Fan Submission # 2 – "A-story-a"
A-story-a
To him, people seemed to always be going somewhere. Always walking home, or to school, off to work, speeding to the hospital, or to the grocery story because it would close at nine and they were out of milk, or to visit their fat aunt with that nice brownstone, who was actually quite the bitch but had just the right amount of zeros on her paycheck that she was worth talking to. You know, in case she died.
Still, though, everyone was always in motion. But really, it remained a mystery if anyone was actually going anywhere at anytime. These straphangers and commuters, masters of crowding up sidewalks and staircases, had as much direction in their lives as queenless ants, pushing forward and sidestepping.
There were tunnels and escalators, arrivals, and departures. Streets like corridors filling up with traffic. Delays. A chorus of car horns with soprano, alto, and bass. The New York Times was 50 cents. Loafers and high heels. Briefcases and purses. Lots of Coffee. Metrocards. Turnstiles. Click. Clunk. Click. Green train. Yellow train. Red train. Like the traffic lights. Tickets, please! All aboard. Next Stop: So and So. Watch the gap. Watch the door. “Ow, fucker, you stepped on my foot.” Running late. What’s the time? Walk. Don’t Walk. Crosswalk. Jaywalk. Excuse me. Pardon me. Taxi! Wait for it. Wait for it. Off duty. On Duty. And by the way, this cab smells like someone took a shit in it.
It was chaos. It was home. It was routine. And it was still what you would call summer, although not for much longer. The weather didn’t matter all too much, because regardless of temperature people were always out and about, off on their own business. It was dizzying, and he felt like sitting, somewhere nice, bright and quiet, where he could just breathe. That sounded nice. Just the thought sounded nice.
His father spoke in short sentences using a lexicon of only the most elegant words. The man spoke with such intention.
“Jesus Christ, Jimmy! Get the fuck outside! Go outside, and get some goddamn fresh air.”
***
The door closed behind Jimmy rather forcefully. He stood stiffly out on the front step. There was no lawn to view, just cement left and right, with occasional islands of trees cut out of the sidewalk. A woman was walking her dog. It shuffled and turned its head towards his house and let out a bark of hello. Jimmy waved to the dog, not the woman. Besides, she was too busy to notice anything. She had headphones on and a sweatband over her forehead, and her sneakers were only white streaks chasing after one another. Soon enough they were turning the corner, out of view.
The garage smelled of stale beer, probably because his father was an avid proponent of recycling, but he also happened to be the kind of person that didn’t take the trash out on a regular basis. The light bulb happened to be on. Over by the propane tanks and spare bicycle wheels, his father kept a box of misplaced objects, old toys, broken gadgets, spare hammers and screwdrivers. Jimmy leaned over and sorted through the contents pulling out a stuffed bear, now an amputee, with one eye.
He dropped the bear back in the box, threw a hat and a pair of shoes over his shoulder, sorted through books, where “books” mean dirty magazines from the 80’s. There was office equipment, floppy disks, staplers, a chordless phone, which was really a chorded phone with the chord itself torn out of the receiver. Beneath that was a collection of forgotten records that may or may not be very aerodynamic when thrown like Frisbees. And finally, below all that clutter, Jimmy dug to the bottom where he found a working 35mm camera. As he began to examine the object his father came into the garage. This prompted Jimmy to leave right away before anyone discovered what had accidentally happened to Jethro Tull and Ted Nugent, and why their records were laying splintered in the corner.
***
The camera felt foreign in his hands. He skimmed his fingers against the edges, feeling up the smooth metal and the rough ridges, nervously sweeping over the worn-out buttons, dials, and the lens shutter, wrapping his wrist around the strap. They were introducing themselves, he and the camera, preparing each other, knowing there was work to be done. When the light had turned green, Jimmy crossed the street that was empty in both directions, stepped onto the curb and passed the gates. Old Greek men sat on green painted benches that were provided exclusively by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. They had on brown jackets, played chess while smoking, at times leaning back and stretching their arms outward.
Pawn takes pawn. Rook takes bishop. Knight takes queen.
“Malaka!” One would curse at the other in the vernacular.
“You cheated! You moved that piece when I wasn’t looking!”
“Bullshit I did.”
The camera lens clapped its hands together and caught them in a moment of deep meditation.
Further on was the field, where people ran in circles training for soccer or some other sport that required especially nimble legs. They panted, extending one limb after the other, after the other, and then the other. Inhaling. Exhaling. Sweat melting down their foreheads. Arms oscillating back and forth, like the valve gears of a locomotive.
As they sprinted around the lip of the track, and a shutter snapped and they were trapped in a blurry instant
The East River ran along the course of the park, passing the feet of both the Hell Gate and Triboro Bridges, which appeared to effortlessly hold up the sky, while back down below, children flew brightly colored kites – mostly pink and green – with their parents. It seemed as though the kites themselves were trying very hard to escape their owners, swimming upward to almost rendezvous with the bridges.
It was a zig-zag of meetings caught by the photographer.
He continued to walk along the park by the waterfront, populated by seagulls and empty soda cans. At the junction of the river and the mainland, angry rocks and boulders jutted from the waves.
It was odd. Things were, for once, calm. That sense of vertigo he felt so frequently was gone. And for the first time that he could remember, the people around him had finally slowed down. The cars on the street slowed down. The pedestrians walked as though weren’t erratic or impulsive strangers anymore, now they felt like real people, and there was this sense of new found time that made him want to stop and appreciate their eyes and their smiles, their thick accents and the types of clothes they wore, even what they smelled like as they would pass by, pleasant or not. But then again, maybe they were always the same, always this alive. Maybe he was the one who had been caught up to speed. Maybe he had been the stranger all along. Not quite in the scene, but not quite out of it. Rushing when there was no rush hour. Stopping while the crowd pressed forward. Whatever had happened today, whatever had caused this change in him, this switch in tempo, he was thankful for it, grateful for it, excited by it.
A little farther down the walkway there was a man standing in such a way that his shadow looked fifteen feet tall and anorexic. The man was not anorexic himself. He wore a red flannel button-up with a white tee beneath. He had large hands textured with thick black hairs. His jeans had cement stains on them the kind that you couldn’t wash out even if you tried. He hadn’t shaved, and his face was somber. There was something chalky in his hair. In one hand he held a brown paper bag with a glass bottle inside. He might have been Italian, or Greek, but definitely something Mediterranean. He spat to his left and watched the Manhattan skyline, clenching the railing with his other hand.
There was enough daylight for one last photo.
Ahead, skyscrapers lit up one by one, the grounded stars of a metropolitan sky, the understudies of the ones above, and there was that shade of red, becoming the aura of the whole island, while the river grew dark and glassy, almost obsidian, brooding as if unhappy the day was coming to an end, Jimmy’s attention skipped from building to building, Chrysler to Empire, titan to titan, and he noted how the bridges arched away from the island stretching like extended fingers from a flat hand, reaching and clawing at the horizon line, farther than you could ever see
He raised the camera to his eye, looking through the viewfinder, panning around for a picture that satisfied him. It was then that the man nearby brushed off the sand from his jeans before throwing the brown paper bag into the water. The man stood up on the railing and raised his arms perpendicular. The wind picked at his shirt and it billowed and fluttered like a flannel flag.
Jimmy stopped
He put the camera down.
The gray man leaned forward, falling toward the rocks. The impact was his head, and like any other discarded aluminum can of soda, he bounced just once. His feet lay in dark water. And when the tide came in, it pulled him into the East River. Now he belonged to the city.
Submitted by Artem Derkatch
Tags: A-story-a, Artem Derkatch, Astorya
