up in a solitary, glowing excitement. On the eleventh floor, she departs the cabin, but inside the elevator doors, her reflection remains, warped and golden.
***
Her unit is at the end of the hallway, an efficient one-bedroom with a view of the gothic cathedral across the street. In the winter, snow clumps along the ridges of the roof, and she imagines the church breathes under it, like a great, scaled, hibernating dragon. But in spring the cathedral’s roof tiles are only patterned green with pollen. The birds perch along the ledges, beginning their song against the rising swell of street traffic.
Elsie sits at her vanity dresser. The mirror is square with a jade rim. She retrieves her hairbrush from a peach-colored case. She runs the brush once through her hair, and then squints forward: there is a fracture in one of the beads of her pearl necklace. A foreboding itch that she has forgotten something begins in her brow, as though in the elevator ride upward, she has shed some other life, some separate skin. Her eyelids flutter. She presses the brush to her chest, overcome, suddenly, with a deluge of images from the night prior. She closes her eyes, and a movie reel clicks forward, lined with crackling stripes from an imaginary projector:
***
A tiny blue box, the clink of champagne glasses, her fork through a slice of mousse cake. The lights of the café hang low, and when Elsie looks up, she can see herself reflected as a tiny silhouette in the glass along three separate light bulb filaments. She is suddenly outside the scene, perched atop the light fixture like a bird. She observes: her own blonde head, her own chin on her hand, a loving gaze toward the man next to her in his brown suit and hat. A cricket calls from the outside tables, and she—in both forms, within and outside the scene—resists the pull of his song. She presses the champagne flute to her lips, and her necklace, the string of intact pearls, magnifies in the glass—bigger, bigger—until she sets it down, a pinch too firmly, a glitch in tempo that brings her back to reality, all proportions righted.
***
Elsie, at her vanity again, stares ahead. She imagines her image in the mirror moving along, finishing the brushing, attending to some parallel life. She takes off her gloves and avoids looking at her hands. In her mind, the blue box from the night prior lies unopened on the café table.
Then there’s a pull to the apartment floor, and it vibrates a little, like when her downstairs neighbor’s maid runs the vacuum. She places her brush back into its container; it clacks closed. Then, in her vanity mirror, the floor is the ceiling, and the ceiling is the floor. She walks upside down to her bed. In the corner of her bedroom, there is a little chirping cricket, the color of a pistachio. He is waiting for her, but she does not come. He shimmies into a hole in the wall, and travels a few miles downward, along the pipes running through the lobby and into the basement. Then he is below the building.
It is 2023 and the cricket flattens himself against the ceiling to make room for the subway. It is not the train that almost takes him but the strong push of hot air, a thick gust warm and smelling of trash that presses like a muzzle to his mouth. The subway driver stares ahead. The stations, dotted sparsely with passengers overnight, are now streaked with the colors of morning commute. Yellow hard hats, checkered blazers, red lipstick, a turquoise neck scarf.
Golden hour is closing when the driver’s own shift ends. His name is Sam. He takes the train back to Jamaica, Queens. He gets decaf coffee at the corner bodega and it comes in a Styrofoam cup with a Greek-inspired border. Above his head, the windows of the elevated rail glitter in the morning sun, bright now and unrelenting. In his apartment, a cricket chirps on the window ledge. Sam pulls down the blackout curtain in his bedroom and tries with all his might to go to sleep, but something—like broken mirror shard in the back of his mind—glitters and pulses, syncopated to the rhythm of the cricket’s song.
The room inverts. The elevated rail outside the window plunges into darkness, pushes along under the East River. The train’s two bright circle eyes cast along the subway tiles, which flicker and turn like the pages of a book. Above ground, the skyline shrinks in height, the mirrored high-rises fold down. The cars change shape: they lengthen, some turn turquoise, some turn ruby red. In Times Square the screens disappear, but the lights still flash and shimmer, enthusiastically static.
Sam exits the subway station with the cricket at his heels. He looks for her—the woman with the elegant gloves, with the shimmery blue coat. Her laugh in his ear in the diner booth, her arched brow caught in the bodega lights on upper Broadway. A wisp of smoke from their shared cigarette, a translucent secret hung in the sky, framed by the windows of the walk-ups like silver, square gems in the dark.
But here he is lost in a sea, the press of humans, the swirl of neon. He strains to see over the crowd. He is in basketball shorts and athletic sneakers and therefore very out of place amongst the gentleman theatergoers in their suits. He buys a coffee at a stand selling roasted nuts, and he realizes the rest of them are wearing winter coats, but he is not cold. His breath makes shapes in the air, and he hopes the shapes will call to her—soar above the crowd, the bowler hats and the teased-up hair, the perfume and the glinting metal watches. The shape of his breath will hold. It will spot her at the other subway exit, with her skin prettily aglow in the light thrown by the white sphere bulb on the entrance stairs, and it will curl along her collarbone and she will remember.
“Sam!” She gasps his name, she holds up a white-gloved hand in a wave from across the square.
His heart pangs at the sight of her. The two of them weave toward each other, her blue coat shimmering against the herd of brown and black and fur. Finally they meet, and their hands clasp together, and Sam’s shoulders sink with relief at the touch of silk. She is here. Nothing else matters. The echoes of the square dissipate, the neon reflects on her face. Her eyes, wide and pleading, search his—there is a confession on her red-lipped mouth, he can tell. He has known for a while that there would be an end to this.
“Come on,” he says to her, gently. He takes her delicate hand in his. They move away from the crowd, a pool table ball shot in the opposite direction. “Let’s walk.”
They pass an ale house, a deli, a pharmacy. All closed, all the windows like dark, blank mirrors. Sam studies her profile in each of them, hoping that, though the end is near, something in his brain will be able to summon her form from time to time, in those sinking moments of deja-vu when one recalls a dream.
Her heels click around some building scaffolding. They enter an alley, and there is a lamp post with a curved arm, glowing like golden moon hung low on a stage set. The soft light casts the buildings in shadow. The city is made smaller now, the skyline folded into this tiny corner, just for them. It begins to snow. Elsie steps away, she grips the lamppost and swings, lightly. Her coat opens for a moment, and Sam sees the gold-swirled dress underneath, framing her waist. He sighs. From this angle, it’s so obvious she’s from another time, another world. The snow, like confetti made of shimmery feathers, glistens in her hair.
He catches his own reflection in a pawn shop window: his slept-on hair, his crumpled t-shirt. Insecurity lines his stomach, and he runs his hand over his mouth. What was there to say to her now? Nice knowing you. He reads the ad on the pawn shop door: Need a loan? Call the ranger. A cowboy winks in the glass. Maybe in another life…we could be together. He watches her, gripping the lamppost still, and his heart sinks. This was another life. And it was ending.
She meets him in a swoop around the lamppost; she presses her hand to his heart. He can feel something beneath her silk glove, something hard and prickly on her finger. Her brow narrows, and she slides the glove off: her confession. The ring glitters brighter than the quiet flakes of snow.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers.
He presses his thumb to her chin. “Hey. It’s ok.” He presses his hands to her face. “It’s alright.”
He pulls her toward him. She shudders into his chest. His eyes are blurry and he can no longer see the snow, cannot see that it is picking up, falling in tiny clumps around the lamppost. The cricket begins its song, unseen.
“It’s been a dream with you, here,” she begins, and her voice has that continuous, legato rhythm of people in black and white films, where if you don’t catch every syllable, a whole word might drop out. “I don’t know how it’s happened.”
Sam swallows. He doesn’t know how it’s happened either. Something with the cricket and the golden hour. And her—he’s sure—she’s made of magic.
“But we have to keep on—with our real lives,” she is saying, and Sam can tell she’s practiced this. Maybe in the vanity mirror of her apartment, the one with the jade rim, her peach hairbrush clutched to her chest. In the background of this rehearsal, caught in the mirror’s beveled corner, his legs are tangled in her silk sheets. The snow clumps on the dragon-ridged-spine of the cathedral outside.
His real life, he thinks, is grayscale without her. But she’s right, he knows. They had to move on. Life was not some silver-lined dream.
“But at least,” she is saying, and her voice is a sigh, “we have tonight.”
He takes her hand, the one without the ring, and presses it to his mouth. He meets her eyes. He wishes he had some romantic line, something to match her lovely legato rhythm. But he also suspects, somewhere deep down, that his plainness, his easiness, is what she likes.
“Sure,” he says.
Their hands remain linked. They leave the alley, her head on his shoulder. The snow has piled about an inch around the bottom of the lamppost. The cricket plays on. When the music finally comes to an end, the golden light, hazy in the snow, fades to black. A velvet curtain drops, and it is heavy and shakes a little dust onto the front of the stage. The theatergoers clap, and the roar of applause contributes to the city’s echo. The cricket bows as best he can. Then he shimmies into a hole in the northeast corner of the theater.
The cricket travels a few miles along pipes, along window ledges. He reaches a train station, full of a different type of music: the click-clack of shoes, the holler of the paper boy, the urgent brass of the train’s call. The marble walls make a mirror for the silhouettes of travelers. When he looks up, the ceiling is made of constellations, jade and gold. What a fever dream the city was. But all dreams come to an end.
The cricket sighs. He is readying to board a train to Connecticut.
He, too, is going home.
*****
Emily Brown is a speech therapist who loves working with kids. Her work has been shortlisted for The Letter Review Short Fiction Prize.
