Main Street

Springtime has arrived on Main Street, and it wears crabapple blossoms in its hair.  The burgundy vinyl sticks to my back in the deli booth, a half-eaten salami sandwich in ruins before me.  I’d asked her to go easy on the mayonnaise, but I don’t think she heard.  In reality, my housemate slept with her and then gave her a fake phone number, and this is her revenge by proxy.  It doesn’t really matter.  A moth-eaten copy of On the Road I’d lifted from my parents house sits on the table before me, an old grocery receipt serving as bookmark.  The windows here are large, and capture the downtown panoramic.

Across the street, a man in a corduroy suit jacket and skinny tie slides an envelope into a mailbox.  He looks nervously up and down the street before sitting on a brown wrought-iron bench.  Standing up, he paces a few times, grabs the local paper from a machine next to the mailbox, and sits back down.  He doesn’t open it, instead rolling it up and tapping his knee without rhythm.  His other hand grips the stylish loops in the bench legs, fingers squeezing white then relaxing red.

A teenaged girl walks by the bank, a blonde ponytail poking through the back of her hat bobbing with every step.  Her green bra shows through her white tanktop, and it matches the thong peeking above her low-rise jeans.  She exudes sensuality.  She hasn’t had sex in two years.  She hasn’t even had a second date in eighteen months, and she doesn’t know why.  So everyday I see her, her jeans are a nanometer lower, her shirt a microfiber thinner.  Still, nothing.

A man pushes through the revolving door and notices her as she passes.  He quietly admires her side profile; the opposing curves of her breasts and buttocks are an exercise in symmetry.  He doesn’t want to know her, though–I can’t trust her, he assumes.  His wife is at home having sex with the contractor building the new kitchen.  He is behind her on the floor next to the bed, his roughly-hewn hands on her thighs for leverage.  She won’t on the bed.  That would be too much, she told the strange man, seconds before the first time, and about an hour before the second.

A six year old girl in a frilly pink dress scampers by the window, restrained by one of those child leashes.  Oddly enough, she pushes herself over to a tree by the paranoid man, and she scratches at the bark.  I guess that if she has to wear the leash, she’d rather be a dog.  The woman who sells handwoven rugs out of a rickety shack on the street glares at the man for leashing a child.  It’s silly, though, because she’s told me at least three times that she hates children ever since her daughter stole her boyfriend and moved to Arizona.  What’s in Arizona? I’d asked her.  I think she’d practiced for the question, though, because she instantly snaps out, Hell’s recruiting camp.

A white man and a black man talk to each other across the street, alternating between puffing on cheap cigarettes and chatting.  The black man is wearing a Ralph Lauren Polo and railing about how America needs to pay in kind the injustices visited upon his forefathers.  He says this, although his ancestors emigrated from sub-Saharan Africa in the ’50’s in search of a better life, or at least a less shitty one.  He knows this, but prefers to play the victim.  The white man is wearing FUBU and saying that reparations are bullshit, and that he’s never enslaved a single African.  But he’s often visited Klan websites, filled out all the membership forms, and chickened out at the "submit" buttom.  But he says fuckit, turns on the old school Ice Cube, and smokes a bowl he stole from his neighbor, the black man.

The mail truck pulls up to the mailbox, and the strange man in the corduroy jacket slowly stops tapping his knee.  A mailman steps out of the passenger side, empties the box, and drives away.  Sadness and relief skitter across the jacketed man’s face.  He stands and walks into the bank.  In two days, a widow will open an envelope with no return address.  A lock of short brown hair and a brief explanation: You dont know me, but I knew your husband.  When he died he died quickly, and he told me to tell you he loved you and that he was sorry.  In reality, an IED blew off his leg at the hip, and his last words were screams for his mother  and slowly fading requests to be buried with his leg.

And I’m sitting at a deli booth, considering the remains of my sandwich.  My fingers splay on the wooden table, and I trace them with a black pen.  In each finger, I write in ornate cursive a blessing and a wish for apocalypse.  I’m always counting my blessings on both hands.