Chapter 1
Chapter One
“You stupid fucking prick!” My voice cracks as I yell angrily and throw my hands in the air, but it doesn’t matter.
The pouring rain and the hissing of tires on the wet road drown me out in more ways than one.
I drop my arms after giving the ugly, blue, lifted, “I drive this to pretend my dick is huge, but I use a stepladder to get in” truck the most ferocious middle fingers I can muster.
“Stupid asshole,” I mutter to myself as I look down at my favorite yellow cardigan that now has the thick, sludgey mud version of blood splatter on it. I don’t know if it’s fate or a curse that it storms every time I wear it. The irony is, I wear it to remind myself of sunshine.
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 yellow paint, 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, after I 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 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.
“Everything breaks eventually.”
It’s stopped raining, and I take a deep breath of fresh air when the door slams behind me.
As much as I love it, I also kind of miss the oddly familiar, nostalgic smell of the shop.
I pass the kitchen store where the condescending old lady was.
If my hands weren’t full, I would’ve flipped it off as I walked by, but instead, I just look into the window.
It’s impossible, but I swear my reflection doesn’t follow me.