Seth Geltman
“You forgot the discount.”
Expressionlessly the Subway sandwich artist, a few flakes of lettuce clinging to her plastic gloves, cast her cold blue eyes at his receipt.
“The coupon—you didn’t credit me $1.50 for the coupon,” Joseph said. He was used to scrapes like this, to the quickening of language and manner they called for. These were his daily proving grounds; he would not be victimized.
The sandwich artist pressed a few buttons on the register, mutely returned to him a couple quarters and a dollar, and asked over his shoulder to the next customer “May I help you?”
“I’ll take a—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” said Joseph. “How about some kind of ‘I’m sorry for the inconvenience’ here?”
Silently the air seemed to both sag and bulge at once. Then the sandwich artist muttered “Sorry for the inconvenience.”
Joseph stood there, considering the sufficiency of the sorrow. His purposeful delay started to make things okay again. He had them where he wanted them, not just the sandwich artist, but the entire store, a gathering critical mass of attention, a nice undercurrent of trepidation. They were his now, momentary hostages, stuck until he decided what to do next.
“So if there’s nothing else I can do for you…” mumbled the sandwich artist.
“No, I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said, pocketing the money. “Just a little acknowledgment, that’s what I thought was missing there.”
He walked back to a table, took a seat, and quietly ate his sandwich. It was a dry, utilitarian concoction, despite all the care he’d lavished on it in line, directing in extra oil and scoops of olives that now fell freely to the table. It was as if the food felt compelled to rob itself of its own personality, just because it ended up in a Subway, as if it lobotomized its own texture and flavor, forcibly canceling any tomato-ness or pepper-ness or cheese-ness.
Or perhaps the sandwich artists designed it this way. Avenging his requests in line, they’d curated the most anemic bits of food they could find. No matter how softly he pronounced the ‘j’ of ‘Dijon,’ no matter how politely he requested ‘One more, please’ as they scooped on olives, they’d crafted something resolutely tasteless while still maintaining the legitimate properties of a sandwich. He took a bite or two more.
A couple tabletops away, he noticed a section of the newspaper he usually didn’t care about, Business. He reached over and got it. Who could extract what from who—that’s Business. Tearing away at each other’s money is as cannibalistic as we can get, he thought. I can’t pull your ear off, but I’ll slash at your money. Crisp men in crisp suits with crisp smiles pluck crisp dollar bills from each other—that’s Business.
His own work occurred in the mall a couple stores over at A House of Flags. It wasn’t a house. It was a hallway store in a strip mall, but it did sell flags. Over the years, he’d become extremely knowledgeable about flags, fussy and dismissive sometimes when people didn’t know about the flag of their own city. It was just good citizenship to know the colors and shapes of one’s city’s flag, and the meanings behind them. And he thought his casual expertise about flags gave him a certain cosmopolitanism that sadly never had a chance to flourish on a date or at a bar, or anywhere except A House of Flags.
Suddenly a cat skittered into the Subway. People gasped and laughed. It was a puffed-up terrified tabby, rushing under one table, then another, then another. Teenage boys took flamboyant swipes at it. The woman who’d ordered over his shoulder went pale and shuddered. The employees gazed wearily at the scene as if it was just one more example of how crappy this day was.
Then the cat darted under Joseph’s bench. This second turn in the Subway spotlight made him feel a bit awkward, like saying goodbye to someone, then running into them again later in the day. Amid the small chuckles rippling around the room, the cat hissed and snarled at him. Sitting with her own sandwich, the woman who’d ordered over his shoulder said, “So tough about the coupon. Now the cat’s got his tongue.” There was a scattered chortle or two.
He considered ignoring all of them and returning to his sandwich and newspaper. Or yelling an obscenity to the woman across the room. Maybe, though, he could get the cat into the broom closet four feet away, whip out his phone, call the Humane Society, have them pick it up, and triumph. He looked at the cat with softness in his eyes, and whispered to it warmly. It hissed. He did a stern stage-whisper; the cat bared its teeth, and its pupils were huge and black. He rolled up the newspaper into a thin bat. Showing who’s boss might do the trick—a nice crisp smack on its hindquarters might restore the appropriate balance of things.
It was two feet away, under the bolted-in bench at the other corner of the table. Awkwardly, around the back of the bench, Joseph swung. The cat shrieked a jungle cry, twisted, and with full raging force slashed its claws through the soft flesh of his inner forearm.
Hooked in, the cat pulled his arm and bit hard, puncturing it with four trapezoidal points. It all happened under the table. Then the cat sprinted out the front door, which another sandwich artist was holding open.
Riotous laughter erupted, and no one noticed his arm. Three people stood up and clapped as he returned to his sandwich. Oddly it became more flavorsome and the Subway’s ambience more congenial as his forearm began to pulse. A canopy of respect and presence, like a thin translucent linen rustling in sunny wind, hung over him. Then he passed out on the floor from the pain and fear.
Fetal on the Subway floor, he woke to nervous faces huddled over him—the first sandwich artist, the over-the-shoulder customer, an EMT.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” Joseph said as huskily as possible.
“Looks bad,” said the EMT. “Ought to see a doc.”
Joseph thanked him. Then he manfully got up and hustled over to A House of Flags. He’d gone way past his lunch hour.
Tyra, his boss, was tensely trying to fold up a large flag of Uruguay that a couple customers asked to look at, but balked at buying.
“Where’ve you been?” she asked. She was fifteen years younger than him and a half a foot taller.
“I was at lunch,” he said. “Then—this cat.” He showed her his arm. “I ought to see a doc.”
“Doesn’t look that bad,” Tyra said.
“It’s getting worse. I’m going,” Joseph said.
The flag of Uruguay wasn’t folding up right. She should’ve seen that the customers were just homesick Uruguayans with no intention of buying it. And folding flags wasn’t in her job description anyway. It was supposed to be this little man’s chore. But instead of properly folding up flags, he usually regaled her and her customers with needlessly encyclopedic, highly irritating lectures on flags. And she finished her train of thought with “If you go, don’t come back.”
He left. She wadded up the flag of Uruguay into some kind of ball and kicked it against the counter.
Since he’d just been fired from the employer who issued it, it felt a bit weird to present his insurance card at the hospital. He’d sort it out later. Now the mission was to save his arm. It was feeling bulky and stiff, and flexibility was draining from his fingers. He kept making needless motions with both hands, comparing what they could do, and the right hand just wasn’t keeping up.
An emergency doc winced and inspected his arm silently. After a couple minutes, he stepped back, and nodding quickly and studying the arm, said, “Might have to lose it.”
“What?”
The doc said, “we’ll see what we can do,” winced again, and left the room. He was gone a long time.
The throb in Joseph’s arm got bolder and bulgier. He thought about all the little twists that landed him here. Usually he packed a lunch, but last night he’d stayed up to watch Leno, because some comedian was on that his nephew had told him about. Then he overslept and didn’t pack a lunch. But he kept a stash of coupons to justify any purchase he could, and the Subway mailer was the first one he found.
To think that the existence of his hand, his trusty innocent perfectly wonderful hand, was anywhere near in doubt brought on a tide of nausea, a horrible crumpling, hot and cold and prickly, and again he was fetal on the floor, sweating and shivering, with only the cool linoleum there to calm him.
The wincing doctor entered with a younger one. Neither showed any surprise that Joseph was on the floor. Professionally, they put him back on the table, and the younger doctor, Dr. Holly, inspected the arm. He pressed it, held it at odd angles, squeezed it.
“Next time you see a wild cat,” he said, “you might not want to reach out at it.”
Still woozy, Joseph ran through an alternate version of the previous ninety minutes. The sandwich artist missed the coupon, so Joseph pocketed it and saved it for the next time. Unnoticed, he ate the sandwich, which he knew would be plain no matter how many olives he directed onto it. When the cat came, he simply moved to another table, and returned to A House of Flags at the usual time. Tyra’s contempt stayed on its usual low boil. He sold a couple flags and went home. His right arm went about its business.
“Dr. Cleland here was fairly alarmed by the state of your arm, and I can see why,” said Dr. Holly. “We’ll give it a bunch of doses of the heavy stuff and see what happens. Come back here every eight hours for the next four days. We’ll pump this stuff into you. Maybe it’ll work.”
Joseph returned home to a message on his phone machine. It was the insurance company, questioning his coverage. He opened the fridge. A half-eaten jar of pickles, a quarter-inch of milk in a gallon jug, horseradish. The phone rang, and A House of Flags came on the Caller ID. It’d be Tyra, full of petulant details about clearing out what passed for his desk and collecting his final check. But instead, he heard her say a tentative “Sorry. Sometimes I’m just a bitch. Honestly, no one knows as much about flags as you. You’d be hard to replace.” He finished the milk straight from the jug. “My cousin, she’s a nurse,” Tyra continued. “She said bites can be bad.” She hung up.
The next hospital visit, on the eight hour cycle, was in the middle of the night. After that, he couldn’t sleep. But he got himself to work on time. Tyra’s tentative sorrow from the phone was gone. After glancing at his bandages, she took on a neutral courtesy. A few customers came in, teachers looking for classroom materials, tourists, and then the woman who’d ordered over his shoulder in the Subway.
“I work at the other end of the mall, at Sears,” she explained. “I walk by here all the time, and see you explaining flags to people. How’s the arm?”
“What do you want?” he asked her tartly. She’d played her part in the whole catastrophe.
“It must be hard for you to operate,” she continued, “— to fold flags and make meals and stuff like that. Can I make you dinner, something like that?”
For the first time, he took a real look at her. In the Subway, she was just a voice over his shoulder, a taunt across the room. Paunchy here and there, in the neck, the cheeks, but in good enough shape. Still, it wasn’t as if she’d earned any kind of right to taunt him. She wasn’t some expert in the way things ought to be and the way people ought to act. But he’d never had a chance to show anybody the 1903 City of Schenectady flag in the kitchen.
“Yeah, if you want to make me dinner, that’s okay,” he said. There was only the pickles and horseradish in the fridge.
SETH GELTMAN grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and graduated from New York University with a degree in film. He’s a teacher in the Denver area. His crossword puzzles, constructed with partner Jeff Chen, have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His stories have appeared in The Oddville Press, Great Ape, and Mono.