Each Careful Step Along the Highway

Abstract

Each Careful Step Along the Highway Jamie Black (bio) The email must've auto-triggered. It's in Comic Sans and reads, Guess Who's Moving? You! Pay your outstanding balance or release your apartment and return all keys by noon—police are standing by. Eviction protections lapsed at midnight, 56 seconds ago. Extended protections are being debated—some senator from a different state is holding them up, worried a new moratorium could hurt the landlord who owns my building and three more lead-painted tenements down the block. Future good news, probably, for folks who can afford lawyers, who can hunker and fight. Doesn't make any practical difference for me. Every red cent I've got left is on a smiley-faced debit card sent by my auto-insurance company. A refunded sliver of 2020's premiums on account of pandemic lockdowns (283 bucks) came today. But I owe 1100 in back rent and I've been on food bank rations for a month. Monday was apples, chard, crackers, and crunchy peanut butter. I've got three lemons from last week and a brown bag of loose couscous in a crate with Starbucks honey sticks, duck sauce, and hardtack I found at Desi Mart. Since this shit started, I've tried to be proud of rolling with punches—punches that came with the cadence of microwave popcorn—but I just can't get out of bed and start packing. Instead, I get out of bed and walk to Fifth Wall for a nightcap. The place smells the same as before I got furloughed, before we all had to hibernate. Onions, garlic, leather, salt. I sidle up to the bar, settle into a stool of worn hide and iron. Slap that yellow card down on the marble. The owner, Wil, is behind the stick, wearing a porkpie and herringbone mask. He winks at me while tending two men in matching Louboutins, who shy away when I sit, moving in unison, never untwining their knot-knuckled hands. Wil muddles a tamarind daiquiri while apologizing for how things turned out. "Wish I could bring you back, but I'm not even paying myself. Won't make it past Christmas at half-capacity. Any rec or reference, text and I'll send it." He drops a dehydrated lime in the coupe and nudges it in front of me. It's my first drink out since lockdown, and it's stiff. I force a laugh. "I'll send a pigeon. Mañana, my cellie goes dark." He taps his hat's brim, says this one's on him. "Don't tip," he says, bumping my fist. After last call, I head home, roll a smoke, and straddle the windowsill. [End Page 88] I hunch under the upper sash and reach to touch the glossy green leaves of the overgrown autumn blaze maple I guess I won't get to see change. I look back in at my stiffening socks and wrinkled tees draped over fish wire, sodden denim I washed in the sink still dripping onto the coverless paperbacks by the foot of my frameless futon. There's a molehill of shoes in front of the Japanese folding screen that features the Fisherman's Wife, reliably supine in unlikely ecstasy, which I've been using as a bathroom door. I wonder what I'll have to give up in the Tetris of packing because I'm not leaving the screen behind. I spit on the cigarette's cherry. Stuff it into the rusted gutter overhead. I climb in and start kicking the shit of my life into piles: Must Have, Good to Have, Would Be Nice. Because neither wrinkles easily, I don't pack my pink leathers or ribbed velveteen sweater. I fold both gently, set them aside for dinner tonight with Remy and their parents. On the last night I'm guaranteed a roof over my head, I sleep on the fire escape under the leaves of the autumn blaze. ________ All my possessions are in the collapsed backseat of my Civic when I drive past the address Remy texted. I can't see any house from the street. High wrought...