If I was back on East 1st street I would hear helicopters circling. Sirens, throaty voices, bottles breaking, car horns, the shuffle of feet, pain and hurt, hate and anger. Maybe I would not sleep, sprawled on that mattress on the floor staring up at the ceiling or some dark corner of the sky outside the fire escape. My neighbors could be in the hallway, familiar voices of concern and purpose. The elevator doors scrabbling open. A dog barking, waiting to be walked.
Downstairs, a police car gutted and on fire the smell of burning rubber and gasoline.
Footsteps.
Pleas and warnings.
A flat, hot breeze off the asphalt.
But I am here. A chainsaw chews in the distance cutting down an imaginary tree. What goes on outside our apartment door is not real any more. The people downstairs still drill into walls, like Saint George and the dragon, fighting and fighting but somehow never winning. Next door, they are quiet. You would not even know they are at home until they fuck like zoo animals, like a lion choking a gorilla.
The oven produces a high pitched squeal when you put the flame low. It drives me mad. A guitar leans next to me, and V drags her little fingers across the strings. It is in an open tuning so a big juicy chord rings out. A satisfied sigh crosses her mouth, then she skips to the kitchen.
N is on the phone in the next room, talking a mile a minute to one of her relatives more songbird than human. The words mash into each other, a wandering string of vowels and half stops, questions upon questions, agreements upon agreements.
E is strumming her telecaster, the same chords over and over again. A little out of time, but it sounds promising. It sounds like the truth.
There are crows in the trees. Big black horrible birds that would eat each other's children if they could. They pick from the trash, greasy as rotten potatoes. They caw, as if this is a graveyard and they speak to the dead. They groan. They are fighting over territory or maybe harsh words, an old wound reopened. Who knows what makes them act this way, just that they fight in winter, in summer, in the cold wet spring, in the ugly wind of fall.
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