She was new to the city and unwittingly dressed, floral prints in the dead of winter. She worked as a waitress at a bar in the basement, biding her time. He lived in the apartment above hers. A brownstone down on its luck. She shared with four other roommates, perpetually in and out of love, and waited out the worst parts at his place, drawing blocks of her home- town on the back of his hand. She showed him her high school, the hospital where she was born. Back home, she told him, cats wore sweaters in the cold season. Fire hydrants were inspected one hour before all fires. The annual carnival was held only in leap years. He looked forward to these facts, to the feel of her pen against his skin. When he couldn’t sleep he followed the threadlike paths from the post office to her front porch with his smallest finger. A civic upbringing had taught him to regard small town life with suspicion, yet he couldn’t help but envy the idea of this town: unlocked doors and ice cream floats, doctors addressed by their first names, parades for no reason in particular. She replaced the faded lines, added new avenues and landmarks until the drawings reached the blade of his shoulder. She said she had a plan for the rest of him, and then her visits stopped, without a word of notice. He waited for her footsteps on the staircase but heard nothing. The next week he knocked on the door of her apartment. One of her roommates answered in a bathrobe, and he asked after the woman. She went home, the roommate said, mascara bleeding down her cheeks. He wanted to know when she had left, but the door was closed before he could finish his question. He stood in the doorway and rolled up the sleeve of his sweater. The lines had vanished, worn away over the weeks of absence. But he had traced the streets and sidewalks a thousand times, had watched her pen crawl across his arm night after night. If he only kept moving his feet, he was convinced, they would carry him into her company once again.
RAVI MANGLA lives in Fairport, NY. His stories have appeared in Mid-American Review, Annalemma, Gigantic, Corium Magazine, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. A collection of microfictions, Visiting Writers, was recently released as an e-book by Uncanny Valley Press.