OBSERVATION OF AN ALLEY IN THE LATE AFTERNOON
by ELISA SUTHERLAND
42
No sounds flap their white-flash wings and echo through the streets outside my mildewed doorway after alley-rain. Stoic bricks (wind-worn fondly) startle querying cats and make them hide, the quick movement of their tails incoherent and impeccably noiseless, past cupboards of wax paper and skins of bottles. Kitchen pipes duck their heads and crawl beneath the concrete to basement rooms of sterile white, recalling, ever, the PVC they’ve left behind, reeking of the many onion peels and peppers pickling in lonely bathwater. Across the way silent windows smile and curtains die of rich neglect, their folds smothered in tender, white moth kisses. But listen! I can hear rhythmic footsteps in the shadow of my building as it grows an arm, then casts away the useless limb now free to spawn with other shades (potholes in the road coagulate and then retract as, like a dream the shadow slow surpasses them). No, not a shadow, but a figure as if in a dream, like paperclips that slip off desks, or glasses dropped on white ceramic floors, or clouds that roar like dragons! A composition alien to the bricks and pipes and windows in their silent tasks. In a flurry of cardboard snow, it passes, and with it all the chaos that its shadow teased among the streets. The sound has died, and all is left ringing in its absence.