Exercise 1, Tom Moran

Allison’s heels clacked on the pavement with a steady beat that spoke of determination and hurry. Cantering out of the “C” Line entrance and down Sixth Avenue, klatches of pedestrians instinctively ducked out of her way; behind her, she knew without seeing, they would sometimes nudge each other in the elbow, turn around and idly gape in her direction. As she receded from their view, they would look at each other, smirk and scurry on.

Though she strolled through life with the measured intensity typical of someone of her stature, Allison held no illusions that her singularity translated into importance. She was no one. Maybe someday she would be, she told herself as she sloppily rinsed her hair in the morning, but for this day she was another tick off of the subway pass, a cramped walk-up apartment off of Prospect Park, a decayed fleck of kelp caught in the human tide that crept into Manhattan every morning. If she had to duck to get into subway cars, if she felt strangers' eyes burn into the nape of her neck sometimes, if the barrio kids yelled “Long legs!” at her, that fed her insecurity, not her ego. She told herself she walked with a confident and assured stride, but she often wondered if her deliberate speed was more a function of her desire to dive headlong into the comfort of her office as quickly as humanly possible. If nature had conspired to make her the center of attention, she dodged the privilege with resolve.

Maneuvering through the revolving glass doors at 1702 was only a caesura in her morning epic. Saluting the doorman with a gruff wave of her latte, she would clatter across the marble floor to the elevator and make her way immediately and decisively to the rear of the car, as though standing in exactly the most inobtrusive spot would turn the elevator into a hall of mirrors, her into a diminished reflection in a convex lens.

The car would stop at the third floor, apartments, at the fifth, some foundering internet upstart. People boarding would see her in the back, stare, blink, realize their rudeness and quickly turn around, pressing their floor button with undue haste. This was expected, and if Allison never really grew used to it, she always knew it was coming, like a measles shot or the fetid mass of air that engulfed her when she opened her apartment door in mid-August.

But it was the kids that broke her. Children were an unusual presence in the building, as they were in Allison’s life, but today a doe-eyed tyke of seven or eight dashed through the lobby, hand-in-hand with her mother, a young woman in an impeccable business suit. At least Allison guessed it was her mother. Maybe Youth Services had abruptly shut the day-care center the night before, she mused, or perhaps Mommy had decided to stage her own take-your-daughter-to-work-day, proferring the shorty an early dose of the corporate miasma Mommy waded through five or seven days a week.

The mother swung her hand in front of the sensor as the door was about to close and pulled her daughter over the verge and into the car. The girl looked around and innocently scanned the four or five other people sharing the ride.

Allison knew what came next. First the kid looked idly at Allison’s knees, stationed at about her eye level, pockmarked and scarred under their sheath of business pants. Then the child’s head swiveled up, taking in Allison’s modest waist, the hem of her coat, the stylish messenger bag that held her paperwork. Upward tilted the head, past Alison's barely noticeable breasts, her slender neck. Ranging to her pursed lips, broad nose and tightly locked eyebrows, the prolonged scan ended at the distant peak of the head, her stringy hair barely visible on the girl's miniature horizon.

Enveloped in the awed stare, Allison abruptly turned her own gaze downwards and flashed an unnerving, toothy grin at the child.

A gasp, and a squeeze of Mommy’s hand, and no more stares. When the door opened and the tyke dashed away under maternal escort, Alison could hear her squeaky, insistent voice bounce down the hall as the doors clamped shut, more of an exclamation than a question.

“Mommy! Did you see the giant!”

Allison missed the mother’s inevitable admonition to her daughter, cut off by the whirr of the elevator continuing on before depositing her on the sixteenth floor. She tried to laugh to herself, but it wouldn’t come.

Safe now among peers, Allison strode calmly down the marble corridor, silently saluted the secretary, and approached her office with a silent sigh. Monday morning and she already felt hemmed in, too large for a world in turn too large for her.

She walked into the office and picked up the phone.