Free Top Ten by Ryne Douglas Pearson

The lobby, empty. The counter again, and Doris sliding a single stamp across the counter as she put some coins in the cash drawer. Michaelangelo turning away and...
    Ariel breathed hard and deep through the interruption as the sorting room and back lot were visited yet again. And then...
    ...there he was, at the counter, taking an envelope from inside his jacket. Ariel remembered this, but it hadn’t struck her until now—what was about to happen. The scenes cycled again. Back in the lobby Michaelangelo had a pen coming off the envelope. He’d written something on it. Addressing it, likely, since an address was all there was when his letters arrived at the Metropolitan Museum. Then...
    “Come on,” Ariel implored the cycle of images as counter, and sorting room, and back lot were spied once more. “Come on.”
    And again to the lobby, his hand coming back from the out of town mail slot, hovering for a moment as he became still...
    There. There is where it happens.
    Through the other spaces and back to the lobby. She looked quickly at her watch, noting the time. Then to Michaelangelo, standing there, his right hand hanging, floating, and then coming down slowly. More interruptions, then on him again, and his hand was at his side, and it was clenched. It was hard to tell from the quality of the image, but Ariel thought the newly made fist might be trembling.
    Anger. He was angry there. Hours before he was angry with Doris May–or angry about something in the presence of Doris May. And what was he angry about these many hours earlier?
    Ariel couldn’t jump into his mind, but she could her own, and oddly at this moment she thought there might be some symmetry between his reaction to the small square of paper he was staring at, and her own to one that she had just a few days before.
    She looked at her watch. One minute. The cycle repeated itself seven more times. He was still standing there, still staring at the bulletin, his fist now thumping gently against his leg. And another cycle, and ten more, and when he finally backed away from the table and the most wanted bulletin posted to the wall before it Ariel checked her watch and noted that he had been fixed in position for just under three minutes.
    “You weren’t angry at Doris,” Ariel said as she froze the image one last time, Michaelangelo’s dark and murky profile centered on the screen. “You weren’t angry at her at all.”
    *   *   *
    Glass? Glass? Was that glass?
    The questions interrupted a dream, one of her on a beach as a much younger woman with seven men servicing her every nasty need. Shut the imaginary visit to Deandra Waley’s own personal vision of nirvana down cold.
    Glass? Was that glass?
    The questions came from the rational part of herself. From that little space inside one’s brain where a light is always left on...just in case. Left on so that things out of the ordinary might register. Might raise alarm. Might rouse.
    Things like the sound of breaking glass.
    “Glass,” she whispered sleepily, and hefted herself up to her elbows. She blinked at the darkness. The darkness in her bedroom. The darkness beyond its open door. Nothing. Not a thing to see.
    So she listened. Had she heard glass? Breaking glass? Or...
    ...or had it just been part of the dream. Waves crashing on that beach. Or her rattled screams of ecstasy, baby, yesssss.
    Nothing , she thought, listening and looking. Not a damn thing. That pissed her off to no end.
    “Come back to me babies,” she said softly, and fell into her pillows. “Come back and do me some more.”
    She fidgeted around for a moment, wanting sleep to take her back down to that dream, but the sandman was a little too slow in his doings right then, so she thought she might help him along a little. Give him a hint of where he left off.
    “Oh, yesss, baby, yesss,” she whispered to herself and took a long pillow from beneath her head and worked it under the covers, spreading her legs and pulling her