#73

On Sunday the men arrived in rusted vans filled with junk and crafts to sell. They laid sheets down on the Avenue of the Americas and lined up old George Foreman grills that promised mean leanness, shoes made from stiff and colorful plastics, carved wooden masks that were either screaming or crying or both. Nothing she needed but plenty to distract her as she made her way south, her dirty laundry rolled in a ball in a bag at her side.

Every table at every restaurant in the West Village performed a delicate balancing act as sweating bottles of white wine were shifted from center to edge and back to center all afternoon. She walked past the faces engaged in gossip and laughter and thought that one day, she would laugh again too.

She crossed the East River into Brooklyn and walked on concrete that had gone from forgettable to tragic in the short span of two weeks. For a moment, her feet stuck and her heart stopped. Then a friend appeared and pulled her out, guiding her South once again.

Strapping her dirty clothes into a basket, she biked clumsily and furiously from one corner of the borough to the other looking for a new home. Past street preachers and park magicians and graveyards and fruit stands, past places they had once been together and places she had never been before. Everything was loud and happening all at once. She tried to feel it and not feel it, just like the air which pushed against her face was soon behind her.

When she was almost finished, something took her by surprise. She was too exhausted to move out of the way. She was not walking or biking or in any kind of motion at all, and yet she was falling. She landed softly, though, her bag of dirty laundry still at her side. It remained there for the rest of the night. She forgot why she had brought it with her in the first place, but there it was all the same.

Making her way back to her not home, she stepped over the George Foreman grill that no one had bought. It would no doubt be there next week, waiting for the right time to be useful to someone.