Crossing Fifth and Ninth

On or about an otherwise fine Tuesday afternoon, something ghastly occurred near the bustling sidewalk.  A very messy situation, though not really outside the normal run of things down here, where perturbations of the social fabric often crop up around that hour on weekdays.  A camera van arrived to capture the excitement for the six o'clock news, but didn't stay long.  There was no sex, no racial trauma, just a fairly significant “blood problem.”

By early Wednesday it’s disposed of, covered in plastic and removed from the tree-lined avenue along with soda cans, rusty bedrails, broken exercise machines.  It's a fading, though visceral, scene in the minds of random bystanders who witnessed the young protagonist, a familiar kid from the neighborhood, preparing for his role in the drama of crossing the street — twisting his cap around like a catcher as he looks away for an eye-blink, waiting for a hole in the stream of charging rhinos, lost in the surging moment, his inner eyes converge on the blinking bauble that rests now in the space between his cold hands.