A Memory

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The streets are quiet, hushed. Like a patter of rain, the sounds of rolling wheels and a light breeze through the trees. The clack-clack of keyboards, the random sick cough, and the squeal of an old bus coming to a stop, the doors rattling open, and the sound of a paint chip falling to the ground.

The memories pass - across the mind, a wave of nausia at first, and then a song. In the memories, the sky is clear like glass, the sun and clouds above the thin sheet separating reality from fiction - and an old man with a cane totters beside a community park. He is wearing a blue hat, and he turns up from the ground and stares hard into my face. He is a wrinkled man, with cheeks burned by the fires of history and eyes that have tasted the grime of the earth. In my memory, I smile at him - a folded smile, as if it were a toll I had to pay, and his mouth opens into teeth and a broad grin. As I walk past him, his figure blurs into mist, and when I turn back I can still feel his happiness, as if it were a spirit hovering while the body has disappeared.

I see bikes outside the window. Wagon-bikes, sport bikes, motor bikes, garbage bikes, speed bikes, dirt bikes, police bikes, silver and black and red, smudged by spots of dry mud; they lean against curbsides, old bricks, white tiled walls, and lightpoles. The people walk by, the mother with one small bag of groceries, the man carrying a white sack of grapes, the pair of girls holding hands, and the older woman across the street selling socks, shoe fillings, and toy trinkets. I forget the memory, reclaim it, but decide that more will come and release it.

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