Category: City Stories

Fire Escape

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Fire Escape

I want to tell you about the man standing
on the third floor fire escape, staring through
his round-rimmed glasses, through the window,
in at me.

I am waiting for him to jump.

What will his body be like after sliding
though through two floors of empty air?
Will they bury it or burn it?  His cousins
driving all-night from Utah to watch it happen,
then all night home again to tell
their families it was real.  Or will he lie,
sexy and limp with his arms out-stretched,
still alive, but like a just-crucified
version of himself?  Or, more awful still,
will he walk away, unscathed, leaving me
the only witness to his misery?

This abyss is too easily discussed, to weep
about the watery oatmeal our mothers made
when we were children, to speak so earnestly
about the holes in our socks and the wasted way
we tie our shoes each day.

We know we are not as deranged as we think we are.
We are not gods, and we are not humans.
Our sadness is artificial, but it is beautiful.
It is bits of broken mirror and spoons
bent sideways using just our minds.

We are not horses.
We are not heroes.
Our hair grows
0.3mm per day,
and still they say
we are dead inside.

Alarm

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The radio on your alarm switches on at 3am, unbeckoned.  The voice of a nighttime preacher speaking forgiveness onto dead waves.  It begins in your dreams, and only later do you realize his voice is not water spilling from a crack in a brick wall.  You bring your fingers to your face, listening to the voice, which is not fire, telling you you are loved by an empty sky.  He says it with such conviction to this all-night radio audience, drunks, insomniacs, suicides and one-hundred-million precious variations of the three.  Promises spilling through static the way sadness slowly slides from a broken heart.

 
You are aware of how it will sound in the morning, when you tell your co-workers how you became a Christian, how you must pray and be good, how those unwanted answers arrived feeling so solid against the black backdrop of your midnight bedroom.  
 
But that comes later.  Now, you are sitting up.  You are pulling the blankets from your bed, the clothes from your body.  You will wash away your sins in your apartment complex swimming pool closed for fall.
 
Your brain is chandelier glass with that nighttime preacher’s words, still whispering in the background, made of light.

Gladiolas

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 She ate sliced ham out of a zip-lock bag, standing beside me on the subway platform with her side-tilted hat showing she was all spunk and all seriousness, making me feel absurd to be holding these gladiolus and heading to the far west side of the city where my sweet friends with an Irish accent had just had a baby removed.  
 
This girl with her hat and her ham and I watched each other as the subway lights came crashing through the tunnel as though light could make a sound, and when the doors opened, the girl sat directly across from me.  Me on my way to see my friend without the baby and my hands felt so empty and so wrong to be holding those enormous gladiolus, half-a-dozen fabulous gladiolus that I almost gave to the girl with the hat because gladiolus, what a ridiculous thing to buy.

I was the City

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That clothes-pin couple, both over 80 and under 5 feet, they spoke about me in their made-up language, holding hands, pointing at things, walking down the street. He had a fanny-pack; she had a camera strung around her neck.

The do not walk sign was blinking my heartbeat and the driver in that car going past, blasting my favourite song, must have done so only because I asked him to.

 

The woman calling a cab was really calling my name, and when the street car driver asked me for my fare, I said, Don’t you know who I am?