Midnight in Tabis

Her Tabis were in the mood to be noticed, leaving their split mark behind with every step. Two neat hoofprints stamped into the glittery grit of the sidewalk, like punctuation marks no one else knows how to type.

She’s just left a party she stayed at too long and is walking home because the weather’s too perfect to waste on a cab. The Tabis click softly, a metronome for the streetlights.

Outside a late-night florist, she stops to smell something she can’t name. Behind her, the shop owner steps out to sweep and pauses, looking down. “Goat tracks?” he asks. She laughs and keeps walking.

Half a block later, she notices another set of hoofprints crossing her path, fresher, moving in the opposite direction. She smiles, because of course there’s another.

She ducks into a 24-hour bodega for a glass bottle of strawberry sparkling water she won’t open until morning. The shop owner bags it without a word, but glances once at her feet before looking away. She’s used to it. Tabis have that effect. They make people think in questions they don’t want to say out loud.

She cuts through a plaza where a group of skaters nod at her in approval. They don’t know what Tabis are, but they know style when they see it. The hoofprints glow faintly in the lamplight as she moves on, heading toward a diner that never closes.

Inside, she orders fries and eats them slowly, knowing the prints she left outside are cooling in the night air, waiting for someone curious enough to follow them.

When she finally gets up to leave, the waitress glances at her feet. “You’re the one leaving those marks?”

She just smiles. “Only after dark.”