Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh Page B

is,” I said. I told Sophia it was good to see her, nodded tightly to her husband, and headed for the table, feeling their eyes on me. The music shifted again, to an old Carbon Leaf song. My dad used to love Carbon Leaf.
    “Hello,” I said, standing over the table. All four women looked at me.
    “Oh, hi,” she said. She was dressed in a long, white peasant dress with ruffles on the sleeves. She looked good.
    “Thought I’d check out your hangout,” I said.
    “Right. How are you?” she said, not making any attempt to stand.
    “Good, great. How are you?”
    “Fine. How’d you get out here?”
    I shrugged. “Bike.”
    “Great. Well, it was good seeing you again.” She turned back toward her friends.
    I hovered for a second, then I turned. Sophia’s husband was watching. He said something in Sophia’s ear; she glanced at me, said something back to Jean Paul, frowning, and turned to join her friends at a bar tucked into a snowbank.
    I glanced back toward the table where my “date” was sitting, in the feeble hope that I’d misinterpreted her brush-off and she would suddenly be interested in me the way she’d been at the convenience store. She kept her gaze pointed straight across the table, toward her friends. Why had she struck up that conversation with me? What was the wink about, if I wasn’t worth a lousy five-minute conversation? Was she embarrassed to admit she knew me in front of her friends?
    I walked back over to her table. Finally, she looked up at me. I cast about for a clever put-down, but my mind had gone blank.
    “I can’t help wondering why you invited me here,” I finally said.
    “I didn’t invite you. I don’t even know you.” She gave me the lip curl, the one that said I was a pathetic pest.
    I puffed out a sarcastic breath. “Yeah.”
    The woman across the table from her stood and gestured past me. “Mickey!”
    A second later a guy dressed in a black t-shirt was at my elbow.
    “He’s harassing us,” the girl said, pointing at me.
    “I am not,” I protested.
    Without a word the guy grabbed me by the neck and the elbow and yanked me away from the table. I tried to yank free, shouted at him to let go as he propelled me through the bar, toward the red exit sign in the corner. Everyone in the bar was staring. I spotted Jean Paul, laughing. Sophia stood next to him, her head down. The bouncer shoved me through the door, into the sticky-hot air of the street. Two girls hanging out on the sidewalk laughed as I lurched forward before regaining my balance. The door slammed closed behind me.
    I unchained my bike from the rack and pushed off into the street, watched the road wind under my front wheel, my face still red. I swerved to avoid the porcelain remnants of a shattered toilet, ran over a fast food paper cup.
    My hands on the handlebars looked strange, unfamiliar. I felt vaguely numb, and wished there was some way to wash away that feeling.
    Jean Paul was probably still laughing. Sophia hadn’t even tried to intervene. My only solace was that I would probably never see either of them again.
    Bright lights and voices on a side street caught my attention. I took a right and rolled by a little crowd lounging outside a freshly painted storefront with big windows. It was an art opening. Christ, there were still art openings uptown.
    What the hell. I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to hear Colin ask “How’d it go?” I didn’t want to recount the humiliation that even now made it hard for me to look passing strangers in the eye. I needed to get lost in distraction for a while. I pulled onto the curb, chained my bike to a street sign, and wandered in through the wide open door.
    The gallery was a dimly lit, cavernous room that had once been a dairy, or an auto showroom, or something like that. A line of ghostly, featureless, emaciated figures made of papier-mâché were mounted to the high concrete walls. The figures were all facing the back of the gallery, and were posed as