I dodge someone jogging with a paper over their head to keep them dry, focusing on the alleyway I see ahead on my left, my low-top sneakers squelching with every step. An old lady is staring at me slack-jawed from the stoop of a shop next to me, and I assume it’s due to my mouth. “Not today, Delores,” I snap in her direction. She gasps, clearly bewildered, before stepping back into her store and slamming the door. I rush by her shop, past the window that says“KITCHENS”in faded red and yellowpaint, and briefly catch a glimpse of my reflection. She looks worn down…and now muddy, too.
I sigh in relief when I finally duck into the alleyway and notice the smallest tattered awning towards the middle of the otherwise deserted area. I retract my umbrella as I walk, shake it out, and roll my backpack off my shoulder. Lucky for me that Luca, my poor excuse of a boyfriend for seven whole months, attempted to break up with me about, oh, twenty-seven minutes ago,afterI found him with his“agent’s”mouth around his dick. When I let myself into his apartment using the key he had given me just a few weeks ago, I scared them. Very rude of me, obviously. He shot up while she was giving him the toothiest blowjob I’ve ever seen, which actually worked to my advantage. The surprise made her bite down on him, and he yelped like a puppy whose tail got stepped on.
I’d actually have sympathy for the puppy, though.
“It’s not what you think!” He immediately went into defensive mode, progressively getting angrier while I stood there laughing. She at least had the decency to run to his bathroom and lock herself in. “I don’t care, Luca,” I choked out between laughs. “Enjoy it!” I began walking around the room, shoving my things into my backpack.
“I just need to get my career boosted, Claude! Then it’s me and you, baby, all the way!”
His using my nickname grossed me out.
“Claudia,” I deadpanned. “Good luck with that, Luca. We will not be ‘all the way’”, I retort, mimicking his dumb fake surfer dude accent. “You’re free to boost your career all you want.”
I clicked the buckles on my bag shut, hiked it over my shoulder, and threw his key on the coffee table on my way back to the door.
“She’s not an agent, Luca. She has a social media account with three followers, and one of them is her cousin, Vinny.”
“He’s big in New York!” a defensive, muffled voice called from behind the closed bathroom door.
“I don’t think our vibes mesh well together anymore, Claude. Maybe we should set each other free and see if the fates bring us back together.”
Somehow, I kept the guttural, angry growl from escaping as he used my nickname again. “The fates. Ha. Did you really just give me the relationship equivalent of ‘you can’t fire me, I quit? Get a grip, Leopold.” A genuine laugh bubbled out of me as he stumbled for words and tried his best to twist it so it seemed like he broke up with me. Throwing his real name out was just salt on the wound, and it made me feel invincible.
“Whatever makes you feel better, pal,” I say, shaking my head.
The girl in the bathroom was curiously asking who Leopold was when I let the door slam behind me and jogged down the stairs of his building, burst out of the squeaky door, and stepped directly into a puddle. Of course, it was fucking raining.
I replay the whole scene in my head for the fourth time in the twenty-seven-minute span after leaving his place. Holding my backpack between my knees, I unearth my hoodie from it and pull it over my head. I ignore my phone as it vibrates with Luca’s fourth call in a row. I let it go to voicemail before I press and hold the buttons on the side to turn it off. I don’t even notice the door beside me until I hear it open, a slow creak over the still pounding rain.
Squinting, I look up to see if there’s a sign above me to tell me what kind of shop it is. There’s not a sign, but the words “thrifts & oddities” are painted haphazardly on the brick next to thedoor, above a rusted mailbox with a flip top. I thought I’d visited every thrift shop in the area in the five years I’ve lived here. I’m a regular at all of them—some employees even call me first when they get cool shit in. I buy what most people consider junk and re-purpose it to create art.
I pull my backpack strap onto my shoulder and push the door open the rest of the way. There’s a mutedthunkas it moves, made by what used to be a bell over the door to let the shopkeeper know that customers had entered. It looks like someone had taken the dangly part out that made it actually ring, but couldn’t be bothered to remove the whole thing from the wall.
“Hello?” I call out politely. “The door was open, so I thought I would check it out in here. If you’re not open, I can come back!”
There’s no answer, so I close the door quietly behind me and start looking around. It smells musty in here, like the attic in one of the old people’s houses that fostered me when I was a kid. It’s so silent that it almost feels soundproof. I navigate the narrow, cluttered walking paths, taking in all the off-the-wall things in stock. There’s the usual thrift store stuff; things like old paintings, chipped dish sets, weird wooden furniture that doesn’t really seem to have any purpose. What isn’t normal is the stuff tucked away from the everyday items—wet specimens in jars, bad taxidermy jobs, old photos with the faces scratched off…and a drawer with an apothecary-style label that simply says “teeth”.
Nestled in a corner, half covered by a questionably stained drop cloth, I see the edge of a mirror peeking out. It seems beautiful, a tarnished gold frame with black snakes frozen in time as they try to slither up the sides. I step over a broken wooden milk box filled with old adult magazines to pull the cloth off.
“So pretty,” I whisper to myself. As my hand makes contact with it, a woman’s voice startles me, causing me to grab my chest and stumble back a bit.
“Isn’t it?”
Her hand shoots out and wraps around my bicep, steadying me. “Easy there, my lady. I didn’t mean to frighten you,” the older woman holding onto me says. Heat creeps up my face as I realize how overly dramatic my fear was. She doesn’t seem like a threat at all; in fact, she’s probably someone’s precious Grammy. Her grey hair peeks out from under a crimson silk headscarf, and time-worn wrinkles fill her face, heavy on the laugh lines. She was full of joy in her younger years based on those alone. The most noticeable thing about her, though, is her clouded-over, green-tinged eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” I start, righting myself so the woman stooped over her cane wouldn’t have to continue holding my weight. “I didn’t hear you walk up. I tried to announce myself when I came in, but I may not have been loud enough.”
“You’re okay, dear. I am open whenever the need calls. People come in here when they’ve lost something; there are no business hours for that.”
I laugh nervously, unsure of what she means. “I make art from secondhand finds,” I trail off quietly and point to the mirror. “I was trying to get to this beauty,” I explain as I pull the drop cloth off, revealing it fully. I gasp and realize the glimpse of the corner I had gotten was just a taste of its beauty.
“It likes you,” she says softly, curiously. I hum in acknowledgment as I crouch down to inspect it closer. It’s dusty and has a layer of grime across the glass, but other than that, it’s in immaculate condition for something that looks so old.
“How much is it?” I get to my feet and slide my backpack around to my front to dig in the pocket at the bottom for my wallet.
“For you, cheap.” She dismisses the question with a wave of her hand and gives me an insanely low price. I feel like I’m robbing her, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I hand over the money and heave the mirror up, tucking it under my arm. It’s heavy for its size, sturdy. When I pull the door to the shop open to leave, her voice calls to me. “When it breaks, don’t try to fix it. Just look away.”
I turn, not spotting her in the chaos in front of me. “Why would it break?” I ask loudly, hoping she can hear me, wherever she is.