2. The Diner #2
The bullet shifts. He makes a sound—not a gasp, not a cry, just a small exhale, like he's letting go of something he's been holding.
"My mother taught me how to birth a calf when I was ten. Breech birth. My arms were small enough to fit inside the cow, and my mother talked me through it."
I hook the tweezers around the bullet and pull.
It comes out with a soft, wet sound—a small piece of metal, still warm, still glistening with something that might be blood or might be something else. I drop it onto the counter and reach for a clean towel, pressing it against the wound with firm, steady pressure.
He exhales. A long, slow breath, like he's been holding it for years.
"Monika," he says.
Not a question. A statement. Like he's tasting the word, like he's been saving it for this moment.
I look at his face. Grey eyes, steady as stone.
Silver at the temples, threaded through dark hair like frost on winter fields.
He's handsome in the way that old things are handsome—weathered, worn, carved by something that left marks.
I don't know how old he is. Forty, maybe.
Forty-five. Old enough to be my father, though I don't think about that. I don't think about anything.
He's still looking at my face.
"You have very steady hands, Monika."
The towel is red now. I press another one against it, and another, watching the blood slow from a weep to a seep to something that might, eventually, stop.
"You should still go to a hospital," I say. "The bullet's out, but I can't stitch this. I don't have the right supplies. And I don't know if there's internal damage."
"There isn't."
"You don't know that."
"I know my body." He says it like a fact. Like the weather. Like something that isn't up for discussion. "You've done enough. More than enough."
He reaches into his jacket—the one that's ruined now, stained with blood that will never come out—and pulls out a stack of bills.
Hundreds. I can see the portrait of Benjamin Franklin peeking out from the top, and there are more underneath, a whole folded rectangle of them, thick as a deck of cards.
He presses them into my hand.
"I can't take this."
"You can. And you will."
His fingers close over mine, folding my palm around the money. His hand is warm. Warmer than it should be, after blood loss. His skin is rough in places—calluses, scars, the kind of texture that comes from work or violence or both.
"I don't even know your name," I say.
He smiles. Just a twitch of the lips, a small crack in that grey-stone face. It transforms him. Makes him almost human.
"No," he says. "You don't."
He stands. I watch him button his shirt over the wound—the blood will show through, impossible to hide, but he doesn't seem to care—and walk toward the door.
He doesn't limp. He doesn't stagger. He moves like a man who has decided that pain is not going to slow him down, and his body has learned to obey.
At the door, he pauses.
"Thank you, Monika."
And then he's gone. The door chimes behind him, cheerful and cheap, and the wind whistles through the gap before it closes, bringing with it the smell of exhaust and wet concrete and something else. Something that might be cologne or might be gunpowder or might be nothing at all.
I stand behind the counter with a stack of hundreds in my hand and a bullet on the counter and blood on my apron, and I think: I'll never see him again.
I'm wrong.
But I don't know that yet.
Del wakes up at four, rubbing his eyes and complaining about his back.
He doesn't notice the blood on the floor—it's dark in here, and the linoleum is already the color of dried rust—and I've already scrubbed the counter twice, so there's nothing to see.
The bullet is in my apron pocket, next to the money.
I don't know why I kept it. Maybe because I needed proof that it happened.
Maybe because I didn't want to throw it in the trash like it was nothing.
"You look like hell," Del says, lighting a cigarette even though he's not supposed to smoke inside.
"Thanks."
"Rough night?"
"Something like that."
He doesn't ask follow-up questions. That's why I like Del.
He's not curious. He's not kind. He's just a man who shows up, does his job, and goes home, and he expects the same from everyone else.
We've worked together for eight months, and I don't know his last name.
He doesn't know mine. That's the way things work in this city.
The sun rises at 6:45. I know this because I watch it through the window—a thin smear of orange between the buildings, like someone spilled paint and couldn't be bothered to clean it up.
The city wakes up slowly, reluctantly, like a creature that doesn't want to face another day.
Cars start honking. Sirens wail in the distance.
A woman in a business suit orders coffee to go, and a man in a hard hat orders eggs over easy, and life goes on the way it always does.
I clock out at seven. The walk to my apartment takes fifteen minutes, through streets that smell like garbage and hope and the faint, sweet rot of something that used to be alive.
My apartment is a studio on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator.
The lock sticks. The radiator hisses. The windows face a brick wall, which is fine because I don't like looking at the city anyway.
I shower. I wash the blood off my hands, off my arms, off the places where it splattered when I pulled the bullet free. The water runs pink for a long time.
I lie down on my bed and close my eyes.
I dream about the barn. About my mother. About a man with grey eyes and a bullet in his side, and the way he looked at me like he was seeing something no one else had ever seen.
When I wake up, it's dark again. The clock says 9 PM. I have four hours before my shift starts.
I have four hours to pretend that last night didn't happen.
I have four hours to tell myself that I'll never see him again.
I almost believe it.