The Blood Artists

In Melanie’s varied and vast work experience, wearing out jobs like they were nylons, she had found the sole redeeming quality of a retail or service-oriented position to be the camaraderie found among co-suffering, codependent co-workers. The Penny University, however, stood as the exception to this trench-mentality rule. The microbrewers hated the baristas who hated the pastry chefs and so on down the line.

Customers. Constantly customers. If the absentee owners prayed, they prayed to the God of Precipitation on Weekend Nights. Inclemency meant lines out the doors. Melanie watched the kids stamping off street grime onto the spongy entrance mats and could smell, even over the roasted beans, the wet-winter scent of coat sweat and dank wool; fleecy sheep herding together over boysenberry beer, or triple-foam, triple lattes, or super-steeped, hemp-brewed pots of tea.

As she was watching the crowded entrance, a man stepped in from the rain wearing a simple gray suit, standing out from the rest of the young, pained hipsters. The trunk-necked hand-stampers deferred to his flashed ID, and as the man returned his billfold to his pocket, Melanie saw that he wore latex gloves.

She resisted her overactive imagination as she watched from the shadows of the creaking vats. The man proceeded to the center island supply station, rather than straight into the coffee line or up the spiral stairs to the beer floor and beyond, stopping at the recycled napkins and flavored stirrers, eyeing the wide ground floor and allowing Melanie a good, long look.

It was the well-dressed man from the trolley, the one who had pushed her out of the path of the oncoming streetcar. The shoulders and pant cuffs of his cheap suit were dark with rain. She wondered for a moment if it had been him out in the alley, but realized there was no way he could have gotten back to the entrance so fast.

Two other men, whom she recognized as semiregular customers, rose almost simultaneously on opposite ends of the floor and wandered close to the man in the suit. They were dressed like students, though as she now paid attention to them, she saw that they were definitely older.

A wave like a charge of electricity left her motionless and buzzing.

The dark-haired man from the trolley started to move. He crossed from the center island, scanning the vats as he approached the mess counter. He couldn’t see her there in the shadows. The man appeared concerned.

The other two fanned back out from the center island. Kids near them, as though sensing some sort of trouble, moved out of their way.

The dark-haired one from the trolley skipped the line and went straight to the barista well where the drinks were being prepared. Beverly was foaming up some milk when the man caught her eye. Melanie tried to whisper to her to wait, but the man was too close.

Beverly started toward him with the milk-frothing pitcher in hand. Even with wet shoulders and his drowned-puppy hair, the man was dark and blandly attractive and smiling forwardly, which guaranteed that Beverly would be on her way to help.

They met. Melanie could hear none of it, what with the orders being taken, the click and clatter of spoons and saucers, and the piped-in blues overhead. She watched the man produce his billfold — careful, in a conspicuous way, to display his identification only to Beverly, as though letting her in on something. Some sixth sense must have told him he had an easy mark. Beverly set the hot pitcher on the countertop and pulled down her mouth guard without taking her eyes from his credentials.

Melanie never saw them near her apartment or her work, only on the streets. That was how she was able to keep her sanity about being followed.

“Health” something, he seemed to be saying to Beverly, as in “health matter,” or “health emergency.” Beverly evidently shared his concern, as she was nodding slowly. Melanie began her retreat just as Beverly turned and looked back from the cocoa-powdered counter, her ratty blond bangs twitching over blinking mouse eyes. She appeared to be alarmed, searching the vat spaces, at first not seeing Melanie. Then she did see her there. Melanie shook her head, pleadingly, but Beverly jerked back and elbowed the stainless steel pitcher clatteringly to the floor. The blue tile went white with boiling milk.

Panic, unreasoned and immediate, burst within Melanie, and she turned and took off running. She threaded back through the fat shadows, stumbling and misjudging a turn on the wet floor and careening sharply into one of the vats, her bony shoulder prodding a light boom and her bag strap snagging on a gauge. She nearly ripped her arm off freeing herself, lunging between two copper bellies back toward the red EXIT sign over the side door. She hit the disabled alarm bar with both hands and spilled hard into the slick alleyway, flopping over the wet curb outside and almost failing down. Her momentum carried her into the far brick wall, which she pushed off from, fleeing toward the closed end of the alley.

She stopped at the beginning of the turn, seeing the pallid safety light through the rain and realizing she would be trapped in the dead end. She spun and ran back up the alley, fighting the apron tangling between her legs, past the door to the Penny University as it burst open and the dark-haired man from the trolley splashed out.