The Mirror and the Letter

I keep seeing the side mirror. That's what stays. Not the SUV itself — black, tinted, the kind you don't rent without intention — but the angle of it. Four blocks of Nostrand and I knew the way your body knows before your brain signs the paper that I was being kept in the shot. I didn't run. I want that on the record. My hands were steady the entire time.

H. Park Avenue prefix. "My wife doesn't know I have your number." I have read it eleven times since one o'clock, which is its own kind of stupid. I am answering tomorrow. Minetta Tavern is a room I can read — dark booths, a bar with a mirror, a man across from me who thinks he has the leverage. He does not have the leverage. I want to see his face. I want to know what kind of man signs a text to a stylist with the single letter of his own name.

Two new fives this week, both from accounts that have never booked a session in their digital lives. Both worded with the same little flourish at the end. The cadence is wrong the way a wig is wrong from three feet away. Someone sat down and wrote two reviews in a voice they thought a client would use, and they are burying the watch one-star. I have been professionally, gently murdered this week by someone with patience and a Gmail account.

The bodega owner said she came in with a man in a black coat, said she was a friend of yours. I do not have a friend who would say that on Nostrand. So who is she. Is the man in the coat the man in the SUV. Is the SUV the man writing fake reviews in my cadence. I am on the rug in the back bedroom doing the math and the math is not clean.