Friday

Hannah's hands shook as she read the newspaper. Bert Cummings was dead. She read and reread the obituary trying to find some solace in the lines, but soon closed her eyes too upset to read anymore. There wasn't a picture of him and no mention of survivors. She wondered if was there anyone who cared that he was gone as images of him—well at least her version of him— dying alone flooded her consciousness.

She scanned the page for something to distract her; to find another bit of news and another name.

Ophelia Maltese. At least this one had a face and hopefully, had lived a good, long life. She had left behind children and grandchildren, so perhaps happiness had been part of her daily landscape. Or perhaps her children and grandchildren had been ungrateful and never visited or she had been abusive and neglectful and pushed them all away.

What were her dreams? Had she been lucky enough to achieve some of them or had she been forced to let them go and settle for a diet of soulless starvation.

Another paragraph, another name, another face.

Maxwell Porter killed in a car accident. He was only seventeen.

Such waste, she thought, such terrible waste. Such promise lost.

What about his parents? Did they have other children or were all their hopes placed solely upon their now deceased child?

Unable to contain the weight of what she was reading Hannah let the newspaper drop from her hands.

It all ends here, she thought. A whole life contained in a tiny paragraph announcing that you are gone, whom you've left behind, how you've died and when those who wished to mourn you, if there were any, could come to say goodbye. A whole life ignored, even now, since most people didn’t take the time to read obituaries.

Hannah sighed while reaching for the cup of coffee she'd allowed to grow cold. Its bitter chill didn't upset her. No warmth to be had today, she thought while taking a sip and looking at the lists of names and faces.

The headlines would wait until later. It was the dead who woke her every morning, and forced her to rub the sleep from her eyes. Then she would walk down the stairs and find them, waiting. Every day there was a new set of introductions and farewells. Every day the realization that someday she would join them, and all this before dressing, eating or running to catch the bus.

Hannah was captivated by them and their constant endless march. There hadn’t been a time when this wasn’t part of her normal routine as the memory of her younger self sitting on her grandmother’s lap while she did the very same thing reflected back from her now empty coffee cup.

Grandma always said that this may have been the only time that some of these people ever got their name in the newspaper or received a kindness or even a flower. Hannah scanned her apartment saddened by the graveness of the room before returning to read and then rush out the door to face the bitter slap of morning air.

It wasn't until she found herself ensconced behind the same desk, in the same office that had become her little corner of obscurity for almost twenty years, that it became too much. Her life meant nothing to anyone except her. She, like so many others, was an easily replaceable thing. It would take no time for someone else to fill up the space she occupied consuming everything but her shadow. That she would take with her until even it dispersed into nothingness.

Hannah heard her heart beating and began to imagine what it would be like when she joined the list of names and dates of death. To comfort herself, she silently repeated some of the names of the morning dead into the air, Victor Newbury, Alice Randall, Stephanie Cress. They were real people, not abstract realities and now they were gone. She wondered if someday someone would see her name and wonder about her life, her dreams or only see her as a nameless face in an ongoing crowd.

She returned to the security of work until the time came to leave for the day. She knew that nothing awaited her at home but the certainty of sleep, and the knowledge that the morning paper would come. Even after she'd moved or died or simply faded out of sight, there would be an endless parade of names eternally marching across her doorstep on their way to oblivion.

On the way home she stopped at a florist shop and bought herself a bouquet of roses.

It didn’t matter what they cost, she told herself, as the clerk took her credit card. I want my flowers now when I can see them. She held the bouquet in her arms like a child and inhaled their scent as the petals brushed against her cheek. It felt good. This moment felt good. There was hope in it and it lingered with her even after she returned to the heat of the late summer day and the inevitability that another list of names was currently being filled and would await her tomorrow.

Saturday

Her hands, wet and red from the harshness of detergent and despair, grasp the windowsill as she leans against the sink straining to see the sun. Stacks of the unwashed and washed surround her in the darkened scullery that has become more a second home, besides the one where she closes tear-swollen eyes as the clock ticks out the intervals between breakfast, lunch, lovin’ her man Jake and dinner.

The outside world rushes by in a stream of streetcars and soup kitchens.

“I’m too tired to sleep anyways,” she whispers to the few viewable peaks of sunlight streaming through the basement window that she must strain her neck to see. “Tomorrow,” she whispers, “you’ll still be free and I’ll still be here.”

Then she lowers her head and looks at the remnants of half-eaten meals scraped into vomitus clumps before washing them down the exposed and slimy, wet hole of the sink.

“Is this how I’m supposed to spend my life?” she says to the muck and mush. “Ain’t I never gonna get nuthin’ better than this?”

She returns to the stacks of dishes resuming her work as if she’s under a somnambulist’s spell like the girl in the flick Jake took her to see last week. While looking at the soapy water and silverware, the image of the soiled mattress that she knows Jake’s still passed out on bubbles and bursts amid the clinking and clanking of pots, pans and a pair of angry feet suddenly standing behind her.

“Hurry up with your work gal, we got customers to feed!”

“Yessir,” she says, listening to the feet stomp away.

“I wonder what time he’ll get up today, if he gets up at all,” she mouths to the reflection of the bruised face shining back at her from the bottom of an old iron pan. “I’m sure he’d find something if he looked today. Man like him can do anything. Anything he sets his mind to.”

“Talkin’ to yourself again I see,” says the owner of the angry feet, his face as red as her hands, though his coloring doesn’t result from a hard day’s work, but his disposition.

“Sorry,” she says, while continuing mechanically to wash plate after plate and trying to close her mind as tightly as her eyes, as his hot, fetid breath reaches through her hair, around her neck, brushing against her breasts. His hands will follow, painfully squeezing her nipples so tightly that a plate slips out of her grip and smashes to the floor.

“I’ll have to dock you for that, Sally,” he says, pulling up her dress and exposing the rawness of her to the hot, greasy air of the scullery, “unless you want to take it out in trade.”

She doesn’t struggle because this is as commonplace as what she washes down the drain. It will occur in ugliness and she will wash away. Everyday plays out the same sick scene. And every day he will pay her, but not before reminding her that he is and always will be the boss, and she will always be exactly where she is and what she is.

Hours later, when the sun begins to descend into pavement, she walks home with the heavy stench of him still running through her like ooze. An army of tears cut themselves free through the slits of her still-swollen eyes.

“Better not cry,” she hears Jake say, “Or I’ll give you a reason to cry.”

She wipes away every tear as her hopes return like playground bullies to taunt her.

“Maybe Jake got up today and found work at the docks and I won’t have to go back to that nasty kitchen and that nasty man. Then I can just stay home and just take in washin’ and sewin’ to make extra money and I’ll be free to enjoy the sun whenever I want to.”

When she enters her apartment, the sound of his snoring slaps all hope to the floor in a tangled heap. She could get angry now and kick him out. She could decide that life would be better without him because she might actually have a chance for something more if he wasn’t knocking her and her dreams down. But instead, she goes from window to window, closing each curtain, without opening her eyes to see the last peaks of sunlight slowly dying.

212 South Crouse Avenue

Some people swore that the house was haunted. But the sounds coming from within were not the voices of those afflicted by the torments of the afterlife nor were they the voices of those afflicted by the torments of their current lives. The house itself sighed during the darker moments of the day from the weight of age and old memories.

Built in 1899, it had seen and been home to many people, but until the day that she had come with her husband, a dentist, it hadn’t known joy. From the moment her foot touched the bottom step to its front porch, they had fallen in love. She, with its ornamental caramel-colored hand carved wood features and it with every aspect of her. From then on she spent hours decorating its walls and sweeping its floors, while it watched her every move, intoxicated by whiffs of her strawberry-scented perfume.

They had built a happy life together and for the first time since its construction, the house felt it had finally found its reason for being. Before then it endured years of being repeatedly inhabited and abandoned like a great wooden whore, until it learned to close itself off from each new invader becoming a hollow shell. Now she was there and it felt reborn as if it had just received its first fresh coat of paint.

However, sometimes the husband would take her away for as long as week to a place called “Florida” leaving it standing alone in the winter cold, howling out its sorrow. When she would return, and run up its walk with her arms full of souvenirs exclaiming, “It’s so good to be home,” the house would settle and sigh in satisfaction. They lived this way for years and the house came to accept these yearly “vacations,” mourning her loss and trumpeting her return. One year the husband suggested that they move to accommodate his growing practice, but happily the wife refused to be wrestled from her home, and it was decided that he commute instead and come home on the weekends when necessary.

The house began to hate the husband after that, and only tolerated his presence for her sake. When he eventually died, the house—indifferent to the dead man—overjoyed that she was finally exclusively its own, concocted ways to keep her content such as baiting her to follow the sounds of a rattling window or a thump in the attic. However, her grief lasted for some time, so it collected each of her teardrops that trickled to the floor as treasures.

Time passed and they grew old together spending hours quietly listening to musical recordings on the Victrola until the morning she didn’t wake up and everything from the root cellar to the rooftop died. After trying to clamp its doors shut and having them forced open, the house stood agape and alone when they’d taken her body away.

Others had come and gone since then. They called themselves “families,” but the house never accepted them and moaned its implicit discontent to each new resident. Now its new “family” left shards of broken glass on its floors amid the sounds of screams and sirens. Its only joy came from revisiting its former happiness and the woman it had loved. But she was forever removed from it and there was nothing to wait for except the inevitability of its own destruction. It revisited their last happy day together and the way the sun had caused her silver hair to shine. Nothing was ever the same again after that.

Right Before - A Poem for 9/11

Right before....

The first plane hit
It was 8:45 a.m.
They were thinking
Laughing
Working
Eating
Building
Communicating
Remembering
Walking
Going to the bathroom
Checking the clock
Getting to work late
Wondering how their children were doing at school
Thinking about who they'd like to have lunch with
Thinking about the dinner they'd have that night
Digesting their breakfast
Trying to meet a deadline
Looking out the window
Making a deal
Scratching their knee
Licking an envelope
Dictating a message
Checking over their schedule for the day
Making a doctor's appointment
Dealing with a grumpy boss
Listening to office gossip
Flexing their toes
Hiring
Firing
Planning their next vacation
Wondering how many sick days they have left for the year
Biting their lip
Thinking about their husband's/wife's/children's smile
Feeling overwhelmed
Stressed
Exhausted from lack of sleep
Exhausted from too much sleep
Wondering if they/their spouse/mate/lover/children were coming down with a cold
Worrying about their job
Worrying that their boss didn't like their last report
Dialing a phone
Staring blankly at a wall
Ready for the weekend even though it's only Tuesday
Taking this day for granted as they/you/me/us had done so many times before
Right before
In a split second of nothingness
Everything was as it had always been
As it would/should/could always be
Until the minute hand struck 8:46 a.m.

Cherokee

Life isn’t fair. It just isn’t fair, he’d murmured the first time he’d seen her. She was standing on the corner of West 59^th Street during the heaviest rainfall the city was to suffer that year. She stood in a rainbow puddle of dripping make-up, reflected storm clouds and garbage. He wanted her to stay there so he could continue to take in the ugly pattern of her dress that she tried to wring dry without awareness or care that she exposed her womanhood to the world, her dangling earrings and the way she peered into every car that passed by.

Such a delicious treat he thought as a police officer ordered her to leave while she defiantly yelled back at him. Everything in the world stopped just then; the ultimate E.F. Hutton moment as she, cheaply and wantonly majestic stood toe-to-toe with Johnny Law. It didn’t last long before she spit out her gum and disappeared down the steps of the subway to the dry darkness of the underground hiss of trains, street ministers and homeless vets asking for food.

He watched her standing among the scenery of the city’s throwaways and tried to take in as much of her as he could so that he could recall every curve and gesture before the subway came and took her away. Then a switched flipped somewhere and he descended into the depths of the subway station. He hadn’t felt himself move from where he’d originally stood to follow her. His mind and body had comingled and given birth to a new version of his former self that trumped every aspect of who he’d been before he’d seen her. Gone was the man who worked every day in a cubicle who went home to the waiting arms of an indifferent wife and nondescript children.

There was no other option. He had to follow her or risk never seeing her again. The world was too large and people too easily lost. He could spend the rest of his life searching and never find her again and then he would be lost too. The faces of his family faded from the photograph he kept in his mind as he journeyed down, down, down to where she was. There was nothing but her now. Though she hadn’t seen him, he knew that she willed him into this place of forgetting.

The scent of stale urine filled his nostrils as he paid the toll and stood on the platform behind her. The heels of her feet were red, no doubt from standing too long on the impossibly high heels she wore. Instantly the image of him rubbing her feet filled his vision. He would give her comfort. He would protect her from the outside world and its cruelty, and it would give him pleasure to do so. She might fight him a bit at first, but he would find a way to convince her that he meant no harm. But surely she knew that already. She must know it. She was the one who was in control.

Subway doors opened and closed as shades of homeward bound citizens emptied and filled the car to slide through the intestinal tunnels of the city. People came and went; life began and ended as he stood beside her. He didn’t try to speak, that would come later. For now, he was content to share her air as she exhaled exasperated huffs of wet tiredness, soaked resentment and street grime anger.

She exited the subway to one of the edgier areas of the city and he followed, but this time he made sure that he was far enough away that she didn’t know he was there.

The rain had temporarily retreated during their travels, replaced by a cloudy half-darkness that allowed their shadows to touch as he narrowed the space between them.

“You want something?” she asked him suddenly jarring him out of his reverie.

He couldn’t speak. There were no words. There was nothing but her precious voice and the echoes of sex screams and dust-covered prayers reverberating within him.

“Sorry I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I can take care of myself,” she said softening.

“What is your name?”

“My friends call me Cherokee cuz I look Indian, I guess.”

Calmness filled all the places inside him that nothing else could as he burst forward and grabbed her knocking them both to the ground. Then the warm throbbing ooze of finally realized dreams squelched out every sound in the world until he awoke standing in the place where he’d originally seen her. This was how it had to be. He was First Man and She First woman, and she had been his blessing and his curse. Now he was bound to repeat this moment with whomever she sent to play her part until nothing was left but eternity.

Jellyfish

He was the embodiment of the word “meticulous” and had been that way since he’d evacuated the womb, it not being up to his standard of cleanliness. His early days evaporated amidst tears of disgust about soiled linen, clip-on ties and the general lack of proper hygiene of the woman who forced him to suckle her. Thankfully things improved with time so that she became someone he learned to tolerate and finally adore.

She’d won him over so that he forgot her former sloppiness by teaching him the remedies for every kind of manmade stain. Mother was everything to him and he was her precious boy. Even after the departure of days spent enduring childhood taunts, collegiate stares and corporate whisperings, she had been his queen, and he had taken care of her until the day when all of her sentimental aspects had disappeared into dust.

Walking home had lost some of its purpose after that. Even so, there was always something to distract him, some odd thing out of place, some homeless person to scowl at or kick, though touching them made him feel unclean and full of self-disgust.

He cast stares made of stones, which he hurled with equal disdain at unfashionable patrons in corner cafes and fine dining establishments where he sought refuge from the unsightliness of city streets. But there was no escape because ugliness followed him like a shadow. Now he’d engineered a way to combat it and would work out his schemes until the world surrendered to his will. Someday, he surmised, people would rally to him and willingly stay by his side until he’d purified them with fire.

*************

He scanned the room surveying every imperfection and seething at each newfound discovery. A piece of lint glared up at him from an Oriental rug, but he did not attempt to retrieve it knowing that others watched his every move. He would focus on other things for now, like the jellyfish at the city aquarium that always transfixed him in their clean watery world. These floated by even as the lint on the rug haunted him. He closed his eyes as multitudes of them cascaded before him until the scent of ancient perfume summoned him back from the depths to the now.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“That pie I had yesterday was quite delicious. It almost tasted homemade. Just like my momma used to make…”

“Fine, you want pie. Any particular flavor or do you want me to surprise you?”

“Whatever you suggest. I trust you completely.”

A lady at another booth peered at him over her menu as he adjusted one of his cufflinks. He looked out the window of the restaurant watching the jellyfish and other sea life fill up the view. Ugliness disappeared into luminescence until nothing remained to remind him of unclean places or people except the sound of crying that reverberated into silence from high flying fish and sea creatures, leaving nothing for cadaver dogs to find.

Panting Dogs Retreat

(or a day in the life of a city on a hot summer day in three hundred words)

Perspiration drips causing cheap make-up to form odd lines on the unsuspecting faces of social climbers. Shadows tease of cooler air in the humid thickened pudding of deserted summer streets. Puddles bring relief to children who splash and play without care of consequences. Old black women resemble flocks of flapping birds as they fan themselves in church pews and sing hymns about Jesus. Later they’ll stand before hot stoves with their hands on their hips to sigh and sweat over Sunday dinner while hydrants burst and children play.

Hot-headed cabdrivers maneuver through civilians who crowd empty and refill the foot plodded oil-streaked pavement. Drug dealers deal from corners and crack houses, secreting their stash to those who slobber along transfixed. Lemonade glasses and rocking chair swings decorate the imaginations of those who sit crowded on stoops, dreaming of ease. Whirring fans blow hot. The ice cream truck chasing of children results in melted sticky sweet smiles. Scream-laugh playground wars compete with horns, scolding mothers and the barking of panting dogs seeking retreat from thirst. Mothers call their children to come in to eat, while fathers from various economic brackets chug back beers, sit in offices or haul trash. Roaches lurk with hidden agendas in darkness.

Garbage reeks of better days and the decaying of sweetness. Storefronts offer promises whispered by Chanel, Jimmy Choo, Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin’s red-soled stilettos that only a select few can hear as panhandlers and homeless vets beg for dollar signs. Wealthy matrons hire others to walk their dogs that wear diamond studded collars, while others feel lucky to find a cardboard box in a bit of shade to rest. This balletic litter of events, consisting of births, deaths and what feels desperately important, dances oddly in the heaviness of humidity like billowing newspapers floating.

Wednesday

He had left before she’d stirred that morning, not even daring to jostle her sleeping form. It was comforting to think of her sleeping there, warmly nestled on the bed as he walked out of the warm apartment into the frost and cold of the street. The soft crunch of his footsteps on virgin snow made him remember how it had been when she used to join him on his daily jaunts.

He journeyed through the crowded lonely streets of the city, passing people whose eyes never met his as he said “hello,” to each of them with a slight tip of his hat. He didn’t care that to them he was a strange old man and just another one of the city's oddities that they purposely ignored. He knew what their lives were. He knew that they spent years going from threshold to threshold in unhappy pursuit of corner offices and objects to fill the empty shelves of their perfectly decorated lives. So, he continued to greet them because they were miserable and because he felt the miserable deserved respect, if only from an unknown man on the street.

While contentedly making his way through the throng doing errand after errand, he began to wonder what she was doing while he was away. He saw her waking, yawning and stretching before going to the kitchen in search of food.

“So good,” he said after having his breakfast at the usual spot, a little dive on Love Street that served cheap meals, followed by “Wonderful” after swallowing whiskey-smooth liquid fire that he kept in a flask to soothe it all down and prevent its return. He used to bring her there in the old days, before it was allowed and they’d received odd looks until he took her out through the backdoor. Now she was welcome, but old age had caught up with her, so she rarely joined him anymore.

Even so, everyday Crystal, his usual waitress would ask the same question, “Where’s Jenny?”

And everyday he’d respond, “I don’t know. I don’t know. My old girl isn’t what she used to be.”

“None of us are sir,” she responded wondering if he was aware that Jenny’s soul didn’t have long for this world. Then they’d both retreat to their various tasks of serving customers or being served until he’d finally get up to pay his bill.

“I saved the day old Danish for you to take to her,” said Crystal handing him the bag.

“Thank you.” His dulled eyes twinkled with tears. “You remember how much she always loved sweets,” he said before tipping her and then his hat and disappearing out the door.

He sat on a park bench. It was the same one he’d come to for years. This is where he came to remember bygone days when the two of them had walked there side-by-side joyously anticipating a moment of green escape from the cold stone of sidewalks and unrelenting caravan of traffic-jammed streets. His mind’s eye traveled him back further; to the days when the earth hadn’t journeyed as many times around the sun as now. Those were happier times. Old age hadn’t forced him to give up driving then, so he’d take her on long rides in the country to escape the wilds of city living. But now those days were gone and there was no bringing them back.

She had bound into his life when everyone else had either gone or died and helped fill in all the empty spaces formed by time. He crushed up one of the Danish and threw its crumbs at the pigeons that gathered around him. They came everyday to this same spot in anticipation of a daily feed knowing he’d be there to provide it to them.

After all the crumbs were gone and only a few errant birds remained, he continued to sit waiting out the day and the long journey home. He had done everything he could to escape the reality that stared back at him from her age-worn eyes. He had needed a break from watching her suffer.

A policeman on a horse paused nearby. So he rose from the bench and began his walk home. Still not wanting to return, he walked around the block two times before exhaustion forced him to the stoop and up the stairs and back to her.

“I’m home Jenny,” he said not expecting a response. She hadn’t greeted him in days.

But this time she came limping, barely able to wag her tail, making tiny yelps and grunts before raising her head to lick his hand.

“There’s a girl,” he said bending down to pet her.

She stumbled away and returned with the tail of his wife’s fox fur in her mouth. It had become Jenny’s favorite toy ever since his wife had given it to her when the fox fur had become moth eaten and beyond repair.

It was then, that finally, all the tears he’d been holding back finally surfaced and fell. He’d lost his wife, but Jenny had helped him get through it, just as she was trying to now. But who would be left to comfort him after Jenny was gone? The thought frightened him. There had been too many sad goodbyes in his life and he couldn’t face the possibility of another one. Even after the vet had told him it was cruel not to put her down, he knew that there was no way of letting her go. Just the same, the vet’s way was not the way he wanted it to end. He imagined her in that cold impersonal setting on a cold examination table, with nothing but a needle stick to oblivion.

He petted her head again and walked over to the window, hoping to somehow see the answer to his dilemma. Jenny licked his hand again; her reassurance calmed him even as he continued to contemplate how alone he would feel when there finally was no one to come home to anymore. She had hid him from that and now she was going too and there was nothing but his own sad oblivion before him.

He had carried her to bed that night; her already limp body heavier with every step. He had done it. She was asleep and free of pain and he would join her shortly after finishing the last of the day old Danish. And this is how it would end, with him watching the wintertime world dim into darkness while cradling her in his arms in the gentle glow of moonlight.