Anodized – Hannah Elsie

October 20, 2025

Every weekday morning, a faux-hawked teen in crisp navy drank Four Loko Sour Apple out of a paper bag and probed the gumball machine on E 4th Street and 1st Avenue for quarters, while I sat behind flimsy glass and swallowed cool air. At the time, there was some talk on the radio about acidic rain. It had been a relentless grey summer. Drizzling sulphuric acid marked the thinning storefront glass with a hairline fracture. I could feel myself, with every polluted downpour, nearer and nearer to the passing touch of the boy’s Four-Lokoless hand, but no malt-lovin’ fingers ever broke through. The fractured glass was replaced with anodized triple-pane storm windows. A thick accretion of dust gathered within me.

I sat, uncoiled, on the top display shelf. It was a day like any other: a homeless man was pressed up against the glass and then pressed into a low black car; a Greek-restaurant worker stepped on the neck of a blunt-nosed rat; a sobbing child ate fallen soft-serve off the hot sidewalk before shoving his mother’s quarter down the windpipe of that beloved street-corner gum machine. The kid’s gumball was not blue. He sobbed loudly once more. His mother pushed the stroller along. My power cord swung slowly in the ventilated breeze.

Half-past four, a scrawny pigeon snuck into the cool store for a brief reprieve but, upon attempting a breezy exit, found the sky was not the sky but only a hard-walled imitation. In primordial panic, the bird thrust itself repeatedly against the daily-windexed front door before circling the fluorescent ceiling and veering toward the next streaky window. The resolute bird, now existentially desperate to return to the disgusting city heat, flung itself, with all its bony weight, toward heaven and dropped hard into the empty display wheelbarrow, where it inked out red and clear liquid for three temperate hours.

The winged touch of the now-dead bird stuck with me. A downy feather from the forceful flight had been caught in my tilted slats, and it stayed there, lodged in my filtered torso, until a hairless bodybuilder shuffled in with an open pack of grass-fed jerky and loudly announced he planned to win back his future wife through the installation of a reasonably priced window A/C unit.