Fifth Avenue, July

Fifth Avenue, July One summer we were wards of a block by two block radius cordoned off by the promise of blue neon spelling out L-I-Q-U-O-R, and the only all-night convenience store within staggering distance that would take our government stamps for the warmth of cheese and bread, jelly for toast on Sundays, when the stomach hurt as much as the head. Some of us had day jobs serving weak salads in cafes, or answering phones. I had a check every month on the right day, the right hour that paid for a boxy room with a mattress and one window looking at the children in the schoolyard across the street. One room is as good to waste away in as two rooms, or three. Space isn't needed when you're only trying to disappear. We shared solemn nights in the schoolyard picnics of whiskey and cigarettes, the swings playing a strange harp as we flew and always thought, but never asked: Is this the way the end begins? At twenty-four, drunk in welfare apartments, Wesley across the hall in his straining shirt asking for a bucket to wash down a toilet too full of wrath, or the landlord on the fast side of eighty, with a frame so small and sharp his bones should have been paring knives, lamenting the days of nineteen thirty six— his boxing days when heart and not muscle mattered. Sometimes he would walk in his sleep and we'd watch from our swings, as he danced on the worn-out landing, his arms moving like thin spikes, at shadows and stray cats, moving himself years back, into the shining light. Kathleen Glasgow 36 ...