“Truth’s not a bad thing,” Bronca says. Time to call this heifer out, so Bronca can stop feeling the little hairs tingle on her skin. “I’ve always thought it best to quit fucking around and just say what you mean.”
“Exactly!” says the woman, almost proudly. “This doesn’t have to be hard. If I could change your nature, make you less harmful, I would! I like your kind. But you’re all so inflexible, and dangerous in your innocence. And none of you are likely to volunteer for genocide—which I suppose I can understand. Neither would I, in your shoes.”
She pauses to sigh while Bronca thinks, Wait, what did she just say?
“But wouldn’t you like to still be alive, when the end comes? You, and that sweet son of yours, and your grandchild-to-be. I’ll even throw in your exes—the still-alive ones, I mean. Wouldn’t you like this little, um, place of yours here to still be standing when all else has been flattened into nothingness?” Bronca bristles in mingled outrage and confusion, but the woman in the stall continues, oblivious or uncaring. “I can make that happen. Help you, help me.”
Bronca has never, ever responded well to threats. Not even when everything about this situation, everything about this invisible woman, has her so unnerved that she’s broken out in gooseflesh. But this ain’t her first rodeo. She knows better than to show weakness.
“I think I’d like you to come out here and say that to my face,” she snaps.
There is a startled pause. Then the woman in the stall laughs. It’s not a giggle this time. This is a full-on, rich, rolling belly laugh, though with a scratchy edge that makes it less than pleasant to listen to. It goes on insultingly long, too, and finishes with “Oh, my! Oh, honey. No. It’s been a long day, and this shape is such a pain. I’ve had to step into my parlor, so to speak, to rest. So trust me… you don’t want me to open that door right now.”
“Yeah, I really fucking do,” Bronca snaps. “You gonna sit in a goddamn toilet and threaten me and mine?” It’s bluster. She’s sick with fear, even though fear usually pisses her off, makes her even more ready to fight. Now, though, every instinct is a-jangle with warning that somehow she isn’t ready for this. She can’t let this chick get away with threatening her… but she also doesn’t want to see what’s inside that bathroom stall.
“It isn’t a threat,” says Stall Woman. And suddenly, her voice is different. Less pleasant. Less husky, more… hollow. Like she’s outside the stall somehow, speaking from much farther away. Like the stall is not a tiny cubicle but a vast, vaulted space; her voice echoes off surfaces that should not be in there with the toilet and the tampon box. And she’s not smiling anymore, this unseen woman within a South Bronx bathroom stall; oh no. Bronca can practically hear the words being gritted through teeth.
“Consider it advice. Yes, advice, useful advice to counter your useless innocence. You willlll see things in these next few days, understand.” Almost electronic, that extended word. Like the stutter of an audio file that’s corrupted or otherwise incompatible with whatever system it’s trying to run on. “Fresh things, unique thiiiings! When you d-d-do, remember this conversation, would you? Remember that I offerrred you a chance to live, and you ssssspurned it. I held out my hand and you b-b-burned it. And when your grandchild lies torn from its m-m-mother’s belly, split and spilt upon the ground like so much garbage truck falloff—”
Bronca clenches her fists. “Oh, that’s fucking it—”
And in that moment, something ripples through the room.
Bronca starts, looking around in momentary distraction from Stall Woman. That ripple felt like an earthquake, or the subway having a bad day, but nothing’s rattling and the closest subway line runs three blocks away. Bronca hasn’t moved, and yet she feels like she has. Inside.
Stall Woman is still jabbering, her voice growing louder and faster with every word. But somehow, Stall Woman becomes unimportant. There is a stretching… a snapping-into, like a puzzle piece finding its place. A becoming. And all at once Bronca is different. Bigger than herself.
Out of nowhere Bronca finds herself remembering a day from her childhood. She’d stolen—borrowed—her father’s steel-toed construction worker boots so that she could walk through a brickyard on her way to do errands. The brickyard was full of rubble from a building demolished so long ago that it had sprouted flowers and ivy, but she’d decided to cut through it to avoid some of the neighborhood boys, whose catcalling and attempts to follow her had lately shifted from speculation into an active hunt. There had been one man (they were all grown men, and she all of eleven years old; her low opinion of men is so well earned) who moonlighted as a security guard, and who’d been especially persistent. Rumor had it that he’d washed out of being a cop somehow; something involving improper behavior with an underage witness. Rumor also had it that he liked Hispanic girls, and nobody around the Bronx could keep it straight that Bronca was something else.
So when she’d seen this man step out of the crumbling entryway of an old building shell, with a smirk on his lips and his hand prominently resting on the handle of his gun, she’d felt like she does now, fiftyish years later in an art center bathroom. She’d felt bigger. Beyond fear or anger. She’d gone to the doorway, of course. Then she grabbed its sides to brace herself, and kicked in his knee. He’d spent three months in traction, claiming he’d slipped on a brick, and never messed with her again. Six years later, having bought her own pair of steel-toed boots, Bronca had done the same thing to a police informant at Stonewall—another time she’d been part of something bigger.
Bigger. As big as the whole goddamn borough.
Stall Woman’s voice abruptly cuts off its mad rant, midsentence. Then she blurts, with palpable petulance, “Oh, not you, too.”
“Eat a bag of dicks,” Bronca says. Veneza taught her that one. Then Bronca moves forward with a purpose, with her fists clenched and a grin on her lips because in spite of herself she’s always loved a good rumble, even if it’s the twenty-first century and nobody calls it a rumble anymore. Even if she’s gotten old and “respectable.” She is still Bronca from the brickyards, Bronca the scourge of Stonewall, Bronca who faced down armed police alongside her brothers and sisters in AIM. It’s a kind of dance, see? Every battle is a dance. She was always a good dancer at the pow-wows, and these days? The steel-toed boots dwell permanently in her soul.
As she advances on the bathroom stall, its latch clacks and starts to swing open. There is only white around the edges of it—not light but white, and in the most fleeting of instants, Bronca glimpses a sliver of a room. It has a white floor, and in the distance is an indistinct geometric shape that seems to be… pulsing irregularly? What confuses Bronca more, however, is that the strange shape is at least twenty feet away. As if the stall is not a stall, but a tunnel, burrowed into the plumbing and lathing and somehow terminating elsewhere, because Bronca knows there’s no space like that in or outside of the Bronx Art Center.
But before the door can swing open by more than a few inches, and before Bronca can catch more than a fleeting glimpse of something that her mind warns against even thinking about further, Bronca braces her hand on the nearby tile wall, lifts a foot, and kicks the fucking door in.