Strangers

the shelves laden with canned and packaged food, the display cases, the wall clock with the Manischewitz logo, the pickle barrel, the tables and chairs all seemed to shimmer and slip away into a niveous haze, as if a fog was rising from some realm beneath the floor. Only the portentous gloves did not fade, and, in fact, as she stared at them they grew more detailed, strangely more vivid, more real, and increasingly threatening.
        "Miss?" the doughy-faced man said, and his voice seemed to come from a great distance, from the far end of a long tunnel.
        Although the shapes and colors of the delicatessen bleached toward white on all sides of Ginger, the sounds did not dwindle as well but, instead, grew louder, louder, until her ears filled with a roar of meaningless jabber and with the jarring clatter of silverware, until the clinking of dishes and the soft chatter of the electronic cash register were thunderous, unbearable.
        She could not take her eyes off the gloves.
        "Is something wrong?" the man asked, holding up one leather-clad hand, half-reaching toward her in an inquisitive gesture.
        Black, tight, shiny… with a barely visible grain to the leather, neat little stitches along the fingers… taut across the knuckles…
        Dizzy, disoriented, with a tremendous weight of indefinable fear pressing down on her, she suddenly knew that she must run or die. Run or die. She did not know why. She did not understand the danger. But she knew she must run or perish where she stood.
        Her heartbeat, already fast, became frantic. The breath that was snagged in her throat now flew free with a feeble cry, and she lunged forward as if in pursuit of the pathetic sound that had escaped her. Amazed by her response to the gloves but unable to be objective about it, confused by her own behavior even as she acted, clutching the grocery bag to her breast, she shouldered past the man who had collided with her. She was only vaguely aware that she almost knocked him off his feet. She must have wrenched open the door, though she could not remember having done so, and then she was outside, in the crisp November air. The traffic on Charles Street - car horns, rumbling engines, the hiss-sigh-crunch of tires - was to her right, and the deli windows flashed past on her left as she ran.
        Thereafter she was oblivious of everything, for the world around her faded completely away, and she was plunging through a featureless grayness, legs pumping hard, coattails flapping, as if fleeing across an amorphous dreamscape, struck dumb by fear. There must have been many other people on the sidewalk, people whom she dodged or shoved aside, but she was not cognizant of them. She was aware only of the need to escape. She ran deer-swift though no one pursued her, with her lips peeled back in a grimace of pure terror though she could not identify the danger from which she fled.
        Running. Running like crazy. Temporarily blind, deaf.
        Lost.
        Minutes later, when the mists cleared, she found herself on Mount Vernon Street, part of the way up the hill, leaning against a wrought-iron railing beside the front steps of a stately red-brick town house. She was gripping two of the iron balusters, with her hands curled so tightly around them that her knuckles ached, her forehead on the heavy metal balustrade as if she were a melancholy prisoner slumped against the door of her cell. She was sweating and gasping for breath. Her mouth was dry, sour. Her throat burned, and her chest ached. She was bewildered, unable to recall how she had arrived at this place, as if washed onto an alien shore by moon-timed tides and waves of amnesia.
        Something had frightened her.
        She could not remember what it had been.
        Gradually the fear subsided, and her breathing! rei!ained an almost regular rhythm; her heartbeat slowed slightly.
        She raised her head and blinked her eyes, looking around warily and in bafflement as her tear-bluffed vision slowly cleared. She turned her face up until she saw the bare black branches of a linden and a low, ominous gray November sky beyond the skeletal tree. Antique iron gas lamps glowed softly, activated by solenoids that had mistaken the wintry morning for the onset of dusk. At the top of the hill stood the Massachusetts State House, and at the bottom the traffic was heavy where Mount Vernon intersected Charles Street.
        Bernstein's