Drinking alone in November

He drank alone at the bar on Krenz Street, in the corner where the window met the wall, and watched the rain do the thing rain does in November, which is everything and nothing at the same time. The street was empty. The street had been empty for an hour. The man four stools away was reading a paperback whose cover he had bent back so the title did not show, which meant either he was reading something he did not want a stranger to know he was reading, or he had bent it back for some other reason that was his own and not anyone's business.

The bartender refilled the glass without being asked. The bartender did not say anything, which was the highest form of service the bartender could perform, and they both knew it.

He thought about the woman, briefly, and then stopped thinking about her, the way you stop thinking about a sound when you decide it is not worth turning your head toward. The not-thinking was its own activity. It required attention. He paid the attention.

The rain went on. The bartender refilled. The man with the paperback turned a page. The window held the street the way a window holds anything, which is to say: without holding it at all, only standing between him and it, transparent and patient and made of something harder than him.