Free Hot Poppies by Reggie Nadelson

meat markets. Glasses on her nose, the red hair stuck behind her ears, she was typing stuff into a laptop like she was competing in the Olympics. She glanced up and blew me a kiss.
    In her office, CNN was on a portable TV, the radio was playing and a guy I’d never met was leaning over her, gazing at the computer screen.
    I like watching Lily work, and I leaned against the wall while a stream of people flowed in and out of her office, yakking, laughing, asking her questions. Currently she was helping set up a talk show for one of the cable channels. With luck, she said, she’d get to host it for a few months. It was what she did, and she was good, on screen and behind the cameras. She could write like a dream, but freelancing was pot luck. Before I met her, she’d been a correspondent for a network for a while, but she couldn’t cut the corporate style. She was lousy at the politics, she admitted to me once. “I used to burst out laughing during the strategy sessions. I couldn’t keep a straight face when they wanted to do hard news about the possibility of angels. So I became the in-house wiseacre.”
    In the end, she had quit because she got scared, first in East Berlin back before the Wall came down, then in Colombia where she just missed getting blown up. Enough, she had said and came home.
    â€œYou want to eat something?” I said. But Lily shook her head, introduced me to the guy who leaned over her again and punched something into the computer, then disappeared.
    â€œWe’re heading for a total white-out,” Lily said. “We are trapped in some all-time awesome weather system, and there’s maybe another storm coming in after it. Sixty inches! More!! All the weather guys say so, Al Roker, Storm Field. Storm says it is mighty big.” She stretched her arms over her head. “You look a little wan, Artie, you OK? I missed you last night, doll.”
    â€œI’m fine,” I said. “Honest. I just needed to see you.” I wasn’t going to let some two-bit hoods with a spike screw up my life. The way you got a regular life was that you just let stuff be.
    â€œLily!” A skittish demanding voice summoned her from the hall.
    â€œGotta go,” she whispered. “Some of these guys you got to remind them to breathe. I’ll see you later. Meet me over at my place if you want,” she said and tossed me her keys.
    â€œMy cat is dead, OK? I got four more and they almost froze to death also, so gimme some space, Artie, OK. I’ll do what I can for you.” Eljay Koplin was next to nuts when I got up to his studio on Carmine Street. The place stank of cat, the shelves sagged under old camera stuff, but Eljay knew what he was doing. An orange cat, a nasty piece of work, slithered across my ankles.
    â€œI got a dead girl,” I said, but I knew, for Eljay, it didn’t equal a single hair on a cat’s ass.
    â€œLike I said, Artie, I’ll do what I can.” He turned over the picture of Pansy. “Not with this one. This one’s a Polaroid. I can’t do nothing with this one. This doesn’t leave any tracks,” he said and gave it back to me and turned to Rose’s picture which interested him. He shoved his glasses up on his forehead and perused it like Kuntsler in court reading evidence. “This is something else.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œSee the numbers on the back? Before this kind of system, if you had one print, it didn’t mean shit. It was impossible to track. This leaves tracks. These numbers, see, it’s a new system, Advanced Photographic System, they call it. APS. They all got it, Kodak, Fuji. It’s got a bunch of crucial identifiers. Time and date. Conditions under which it got taken. A lab ID number that would allow you to track it back to the individual lab that did the processing. A number of the film cassette. You can program this thing to print out Happy Birthday, if you want,