He remembered kneeling on Davey’s chest, holding the rock over him and realizing that he didn’t know what to do next, taking Davey to their father.
Only Davey had struck him first. He’d only been restraining him, defending himself. Alan had hit Krishna first. “Nod if you understand, Krishna,” he said, and heard a note of pleading in his voice.
Krishna held still. Alan felt like an idiot, standing there, his neighbor laid out across the railing that divided their porches, the first cars of the day driving past and the first smells of bread and fish and hospital and pizza blending together there in the heart of the Market.
He let go and Krishna straightened up, his eyes downcast. For a second, Alan harbored a germ of hope that he’d bested Krishna and so scared him into leaving him alone.
Then Krishna looked up and met his eye. His face was blank, his eyes like brown marbles, heavy lidded, considering, not stoned at all anymore. Sizing Alan up, calculating the debt he’d just amassed, what it would take to pay it off.
He picked up Alan’s wine glass, and Alan saw that it wasn’t one of the cheapies he’d bought a couple dozen of for an art show once, but rather Irish crystal that he’d found at a flea market in Hamilton, a complete fluke and one of his all-time miracle thrift scores.
Krishna turned the glass one way and another in his hand, letting it catch the sunrise, bend the light around the smudgy fingerprints. He set it down then, on the railing, balancing it carefully.
He took one step back, then a second, so that he was almost at the door. They stared at each other and then he took one, two running steps, like a soccer player winding up for a penalty kick, and then he unwound, leg flying straight up, tip of his toe catching the wine glass so that it hurtled straight for Alan’s forehead, moving like a bullet.
Alan flinched and the glass hit the brick wall behind him, disintegrating into a mist of glass fragments that rained down on his hair, down his collar, across the side of his face, in his ear. Krishna ticked a one-fingered salute off his forehead, wheeled, and went back into his house.
The taste of blood was in Alan’s mouth. More blood coursed down his neck from a nick in his ear, and all around him on the porch, the glitter of crystal.