Recently transplanted from Portland, Oregon to Atlanta, Jesse Lichtenstein has a hand in everything: fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He also helps to run, from afar, the Loggernaut Reading Series. We’re glad to have him here. This story was originally published in Propeller.

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She had liked the feel of his hand on her skin. When he’d reached across the table to touch her she hadn’t expected it, but she hadn’t been surprised, either. His hand, his fingers—they had been warm, she’d felt their warmth against the cool September evening. They’d sat on the back patio of a bar, across a narrow table from each other. She’d chosen the drinks and he’d paid for the round. She’d warmed with the alcohol, too, warmed with the conversation, which was about her, her lost years of drugs and expulsion, which, in describing, she could not bring herself fully to regret.

“How’d you stop with heroin?” he’d asked.

“It wasn’t hard. I didn’t like it,” she’d said. “But I met weird, amazing people. They’re still some of my closest friends.”

And she’d turned sideways as she spoke of these friends, put her feet up on the bench, and looked out at the hedge that framed the patio, and the lights winking through its patchy growth. And then he’d reached across the table to touch the back of her neck.

Now she sat on a blue plastic seat in a row that faced the front of the bus. She couldn’t abide the sideways-facing banks of bus seats, or backward-facing seats on trains—they made her ill. She stared out the window as the bus slowed for a red light, passing a small strip of yard with tomato plants on raised beds, the stems straining under the fruit, or vegetable, or whatever it was. The bus passed steps leading up to a walkway that had been framed, like an entrance to a rural ranch, by three large pieces of driftwood painted bright lavender and floodlit from below. The next yard was mostly obscured by a jumble of rotting sawhorses and blue tarps. This was what she loved about her city, how it looked so entirely different from one moment to the next. She picked out shapes in the jumble, like spotting farm animals in a line of clouds, until the traffic light changed.

The man was older than she, although how old she couldn’t be sure. He moved like a young man but there were little flashes of silver in his hair. The two of them worked in the same office, on different ends of the same floor. These were complications. Whenever she’d glanced at him, on the patio, he’d looked at her so intensely.

There was gum on the seat next to hers. Dried gum, the color of dirty canvas. Someone had tried to scrape it off but had given up. Some people try to make things better for everyone else, she thought. Some people don’t even try. And some people try not to make things better. She had never been the last, but too often she had been the second. Yet as a child she’d picked up litter on their street with her mother. As a teenager she’d not been shy—she’d made it a policy to smile at strangers, particularly older people. She had been a contributor. What had happened?

He’d asked to drive her home, pleaded when he’d learned that she would be taking the crosstown bus—“You have to let me drop you off, this isn’t optional”—but everything was optional. She’d wanted the evening to end there, with that warmth, the brush of arm against arm as they walked from the bar and passed a bus stop, and not in the dark of his car as they pulled in front of her house, where decisions would be more difficult to make, weightier to carry out.

There was an elderly man two seats in front of her on the bus reading a small book with big yellow lettering on the cover. The title read, Training the Mind. There was a woman whose child slumped against her side, fitfully asleep. There were two teenage boys behind her, busy with their phones. She took a pen out of her pocketbook, took the lid from the pen, and used the lid to scrape at the gum on the seat beside her. She kept scraping until it was gone.

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