One-Fourth
It was the type of glossy yellow and expensive day that made my temples throb.
I’d been standing for thirty minutes before someone finally pulled over at my outstretched arm. I was leaving behind something I’d stayed too long at, getting into a taxi that was a fourth full. That’s what the driver said: he could pick up a maximum of four passengers.
The driver was a man. He asked what direction I was heading when I opened the door—I’d be the second stop. Inside the car, there was another man, sitting on the leftmost seat, looking out the window.
The door shut behind me as I pulled the seat belt across my body. I struggled to find the button. The taxi was an older car, though there was still a screen on the back of the front seat, finding its way into my lap with guessing games and strip club ads. I was interested in the images as they flared into me, chemical residue. Then, I wasn’t. But there was nowhere else to look. The girl in the “Private Eyes” commercial pouted at me and the smell of Little Trees.
The man next to me was looking out his window, evolving past the monitor. He quickly devolved, his attention going back to the glow.
In my head, caricatures winked. These exaggerated figures observed us, wondering if they could teach me how to enjoy watching?
My legs brushed the edges of the man’s knees. They spread into the space between the seats, but I kept my eyes on the screen.
“It’s two days after my birthday,” he said, without looking at me. The taxi driver assessed us in his wing mirror—an interaction reduced to a data point. Was it the driver’s 3rd trip of the day? 20th?
The man on my left pointed to my screen with wide fingers, telling me he was once in an ad that showed in taxis.
He never liked those ads. I glanced over.
“Happy Birthday,” I said. He stared downwards, at his feet which were tucked under the driver’s seat. The leather of the car’s upholstery was peeling here and there, leaving a mottled pattern and flakes that tempted to fall like sparks.
Wanting to fill the silence, I flipped the door lock back and forth with faint clicks. I wondered if he was coming or going; he was coming up on his next birthday I supposed, and going from the last one.
Watching the promos, I thought of his face, stuck in and to the walls of a taxi cab. Maybe his commercial would come up in the rotation on play that day. Or it would be a part of a crosstown ride somewhere else, presented to a stranger.
He watched the click click for a second in annoyance before turning back toward the passing street. As he did, we stopped with a jerk. My elbow slammed into the pebbled plastic on my right. A biker made a tight turn hitting the hood of the car with their hand, breaking the enclosed moment with his intrusion. The driver cursed, and the meter ticked up as he did.
The man next to me sighed, sticking his face just past where the window would have hit. It was like sticking your face into a shallow pond. I imagined he would stretch out of the window, grab the lit up sign on the car and climb up to its roof. Then he’d swim away.
In that dream, he was a powerful psychic advert, a piece of a city flooded with water. It was all blue-tinted and slanderous there.
I wondered if the next time I saw him in a taxi he’d be on my screen. I told him so.
He said it wasn’t likely. “That ad was years ago.”
Minutes later, he got out on the side of a street that made him seem smaller than he’d been sitting next to me. The imprint in his seat stayed for a second after he was gone.
I found the button for my buckle, left between the seats. He must have been sitting on it.
That seat between us in the car was a length by which I measured things for the rest of my life.