Orbit

Your pencil breaks.

It breaks in half, rabid splinters baring wooden fangs to its counterpart, who snarls back with jagged contempt. The paper they had split over was torn and scored deep from their spat, rough from repeated assaults from the eraser and wounded with ragged trenches from where the lead point had corkscrewed in its fury. The symbols on the page – letters they were, supposed to be – are rent unintelligible. They’re the casualties that the cold-hearted general leaves behind. “There’s no hope for them,” he would say. “It’s them or us.”

You throw the paper away and the feuding pencil halves, stand to retrieve another set. That would have been the goal, at least, had there been reinforcements waiting on standby.

The store, your brain murmurs.

Quite right, quite right. The waste bin full and the refrigerator empty, that means you should check the mail for your monthly pay, check the calendar to reestablish it is summer, check your email for emergent news, check the rooms for signs that that cat is around, check, check, check, check. When you shrug on your windbreaker, you are exhausted, but the repulsion of an empty desk is more so than the temptation of an empty bed. To the store it is.

The air is brisk and piercing, marching down the street an inglorious strategy of dodging between pillars and under awnings. The supermarket is two blocks away, too far to be dodging a clutching chill. In the gray glow of light hidden behind clouds you are a grizzled veteran, judging the land with a deserved weary and wary grimness.

The people you pass and the buildings you survey are bright and popping. They are not smudges of color or radiating suns but kind hearths that keep to warmth as earth does after night comes. You burn easily; the rare occasion the cat in your house gives you its attention, it is startling. A thousand fires flickering much brighter is a wildfire waiting to happen.

Your muscles strain forward and your hands shake on the last block. From the sickly stick of skin to bone, you know you have eaten less than usual, the subtle shaves of fat standing watch at your bloodstream a key decoded by practice. Quickened by the phantasmic thunder of acquaintances and friends, the thirty minute trek is cut down to twenty. It is a great motivator, the cold, the battle, the weakness, the storm, though inside civilized walls there must be explanations as to why you shiver and duck your head into the high collar of your coat.

The mission is swiftly dealt with. The paper and pencils are in the department closest to the door, waiting to be picked up and paid for. Self-checkout is two scans and two clumsy fumblings to insert one of your unbroken hundreds and to pocket the change, then the automatic sliding doors are but ten steps away.

You don’t notice the woman until you are nearly upon her, having looked up at the premature feeling of wind gnawing at your bones. You linger a pace behind her back, the lean lines of her shoulders taut against her ill-fitting blouse. She stands not on the welcome mat or the concrete but on the metal rail where the doors slide close after a pedestrian passes.

You linger there, waiting for her to move. She doesn’t have anything in her hands as she faces the world, and it is freezing. How isn’t she shivering? After a strong gust of ice sends your teeth chattering, you break your vigil and stand beside her. “Miss?”

Her eyes are strikingly dark as they shoot to you, quick as a pistol. She is ghastly. Not hideous, but ghastly: supernatural, bleached of color, an insectile specimen trapped between two glass bindings. Wretched, wrecked, ruined, unnerving. Staring, you realize you could go on all day about her as she is but deserving of nothing less.

“Sorry if I’m in your way.” It is she who says it, her lips twisting upwards with a practiced, fluid momentum. (That could mean two things, one or the other. Perhaps both.) “I always forget to bring a jacket, and I don’t have a car or a bike, so I’m bracing for the crash, so to speak.” She nods, arms crossed like two forks of lightning. “This is what I do.” Beside you, she is a cold warmth, like light from a gem.