Sliced Thin As Your Hopes

She lets herself in through the heavy metal door in the alley with her uncle’s key. Not important enough to padlock. Nothing left to steal. Grime scrapes under her rubber soles. The first time she tried the switch, but it’d already been cut. At the right angle you catch light wedging through the sides of the plywood covering the big plate glass windows on the far side, where the salamis hung.Light doesn’t make it past the cracks, only shows there’s a place on the other side where light exists. Nothing to show anyway. Dust hanging in the air.

But you should have seen the delicatessen! The old men shuffling in every day to clog their arteries and give brief purpose to their lives. Pastrami slices as thick as your pinky, tongue sliced thin as your hopes. Huge glass display case. The salamis in the window. The booths were red and white pleather, each one banked at a formica table turned in on itself, encouraging privacy and intimacy and a certain loneliness. It’s all gone now, as per the landlord’s eviction notice. Meat and salt fill her nostrils. Place still smells like itself. Lonely old men. Good people. If sad. Most of them.

The door clangs behind her. Dim space floods with darkness. Her hands invisible in front of her.She could open it again, but something holds her in place. She feels the hair on her arm rise. Her neck.

The sound of her breath echoes off the linoleum. Something else. She never sees them.

Soon they’ll be gone too. Ghosts the only people who remember her. The place won’t stay boarded up for long. It will be an artisanal cafe offering eight dollar cappuccinos. A restaurant that doesn’t open until five, busy molecularly redefining cuisines. Something like that.