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A Dark Pullover, Maybe Jeans// Scot Ehrhardt

I remember shoelaces and plastic bags. I remember a square of concrete, cursive, a grey sky sliced by the lattice of fire escape bars. Dragging mufflers and choking engines, a curtain flapping wildly out a fourth floor window, the sounds of panicked sneakers against hot and rigid metal.

Some contractors jammed two refurbished homes on either side of a tenement building on M. L. K. Drive. Grey paint peeled from the tenement's bowing windowsills like sunburn, and somewhere was a flowerbox-tangled roots, sucking dust from the arid soil.

It wasn't important, where I was going. Some days I just walk, open-valved, to regain my senses, absorb what surrounds me. I am neither Thoreau nor Whitman -- we all lose focus now and again; we all clutch and hold our nine-to-fives, our families and our what's-for-dinners -- but we have to blink. Recover, you see. I choose one cardboard box in my mind, overturn it, and begin to collect things -- cloud photography and graffiti narrations -- beautiful, discarded things.

M. L. K. was a wind tunnel of food wrappers and transients. Plastic t-shirt bags blew across the ground with saltating beer cups and oak leaves, aligning themselves at perfect angles and projecting toward the sky, joining windowsills or guttered tennis balls, an awning or the skeletal bars where an awning used to be. White shoelaces, lit up in the sun, pinged off fire escape grates. The lack of sounds before a sound -- the minor things I remember.

Shoelaces, sunlight, abandoned newspaper stacks. I remember him a couple stories above me on the fire escape of the sunburned apartments, white shoes lit-shaded-lit in frantic patterns as they hurried towards the concrete. From the fourth story window, a head and arms lunged out -- splitting the sun in two, auburn locks of hair twisting in the wind -- and she pulled herself out onto the metal landing, reached into the folds of her oversized jacket while the laces continued their descent. Two shots, their echoes -- hollow pops like balloons, and shifting leaves.

One plastic bag tore from its tether of oak twigs, and lifted toward the sky. Once it passed the rooftops, though, it seemed to forget why it came, spun idly and returned.

The man folded over and crashed against the landing, a spray of dark red arched and fell. His head and one shoulder wedged into the final stairs before the sidewalk. I remember white shoelaces waving in the open space between his body and the concrete-cruor circles growing slowly on the square just two feet below him. Along M. L. K., the windows and doorways remained closed. Shutters held themselves without flinching.

Then the streets began to slide slightly in my mind, everything angled and pivoting, the wind stirring through buildings and sky like they were only reflections in water. Incessant wind trailing through once solid shapes, I stumbled against a stack of misshapen newspapers, maybe rained on before by an evaporated summer storm. It was touching and terrible -- a canvas torn wet from its backing and jettisoned from a rippling window. A cup rolled across the concrete below him in awkward ovals, trailed arcs of crimson, cursive nonsense on the sidewalk.

I picked up the top newspaper, twisted and ripped the sections in uneven pieces and flung them towards the body. I don't know, pages fluttering in and out of focus. I crunched the next paper in my fists and threw them in the same direction, one paper after another, torn and given wings. The hands worked on their own, senselessly. My throat closed and I doubled over, choking. The buildings blurred and the sidewalk rose up to meet me, open hands on rough cement. Then the rush of air, lungs opening, unfolding; I wiped my face with the inside of my elbow, dragging the spit and rheum to my sleeve, one clear thought before me.

My hands already clawed the rusted rungs, grappled for a hold under his arm and pulled him to the ground -- open unfixed eyes and legs splayed across the secret language of his insides. I laid him with his arms outstretched, like he was catching something from above. The wind played with his laces. He seemed to drift with the sky -- I looked up, too, through the spinning liquid scene, half expecting something vaporous and sparkling to come plummeting down.

"This is a terrible place," I whispered, both our eyes upward. I coughed and spit, staggered toward the street. I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialed emergency, interrupting the voice who answered. That, you already know. "There's a body on M. L. K. I took him down, from the landing. I touched him, okay -- a person can't lay in the air like that, between a building and the ground. So I brought him down." I closed the phone and went east toward Concordia Street, cursed the cigarette filters and graffiti, the wind and how it permeated the bricks and concrete. I remember cursive, and the letters which had just begun to cohere in my mind when sirens came loud and fast behind me.