The pink tiger is still lassoed to the tree. It is one of the only trees. Sometimes she thinks the animal is for sale. Other times she remembers that someone, a child, must have died there.
âLucylucylucy!â
Is he trying to sell me LSD? Is it safe to buy LSD off the street here? Maybe they're more inclined to lace it with deadly things in impoverished urban areas. Is LSD even lace-able?
A man thrusts an unpeeled orange onto the tip of a spiral drill and begins grinding, not watching his hands, tossing the freshly exposed fruit with curling loops a de facto cup encircling its bottom into the already half-full shopping cart next to him, positioned carefully for throwing ease and thirsty onlookers. It is mid-morning.
No green here. She remembers in school, high school, wishing grass would spring up out of the floor, especially on gorgeous cooped up days in summer - anything living to relieve the monotony. There wasnât grass here either. She didnât know then that there are places outside of classrooms without grass. They are called cities.
She also used to wish one of her legs would fall off onto the floor for no apparent reason, the stumpâs severed arteries like roots waving in a breeze, spurting blood everywhere like a bad horror movie, injecting something vivid into a dull lecture or mandated discussion. That probably happens here all the time. With cause.
It is late afternoon. She passes the man in the wheelchair tucked up against the empty payphone booth smoking the cigar. He is there every day, a street fixture. Probably lives off Social Security.
She is glad she is not in a more affluent part of the city, where you feel like everyone who looks at you is making harsh and entirely appropriate judgments about your tank top.
It is late evening. âLady, lady!â A skinnyminny woman stumbles towards her. âLady, my legs â" â here yanking up already nonexistent cutoffs â âis they anything wrong with my legs, he pushed me! My legs!â
âThereâs nothing there. Youâre fine,â she says, glad the woman isn't asking for money but unsure of what exactly she is supposed to look for.
âMy boyfriend, he pushed me, he so mean to me, & he wonât give me a divorce! & he rich & I poor, so I canât get one. Iâm sorry, here, donât shake my hand, itâs dirty! OHHHHHH!â A wail of animal torment but the anguish is contrived.
âYouâre fine,â she says, âreally. Go home and take a nap.â
âYOU TAKE A NAP!!!â the woman howls, already somewhere distant up the street.
If there is magnetism it is in broken things only.
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