Flamethrower - Maggie Estep [9]
Ruby got onto her bike and started pedaling. Her leg muscles had stiffened during the time she’d been at the barn, and the first few revolutions of the wheels were painful. She was riding up the incline to Linden Boulevard, cursing her legs for aching, when she felt a car behind her. At the top of the incline, she put one foot to the ground and turned around to see whose car it was. She was expecting Triple. Maybe playing at following her home. Mock stalking the way he liked to. But it was just some random blue car with a random dark-haired man at the wheel. There was something vaguely familiar about the man’s broad face, but he didn’t show any signs of recognizing her so Ruby got back on the bike and pedaled away.
Night was coming on like heartache.
4. HEIGHTS
R uby rode home to Coney Island the back way avoiding the madness of Surf Avenue. Its chaos was one of the things Ruby loved most about Coney but not tonight, not at the end of a day that had featured a severed leg in a fish tank. No. Tonight Ruby needed quiet backstreets.
She rode up onto the sidewalk in front of her building and got off the bike. Her lungs were sore and her ass hurt slightly. She liked that. She liked the various pains and indignities she inflicted on her body. Helped keep her mind quiet.
As she fished her house keys from her backpack, Ruby looked up at the recently renovated Stillwell Avenue subway station. She did this almost every day but never got used to it. Not that it was bad-looking. Just slightly futuristic, almost German, and at odds with the decaying community it served. Coney had been declining for a long long time, and for just as long there had been rumors of casinos and Disney and Donald Trump. Now though, it seemed that something major was truly on the verge of happening. Something that very possibly would destroy Ruby’s home. Either literally, if the building she rented in was sold, or figuratively, if Astroland were razed and Mickey Mouse put in its place.
Ruby hoisted her bike onto her shoulder and climbed the uneven stairs to the second floor. She glanced toward her lone neighbors’ door. Pietro Ramirez and his wife, Elsie, usually left it open, especially in summer when the top floor of the old two-story building was a sauna. Not tonight though. Ruby wasn’t sure if she was relieved over the avoided social contact or not. She liked her neighbors, was sometimes even grateful for Elsie’s borderline busybody-ness that forced Ruby to confess whatever was on her mind. Tonight it would have been awkward. Intuitive Elsie would have prodded and been hurt when Ruby failed to come clean with the details.
Ruby unlocked her apartment door, put her bike against the wall, and nearly tripped when Stinky, her enormous black and white cat, launched himself at her calves.
Ruby sat down on the floor, scooped the cat into her arms, and squeezed him. The rest of the cat pack came to stare at her, politely willing her to prepare their dinner as they likely counted their blessings that the human wasn’t trying to squeeze them too.
Once she felt vaguely restored to sanity through the grace of her fat cat, Ruby got up and went into the kitchen. She flicked the light switch but nothing happened. Ed had forgotten to replace the bulb. Ruby was too short to reach it, and climbing up on the table to do it would make her weak-kneed since she’d developed a fear of heights after turning thirty.
She fed the cats in the dark, banging her shin into a table leg in the process. Another pain to catalog next to the sore lungs and stinging ass.
As the cats made their savage meat-eating sounds, Ruby retrieved her phone from her backpack and flipped it open to make sure Jody hadn’t called. She hadn’t. There were several thousand things Ruby needed to do, but she was suddenly bone tired. She dropped down onto the couch and lay on her back.