only_in_new_york

The vacancies of days fill in much the same way nights are emptied. The young man rode here on his bike and is leaving on foot and with a few metal splinters in his fingers from fingering the blinking ends of his lock. Walking is a different pace and he hears and sees edges where he is used to wheels. Other people stand on the side of streets and do things as though the windows are watching, and the young man thinks maybe they'll see him, too, the windows or the street people, and understand everything he's lost in the closing eyes of the lock in his hands. He thinks of the people he might call to report the bad news but can think of no one more deserving than a stranger.

A man on the train is offering his seat to people he would like to know, first a white woman with lace hems but after she declines he skips over the hunchback on her right, and in that moment every woman hangs, and the young man shakes his head because he would not have the will to ignore the ugly girls. He shakes and mumbles and looks up, catches one of them holding his pole and holds her eyes because the book told him to try everyday something that scares him and she does not move and finally he raises the lock knotted in the middle with false combination and drapes the open ends around her neck and says, "If it makes you feel better."

He steps off the train and a couple dances on the sidewalk to a laptop on a trash lid, and the sound disappears around corners as he walks into the draining of evening.


a_a