This one might get published once it's finished (Patreon)

“Taxi!”

Rachel Violet could see it coming, a Checker Marathon right out of a noir movie, the big boat of yellow and checkerboard coming to her down the street, but unable to pull to a stop in the residential street, with its sides crowded with cars, parking meters doing good business. Rachel stepped off the stoop of her brownstone, shimmied between two parked sedans—checked her reflection in a tinted rear window.

Sweatpants, warm-up jacket, tanktop underneath with her alumni taking proud possession of her cleavage. Hair tied up in a ponytail, ends still wet with the cold water she’d splashed on her face. In one hand a garment bag, in the other a briefcase. She wouldn’t go before the bench like this, but she was getting an early start, as usual, and the city was still a ghost town. She’d run into no one she knew.

Funny. ‘As usual.’

The cab pulled in, braking in the middle of the street, but no traffic behind to rear-end it. Rachel eyed the driver—didn’t look like a psycho, looked like a lady, but that just meant if she was a psycho, she was really psycho. Beggars, choosers. She reached for the back door and found her hand intercepted.

Man’s hand. Fine hair on the back, expensive watch on the wrist, expensive manicure on the nails. Rachel scanned him. Wasn’t hard. Handsome, but a kind of handsome, an affected handsome. If men were in FHM, he’d be the cover model. The right suit, the right haircut, the right shave, the right tan. Because it was important. Finance, then. If you had confidence, looks, and rich parents, finance was all open arms.

He looked her over. Didn’t leer, just gave her the secret handshake of the city: I’m okay, are you okay? So he had house training. He smiled at her. “Sorry, but I really need this cab.”

“Better hope another one’s coming along then.”

“I hailed it.”

“Must not’ve heard you over the sound of me hailing.”

A honking behind them. Now traffic was piling up, three cars in line, more queuing up. The first driver in line had his hand on the gearshift, ready to put it in park, get out, confrontation. Down the line, they were fiddling with radios, checking mirrors.

The driver turned slightly, her eyes locking onto them from the rear-view mirror. She spoke with something of a Russian accent. Not board, a Moose und Squirrel thing, but every word had some Cyrillic lettering in it. “Rock paper scissors or something.”

“Listen,” the guy said, in the kind of reasonable tone that was trying to make up for a lack of reason in the listener, “where are you headed?”

Rachel swallowed her irritation and didn’t gag. “29th and Castle.”

“That ugly-ass new gym?”

Rachel cocked her head slightly at him. It was a well-worn gesture. Let the other person know that she was surprised how stupid they were, but not that surprised. “Yes.”

“I’m headed for Irvingvine, it’s right on the way. Split the fare?”

Two cars honking now.

“So get the door for me. What kind of gentleman are you?”

He pulled on the door handle with his middle finger, popping it open as he circled around the trunk and into the left rear door. They piled into the backseat, meeting in the middle, slammed their doors in synchrony. The Checker didn’t have the usual seats, but a big leather bench that reminded Rachel of riding a school bus. Plenty of room for her cargo. She set them down, a modest buffer between herself and her remora, and buckled her seatbelt and knocked on the bulletproof glass partition between front and backseat. It’d been installed a while ago, shearing the cab in two, walling off the pocketed backs of the front seats, yellowing magazines behind glass. The driver slid aside a Hannibal Lecter flap, set into the partition with metal casing and a knob handle on the driver’s side, so she could speak to them.

“Where to?”

Rachel spoke first. A matter of pride. “29th and—“

“Castle, I have it. The gentleman?”

“301 Irvingvine.”

“Twelve minutes?”

“Not fifteen?” The man’s voice had an irritated scoff in it. He liked round numbers.

“Twelve,” the driver said, and shut the flap. Perspex glass, Rachel saw. Like in an aquarium.

They were off, leaving the butting horns behind, the old car’s glide deceptively smooth, its engine humming like your mother’s oven before supper. Through the Perspex, the driver’s motions were swift and sure, signaling, shifting, taking them out of the lonely world of garbage collectors and newspaper deliveries, onto the flowing artery of a freeway, joining a flock of other cars. Cheap ones, belonging to people who couldn’t find a job that didn’t need them to be up at this time of morning.

Rachel stared out the window. Saw, in the faint reflection, the man offering his hand for a shake.

“Walter Quite.”

Rachel reached back without looking, taking his hand and bluntly trying to crush it. As expected, she didn’t. “Rachel Not So Much.”

He leaned back against his door, back of his salon haircut touching the window glass. “So, the Improvement…” he opened, naming her destination. “It’s not such a bad gym, just so… modern.” He talked with his hands. They caught the light in the reflecting glass, ephemeral, like birds flapping around, butterflies flitting from flower to flower. “I prefer my gyms like a Rocky movie. They have some good equipment, though. Only a matter of time until it gets as gimpy as every other gym’s stuff, but for now, I can’t blame you for going there. Have you tried rowing? It’s surprisingly great. That’s how a lot of those Polynesian tribes, they’re just yoked…”

Rachel turned away from the window. Her eyes made a slow trek from one end to the other, looking across the dull, scratched Perspex to him. He shrank back from her gaze before he even heard the Voice.

“I understand you see this conversation ending with us having sex.” The voice was designed to make Geiger Counters go off. “So, out of all the unimportant details you might get out of me about my work and personal life on your way to uncovering what combination of words will open my legs, the most pertinent thing you would learn is that I’m a lesbian, and the only reason my legs would open is if I were going to use them to choke you out like a Ronda Rousey. Although as far as I know, she isn’t a lesbian, more’s the pity.”

Realizing how firmly he was pressed against the door, Walter shifted his weight, straightening himself along his seat. “Can’t argue with that,” he said evenly.

After a few minutes, he’d built up his bravery. Or just gotten bored. “Can I ask you a question, though, as a lesbian? Not about sex or anything gross like that—“

Rachel had been staring straight ahead. Her eyes flicked left. “You think me having sex is gross?”

“No, me asking about you having sex would be gross.”

“Ah, self-awareness. It’s almost like talking to the 1990s.”

Walter cleared his throat, with the familiar look of a man who didn’t know if he’d been insulted or not. “So if dogs are associated with men, and women are associated with cats, is that why lesbians like cats so much?”

“I think that’s just a stereotype.”

Walter shrugged and got the idea. Whatever he did next, Rachel didn’t pay attention to. He did it quietly. Then they were at his stop, him passing his cash through the flap, stepping out, slamming the door without particular rancor. Maybe she was losing her charm.

A smooth drag back onto the road, the driver nestling them into traffic. They passed a truck delivering stacks of the morning paper to a newsstand, a vendor cart having its condiments gone over, the occasional busker disassembling his lean-to to get to work on whatever turf he occupied. Snippets of guitar, of saxophone, of beatboxing and rapping beat against the car window as they passed.

“I never thought of it that way…” the driver said.

Rachel looked through the open flap, the AC’s air pushing through it. “Hmm?”

“Is that why lesbians like cats?”

Rachel drew her smartphone, assuming that was a joke. Worth a smirk, at least.

The downside of it being this early, though, was that no one was awake to post pictures of their food. Rachel looked up, through the flap to the rear-view, meeting the driver’s eyes. Anticipating.

“Like I said, it’s just a stereotype,” Rachel said, trying to convey disinterest but not rudeness. She wasn’t leaving enough of a tip to be impolite. “Like black people liking fried chicken. Who doesn’t like fried chicken?”

With a martial arts chop, the driver hit the turn signal. “I’m a vegan.” She caught Rachel in the rear-view again as they changed lanes.

“Oh, good, when I’m dead you’re still be alive eating tofu. While I’m up in heaven, eating steak.”

The driver didn’t quit. “I like cats too. Do you like cats?”

The man had given up by now, but then, she had been more decisive with him. A few more minutes to the gym. Rachel could afford to play nice. Good practice to get into anyway, if she was ever going to have a jury trial. Juries liked people who could hold a conversation. “Yes. But it’s not like gay men love dogs.”

“They might,” the driver countered. “How many gay men do you know?”

Aside from Bill Pratch, the senior partner who everyone knew had hired a secretary that reminded him of Judy Garland? “I really don’t care where men put their dicks, so long as it’s not in me.”

“Or a lamb.”

“What?”

The driver rested her elbow on the back of her seat, driving with one hand. Oh, God, was she getting ready to turn around? “Big trouble in motherland. No one wants lamb that’s been—“

“Okay, yeah, I really don’t talk about where men put their dicks either… this is why I don’t talk to straight women…” The last she muttered, but the driver had the ears of a bat.

“Glad not to break your streak, then.”

Rachel sat up straighter. “This the part where I say ‘Nice weather we’re having’ and you say something like ‘Unless you like blue skies’ and then we talk about how to fight Communism for her Majesty?”

“If we were spies, you could do a better job being undercover. Even for jogging, you look like Better Porter in a burlesque show.”

Rachel registered the reference. Cynthia had called her that once. Back when they talked. “I don’t watch The L Word.”

“Thank good, there’s still hope for you.”

Rachel smiled, parsing her mispronunciation. “This is my stop.”

The driver looked ahead. “So it is. Twelve minutes, as I say.”

“I didn’t time you.” Rachel rifled through her wallet, making sure to tip more than Walter had. “Well, congratulations. You’re the first dyke to find a way to meet women in this hellhole.”

“Eh, I am not so smart. Very few of them pretty as you.”

Rachel almost let herself blush. “Good day.”

“Good morning.”

Rachel was tempted to stay and try to explain how the idiom didn’t quite work as a farewell, but didn’t. She couldn’t figure it out herself, only that it scanned wrong. She thought about it all through her morning work-out.