It reminded me of 9/11, how the papers fell like fat snowflakes, singed at the edges. Watching the book pages flutter down, I smelled smoke and thought of fire, but the odor was only of pretzels burning on a nearby vendor's cart.
I picked up a page and read:
It was a page from a story, I later discovered, entitled "Say Goodbye to Middletown." It was written by a man named Mann, appeared in an anthology of gay short fiction, and was described by an Amazon reviewer as "a story of lost love, sex between men and boys, and eventual redemption."
What was it doing fluttering down over Hell's Kitchen on a sunny, unseasonably warm afternoon? Each page was torn, slashed, as if in a wild display of destructive rage.
I worried, for a moment, that a body would follow, imagining a young man at the end of his rope, tearing and tossing pages from his gay anthology as prelude to his own swan dive. The perils of the closet? A lost love affair?
Thankfully, no body fell. Not while I stood there.
But the pages--they just kept coming.
5 comments:
Oh, that's sad. That's like the saddest post to ever sad! I'm glad you hung around just to make sure nothing else followed the pages. But still. Sad.
Now, that is a genuinely surreal NY moment. One that makes you pause and pinch yourself just to be sure you are alive and in the moment. I probably would've thought that a person may soon follow down the side of the building after reading the pages, but would soon realize a more appropriate explanation may be that some drag queen just getting home from the clubs just found out he was out of cold cream and Bonne Bell.
c james, i hope you're right about that one.
I'm fascinated with what I see on the streets, in the trash ... Having it flutter from above makes it all the more intriguing.
This is a sad but very good post.
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