New York City cabs exist outside of time.
The meter ticks. I think we’ve been in here for a minute. I think we’ve been in here for three years. Me and Jaime, Jaime and me. In the back seat, we’re the only two people in the city, maybe in the world, sealed in amber and held up to a dying street lamp to be inspected.
It suits us well.
“I thought about killing myself after what happened with Charles,” I say, like I’m telling him I lost an earring. “Then thought ‘that’s fucking stupid, killing myself over a man.’”
It’s almost funny. Or, it will be, one day, a crisis we look back at when we’re older and wonder why it was ever a crisis at all.
One day we’ll laugh about this.
The streetlight washes us in blood red and neon gold. My dress rides up a little and my legs stick to the vinyl seat. I imagine another timeline, where we're saints on a stained glass panel, martyred and dead while still pure.
A breath shared.
Our shoulders touch briefly, two warm bodies.
And the cab starts moving again.
Jaime and I have green eyes. His are better. They're more moss than mine. His eyes are a place you could lie down in, curl up, forget the cold.
“I’m not looking for sympathy.” It starts to rain. The city blurs. “I just knew you’d understand.”
He does.
He told me, drunk on a Tuesday in December, in that dead stretch of time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, that he once stood on his roof and considered what the fall would feel like.
No context, no sentimentality, just the blunt axe honesty that we’ve grown used to with each other.
I didn’t ask what stopped him.
I didn’t need to.
We’ve all had a tense hour on the roof, debated walking into traffic, or waded out to sea and let the waves crash over us before hauling ourselves to shore, shivering, gasping, but alive. That’s the miracle of it. We keep living.
I say I’m resilient. Jaime says he’s spiteful. The truth is probably something softer.
“I get it,” he says finally. “But you’re too pretty to die for someone like Charles Havisham, too smart.”
Charles: all cufflinks and condescension.
Charles, who told me I was too emotional during sex.
Charles, who said truth was subjective.
Charles, who is, thankfully, in Italy right now, fucking some other woman’s self-esteem to death. My laugh is too loud in the cab’s pine scented interior. “You always bring the feminist takes.”
He shrugs. “It's true. You have nice eyes, like the last green in a leaf before autumn takes it. And I like your knobby knees and tiny breasts.”
From anyone else, it would be crass. From Jaime, it's a benediction. He speaks without lust or longing.
The first man I dated was my 42 year old art history professor, Julian, during my first year of undergrad. I was 18, but barely, and so full of wanting. He spoke to me in lavish prose, muddled his language with metaphor so I couldn’t see the danger until too late. A sip of bourbon, a kiss during office hours, a hand slipped under my skirt, and me thinking I was grown.
The meter chirps. The driver hums Bizet off key.
Charles said I love you over and over, his peppermint breath warm on my cheek, and never meant a word of it. I was grown then and still hadn’t learned.
It’s a relief now, to have a man tell me plainly that he likes my knobby knees and not want my body in payment for the compliment.
I tell Jaime “You have good hands.” I don’t elaborate, he doesn’t ask me to, but his hands look like they could hold a wound together.
Jaime loosens his tie.
I fidget with my necklace. “I don’t want to go to this stupid gallery opening.” Networking events are the hell Dante forgot in his Inferno. I should go. I should want to, because everyone is, and talking to the right person will secure my place as an art buyer, get me in with The Met, or The MoMA.
In a different timeline, we’re lab rats in a maze. Do the task, win a prize, repeat.
Jaime touches my hand. The point of contact warms the rest of me. “I don’t either. We can leave early.”
“People will talk.”
“We’ll say I’m sick.”
“Are you?” He looks a little pale, a little shaky, and more than a little like I feel.
“I will be, if this guy doesn’t stop driving like he’s auditioning to be a stunt double.” Jaime opens a window and cold air slaps us in the face. My hair sticks to my lipgloss.
The driver meets our eyes in the mirror. “You kids good back there?” He’s a relic of old New York, a dying breed in the generation of rideshare apps. Perhaps Jaime and I would have fared better in that era, an era when your ex couldn’t find you on LinkedIn to call you a whore.
“Needed some air.” Jaime says, then leans back and takes a few deep breaths. Colour starts to creep back into his cheeks.
“I should have eaten before leaving.” I say, not to him, but as an admonishment to myself, 25 and I still don’t know how to take care of my body. I forget to eat or pick at overpriced smoothie bowls that leave my insides cold and unsettled. Sleeping is another matter entirely, too much or too little depending on the day. Wine at noon, coffee after midnight, my body doesn’t know what to do with itself any more than I know what to do with it.
My mother says I’m disciplined.
My father, bless him, worries I’m anemic.
The cab turns down a foreign street. The city’s rearranged itself again, the way it does when you're in motion but going nowhere. I press my forehead to the window. A laundromat blinks past. A man in a wheelchair smokes under an awning. A group of girls, still school age, laugh in the rain, mouths open, teeth flashing, free.
It’s hard to imagine I was once that young.
When I was that young, I couldn’t imagine living to 25.
I’ll take the small miracles.
“I haven’t eaten much either.” Jaime says. “I had toast for breakfast, and I’ve been living off coffee and sparkling water. And two Xanax.” He grins. “The Xanax are to stop me from killing Paul from accounting.”
I smile back. “Paul wants to fuck you.” I’ve never met Paul, but by the way Jaime talks about him, he’s all manic energy and attention seeking, the middle school class clown grown up and given a paycheck that lets him buy eight hundred dollar shoes.
“He fucked my sister. Probably because she’s blonde like his mother. It’s all very Freudian.”
“Eight million people in this city, and somehow no one’s a stranger.” That’s the horror of New York. That’s the beauty of it. Everyone’s circle will eventually overlap.
The driver stops at a light, and we both lurch forward. Eight million people, and it’s still only Jaime and me. We’re not lovers, we’ve never so much as kissed, never needed to. Jaime and I are two sides of the same coin, twins in spirit rather than genes.
“We could skip it.” His eyes are bright. An ambulance screams past us, trailed by two police cars that turn the puddles into waves and light the whole street in red and blue. Danger in the direction we're heading.
I once read that people make thirty five thousand decisions a day. Most of them are inconsequential. This one isn’t. “Ok.”
I can deal with the fallout on Monday.
A third timeline; he’s a knight who keeps failing the quest, and I’m a princess who doesn’t want to be saved from the safety of her tower.
Jaime taps the driver’s shoulder, murmurs something about changing directions and taking us anywhere the food is good at 10 p.m.
One day, when we’re old and settled, Jaime and I will look back at all the moments we had in our 20s and 30s that seemed so important and laugh and how silly they were.
Not this moment though. This one, I think, will always be important.
The rain stops, and the driver drops us off at a diner that promises authentic Slovak cuisine. He winks at us before driving away, the yellow cab disappearing into the lingering mist as if it had never existed.
A bell rings when we enter the diner, and the air smells like schnitzel and fennel and warm spices. No one else is there, save for the chef and a teenage waiter with curly black hair. The boy smiles at us like we're the first people he’s seen in days, like we’re the only two people left in New York.
Jaime smiles too, and it reaches his eyes this time. “We’re alright” he tells me. When he says it like that, like he’s telling me the rain stopped, it’s easy to believe him. I find myself smiling back.
Even if there are other timelines, better ones, it doesn't matter. This one, Jaime and I alone together, suits us well.
Millie Sullivan is a current MFA student. A New York native, she currently resides in a neighborhood of Pittsburgh. She has an upcoming publication in Fjords Review and Flash Phantoms.
This is lovely and alive — the city-as-time-capsule conceit carries the whole piece with a steady, cinematic feeling. I loved how the cab becomes both a confessional and a suspended stage: the meter ticks, the rain blurs the skyline, and for a little while the rest of New York drops away so we can eavesdrop on two people who know each other’s soft and dangerous edges. That suspended-time image (“sealed in amber…held up to a dying street lamp”) is exactly the kind of elegant, slightly strange sentence that makes fiction feel like a small sacrament.
Your characters are vivid in a single scene: Jaime’s mossy eyes, the battered intimacy of “knobby knees and tiny breasts,” the way Jaime names the narrator’s worth without trading it for appetite. The balance between bluntness and tenderness — Jaime’s dry honesty beside the narrator’s brittle levity — rings true and gives the piece a palpable emotional texture. The past traumas (Charles, Julian) are handled with restraint: you don’t linger in melodrama, but you give enough to explain why these two are fragile and why the city’s anonymous violence could cut so deep.
I also appreciate the piece’s moral geography: New York as both cruelty (everyone’s circle overlaps; everyone is a stranger) and mercy (the small miracles, the teenage waiter who treats them like the only people he’s seen). That tension — the city as threat and refuge — is what makes the setting feel like a character in its own right.
A couple of tiny craft notes you might consider: 1) the piece thrives on repetition and cyclical phrasing (meters, timelines, the idea of “one day we’ll laugh”), which underscores the suspended-time feeling, but there are places where trimming one recurring line would sharpen the emotional landing of the next. 2) The timeline-shifting metaphors (stained-glass saints, lab rats in a maze, knights and princesses) are evocative — gorgeous, even — but you might consider paring one or two to let the strongest image breathe longer; right now the piece flirts deliciously with lyricism and sometimes rushes on to the next glittering line before a mood fully settles.