A Night Out

You'll never know what you can learn about a person unless you go out and talk to them.

Photo taken by me in Toronto in May, 2026.

Scanning the room, disappointed to see a man seated across from every woman inside, Jeremy sighed before walking over to the bar.

He sat on a stool, ordered a drink, and turned back around, hoping to spot a woman not yet claimed by another man, but to no avail. When the drink arrived, Jeremy paid, tipped generously, grabbed the glass, sniffed the contents, and took a sip. Warming his stomach, the alcohol calmed his disappointment.

With his drink half empty, debating if he wanted to order another one, wondering if there was even a point, he rested the glass on the bar counter and stared at it, until his peripheral vision was disturbed by an attractive woman who sat on the stool next to him.

As she was comfortably positioning herself on the stool, Jeremy looked around, expecting a man to follow and sit beside her, but when no such man arrived, he realized she had come alone.

The woman ordered a drink the bartender dutifully made and gave her, paid, closed her eyes, took a sip, opened her eyes, turned toward Jeremy, and said hello.

Jeremy turned toward the woman, who was looking right at him, smiling.

“Hello,” he replied.

“My name is Michelle.”

“I’m Jeremy.”

After taking another sip of her drink, and putting it back down on the bar counter, she said, “I haven’t been here for a long time.”

“This is the first time I’ve been here,” Jeremy said, “but some friends of mine said it was a nice place.”

Michelle nodded.

“So why the long delay between the last time you came here and now?” he said.

“I was counting.”

“Counting?”

“Yes.”

“For work?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“Pleasure,” she replied.

“And how long were you counting?”

Michelle looked up at the ceiling, performing what Jeremy believed to be calculations in her head, before returning her attention to him and replying, “One year, one month, one week, and six days.”

Believing she was playing a joke, Jeremy started to laugh, but when he noticed she was only nervously grinning, he stopped, and said, “I think you know what I’m going to ask next.”

“You want to know why I was counting for so long.”

Jeremy nodded.

“That’s how long it took to count to twenty-five million.”

Jeremy looked around, wondering if a practical joke was being played on him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I must be freaking you out.”

She picked up her glass, and started drinking rapidly letting Jeremy know that as soon as the glass was emptied she would get up and walk away. Knowing he only had a few seconds, he said, “No, no, you’re not freaking me out at all. It’s just not the typical thing you hear from somebody, in a bar, especially from a woman as beautiful as you.”

She stopped drinking, with only a few drops left in the glass.

“You think I’m beautiful?” she said.

“Yes,” Jeremy replied, “more beautiful than any of the other women here.”

“Would you like to know more about my counting?”

He wasn’t all that interested in the counting, but she was too pretty to let go, so he said yes.

She finished what was left in the glass, ordered another drink, received it, paid, took a sip, put the glass down, and said, “I was very stressed out over some good news I received, great news actually, and everything started moving so fast. I was overwhelmed.”

“What was the news?” Jeremy asked.

“It’s not important,” she replied. “Anyway, my mind was all over the place, so to calm myself, I sat down and started counting. I don’t know why. I’ve never done that before. But that’s what I did.”

“And then what?” Jeremy said.

“It didn’t take long before the numbers got larger and more complicated, and the more I was concentrating on them, the less I was concentrating on the stress. Soon, all I could concentrate on was the count, especially after I passed ten-thousand.”

“How long did that take?”

Looking up again, doing the calculations in her head, she replied, “Just under three hours.”

“Impressive,” Jeremy said.

“By the time I reached forty-four thousand, three-hundred and twenty-two, I was too tired to keep track of the count, so I wrote the number down on a piece of paper, and went to bed.”

“Why did you write the number down?”

“I was proud of it,” she replied. “That’s probably why I still remember it today. I thought it would be something I could look back on.”

“So what happened when you woke up?”

“All of the stress I had before I started counting came back, even more intensely, as if it was angry at me for not paying attention to it before.”

“So what did you do?” Jeremy asked.

“I rolled over in my bed, saw the paper with the number on it, and figured if it worked before, it might work again. So I picked up from where I left off, and ended up counting the entire day right up until I fell asleep later that night. I reached over ninety-thousand. I can’t remember the exact number, but it was definitely over ninety. And when I woke up the next morning I starting counting again, picking up from the number I wrote down before going to sleep the night before, and I just kept doing that, over and over.”

“So day after day, all you did was count?”

Michelle laughed, took a sip from her drink, and said, “No, of course not. I showered. I ate. I used the washroom. I exercised. I slept. All while maintaining the count. I would go grocery shopping, get my hair cut, things like that, too, all while maintaining the count.”

Unsure if what she was describing was impressive or crazy, Jeremy nonetheless complimented her ability to do it.

Michelle smiled back, thanked him for the compliment, and continued.

“But there was a lot of things I didn’t do, couldn’t do, because of the count.”

“Like what?”

“I couldn’t talk to other people. I couldn’t watch television. I couldn’t use the computer. I couldn’t even turn on my cell phone.”

“Why not?”

“It was too distracting,” she replied. “On the third day, after I passed one-hundred thousand, I turned on the television. I remember there was a commercial on, something about life insurance, and after just a few seconds, I started to feel all tense as I was trying to focus on both the commercial and the count. So I turned the TV off, and as soon as I did, the tension disappeared.”

“So what made you keep counting?”

“I liked how I felt when I was doing it, so I figured why stop?”

Jeremy nodded, astounded at how logical her reasoning was.

“As the days turned to weeks, and the weeks turned to months, I kept setting a new goal. At first it was five-hundred thousand, then a million, then two, then three, then ten million, and the whole time I kept telling myself that the moment I stopped enjoying it, I would stop, but I kept enjoying it, and the stress stayed away.”

“But you eventually did stop, though,” Jeremy said. “So what made you stop enjoying it?”

Michelle sipped her drink, put the glass down, and said, “I thought about counting to a billion, but it didn’t take me long to realize that was impossible. So I scaled it down to one-hundred million, but that would have meant at least another year or more. So I went down to fifty million, and that’s when I realized it was time to stop: the moment I was not only planning for the finish line, but was trying to draw it closer.”

Jeremy took another sip of his drink, smiled, and said, “So just to recap, you were stressed out one day, over great news that you still haven’t told me about, started counting, realized it got rid of the stress, and ended up doing it for over a year?”

Michelle smiled and nodded.

“That is the most interesting thing anybody has ever told me,” he said.

“Thank you,” she replied.

“So what did you do when you finally reached twenty-five million?”

Michelle grabbed her drink, took a long sip, draining the glass completely, put the glass down, and replied, “I went out for a couple of drinks.”

Getting up from her stool, Michelle walked over to Jeremy, leaned in, kissed him on the cheek, turned, and started to walk away.

“Wait,” Jeremy said, “so you just finished counting today?”

Without answering, Michelle kept on walking. Watching the distance between him and her growing with every step she took, Jeremy gulped what was left of his drink, put the glass down, hopped off the stool, and bounded after her.

“You know,” Jeremy said, once he caught up with her, “I once wrote out the entire dictionary.”

Michelle smiled, and replied, “I’d love to hear about it.”

Together, they walked out of the bar and caught a cab.

Originally published by the Spadina Literary Review in April of 2017.

You can read the original version of the story here:

https://spadinaliteraryreviewarchive.com/VIN/SR18-Fic-04.html