Notes on Wyckoff

A young man from a different place walks home in Brooklyn.

Two men in red shirts hook up a hose to a fire hydrant and spray a squashed rat off of the sticky asphalt from beneath a large dumpster.

An angry sounding man shouts from across the street at an unseen worker to “hurry up, we’re on the clock!”, his sound is guttural and suggests a deeper history of disappointment.

Flocks of pigeons cast shadows like sunlight through a fence as an un-fresh breeze lifts them overhead.

Everyone’s eyes are shifting about, looking for dollars.

There’s a loud Spanish sermon being spouted by a lady with no teeth.

A large woman screams at her phone, with fury that draws curious looks from passers by, and I imagine on the other end, an even more furious person, whose own neighborhood on the opposite side of Brooklyn has retreated into their apartments, like civilians during a duel in a Spaghetti western.

A pigeon stares vacantly in between its pecks into a bright, hot, dingy spot of asphalt baked by sunlight and generously dusted with the ashes of a thousand deli rolls spread in goodwill by New Yorkers between now and the year the the road was paved which in my twenty two year old mind seems like it could have been the year 1789.

I contemplate whether the pigeon eats unseen food or pure asphalt and ponder the possibility of the black rocks making up the majority of its constitution, millions of meat sacks with wings hovering through the city, asphalt flowing through their brains.

There’s a piece of road that sags on the corner and collects all of the dirtiest, dankest trash and rainwater it can swallow; rotted fried chicken buckets, plastic straws in off-white clumps, Spanish newspaper ads for lawyers with the features of human faces completely eroded leaving only a headless suit and the word ‘Mas!’ floating just beneath the water, the water that looks like ancient glass, cloudy, decomposed, never freshened but exacerbated by each new bout of rain that chooses to fight the city when they least expect it, desperately hoping to give it a KO while it sleeps, and it never sleeps baby.

I pass by on a Sunday morning and the eternal puddle is gone, paved over by a fresh heap of tar, still glistening and blacker than the war torn remainder of this ancient road.

The first day it rains, and the puddle returns.

More shallow, still there, still dank, still seeming as if it had always been in that one spot, and would remain in it for the remainder of all time.

And I find comfort in the resilience of a shitty puddle.

A young man from a different place walks home in Brooklyn.