Ripple Effect
by Eric Sommer

It was a bright new day. The sun was high in the sky, the air clear, crisp and a slight but steady breeze kept Algorithm’s blonde hair loose and hard to control.

It really didn’t matter. She had been tormented all morning by the worst sort of collection agencies trying to scare her into paying their obscene interest and penalty crap and she had a bruise on her cheek where her boyfriend smacked her at 6am in a semi-drunken grab for her. It ripped her blouse and tore her shoulder bag as she was heading out the door. It really hurt now.

And her life sucked at the moment, too, and that didn’t help.

Directionless, she was just rolling with the punches. She was bouncing between food service and hair salon jobs and it was taking its toll, just like her father had said it would.

But today was the worst she had felt in a long time.

She was on 19th Street now, walking quickly into the wind, heading for another job interview that probably wouldn’t amount to you-know-what in a sandwich made of you-know-what! She turned the corner onto Howard Road. She needed a coffee, and next to the coffeeshop she usually picked up a black coffee at, she stopped.

The coffee shop was there all right, but next door to it in a small space that had been vacant for a few years, was a new shop. A yarn store. And a really weird place for it, too. In fact, it had no business being in this part of town. Checks Cashed, QuickPawn, Dollar Store… Yarn Shop??

But someone had polished and cleaned the windows to an unearthly shine and looking into the glass was as if there was no glass there at all.

And there wasn’t anything in the store: just a table, a side lamp and a picture of Times Square hung right in the middle of the back wall. There were three posters, big ones, placed against the glass facing out: a travel poster, a poster of The Tower of London and a poster for the Travel Channel with an impossibly good-looking guy in a blue blazer, staring right at her, front and center.

Algorithm was startled, caught her breath.

He held in his extended hand a tray of beautiful cocktails, and his feet were planted on the deck of a boat, a big boat, a yacht so magnificently white against the deepest blue water around it… that it couldn’t be real. With his other hand he held onto the railing and steadied himself. His eyes, dark and perfectly set against a tanned, rugged face, gently peered ahead into her eyes, then into and through her soul, deeper and more profoundly than anything she had ever felt. It was an invitation.

The glass shimmered, became fluid, almost watery with small ripples, and she reached out her hand to take a cocktail from the tray. When her hand met the glass storefront, it slipped smoothly through and she was able to take the cocktail glass and step effortlessly, silently, into the pane, as she reached for a napkin on the tray. The glass rippled, returned to its natural state.

The traffic on Howard Street never slowed down as a small white cocktail napkin floated gently down to the empty sidewalk.