Two Lines
The radiator knocked twice before it settled into its low, steady hum, the only sound in the apartment besides the drip that had been falling from the showerhead for six months now, a slow metronome Maren had stopped hearing weeks ago the way you stop hearing your own heartbeat. It was six in the morning. Outside the frosted window, the sky over Flatbush was the color of dishwater, not yet committed to daylight, and somewhere below a delivery truck idled with the patience of something that had nowhere better to be.
She sat on the edge of the bathtub in an old T-shirt of her father's, the cotton gone soft and thin as tissue, and she stared at her phone propped against the toothbrush cup, the timer counting backward from three minutes with the smug indifference of all machines. Two minutes and forty seconds. She had a deadline at ten — four thousand words on sustainable packaging for a client who paid late and complained early — and she'd told herself this errand, this five-dollar box from the pharmacy on Nostrand, was a formality, a box to check so the small itching worry in the back of her skull would finally shut up and let her work.
She was almost sure. Almost. Her period was…