In my ears, Pet Shop Boys are covering “Girls and Boys” made popular by Blur. Catchy gender roles fucking! Anyway, I’m walking up the back end stairs at the Lawrence subway stop and I’m approaching the last set of stairs that lead up into the beayootiful spring morning sun. A man with a leather bag is descending to my left but I barely notice him, because Neil Tennant is telling me there are boys who do boys who do girls who do boys etc.

I lift my foot to start going up the stairs–

POP

Descending man and I stop suddenly. The sound is like a retarded gunshot. We’re sprayed with a milky substance up to our knees. Our eyes are wide and we’re both in a “holyfuckwhatwasthatterrorists?!?” stance – fight or flight, basically. After the shock we both look around to asses what just happened. A bottle of some sort had fallen from his bag and had exploded in a shower of glass and milk (-like substance?).

“Holy crap that scared me!” I say.

“Was that me?”

“That bottle of milk came from your bag!”

“I don’t have a bottle of milk in my bag!” Beat. “I do have a bottle in my bag…” He looks at his glass and milk sprayed leather attache case. It’s buckled but the leather flap at the top could allow for a Coke can sized bottle to fall out. What weirds me out is that he doesn’t look into his bag to see if the bottle is still there.

As if it jumped out somehow and he doesn’t want to admit it.

“Are you ok?” I ask and I look down at my bare legs (shorts day at the office). No damage.

“Yeah,” he says, still looking at his bag as if it was alive.

And then we stood there admiring the shatter radius. Both of us thinking How do we clean this up? Should we call someone to clean this up? Like good folks do.