Laura’s Bio:

Laura works for the Audubon Society and does the same sorts of thing that people in administrative jobs do at every company, but at least she does it for a great cause. Due to the endlessly amusing peculiarities of American pronunciation, she gets to explain the difference between Audubon (a 19th century bird artist) and the Autobahn (a European highway with no speed limits) almost every time someone asks her what she does. Past jobs include bartender, bookseller, librarian, editor, and literature teacher.

Laura has lived in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and England. She has a degree in English from Tufts University and a Master’s in Victorian Literature from Oxford University where she rowed for Pembroke and Exeter colleges. Current writing projects include a comic mystery set in Ohio and a historical fiction set in the London of Dr. Samuel Johnson.

She currently lives in Brooklyn where, when not writing,  she cooks, calligraphies, and volunteers for the Green-Wood Cemetery. 

Sights of Brooklyn

By Laura J. Silver

 

Marianne emerged from the subway to a face-numbing, eye-stinging wind. It was near midnight and a rime of snow covered the ground while more whipped and whistled and fell. She tucked her shoulders up to her ears and headed south towards her apartment.

In all weathers, Marianne noticed the same things on the walk: the even-numbered street signs, the pickled carcasses in the Chinese Restaurant’s window, and the broken entry sign to the car wash flickering “-TRANCE” in ruddy neon.

Soon enough, the bell tower of the church on her block loomed into view. Someone had decorated one of the fir trees which grew in the gated courtyard. The white lights glinted in the frenzy of snow. Marianne saw this just before she turned the corner and saw the shape slumped outside the gates.

It was a man.

Marianne kept walking. Her New York vision was used to eliding the unsavory. If this were Manhattan, she would have forgotten him, if he made it far enough into her consciousness to be forgotten. But her pace slowed at the thought that this was not Times Square, where the guilt was parceled out between a hundred other passersby. This was her street, and a glance confirmed that there was no one else out at this hour, in this weather. On the other hand, she could see the stairs to her apartment building and she was almost beyond the gates. Once past him, it would no longer be her problem... She imagined glancing out her window in the morning to see him buried in snow, and she stopped.

Now that she had turned west, the wind came off the water. “Hello?” she called, hopelessly. People who respond to “Hello?” do not attempt to sleep under a blanket of snowflakes.

After a moment of silence, her hand unclenched and found the phone in her coat pocket. She dialed and stepped into the street.

“911. What is your emergency?”

“I’m walking by a man lying on the sidewalk. It’s snowing. He looks like he might be dead.” She was speaking loudly, hoping the man might hear her and wake up, or, better yet, a neighbor might hear and come join her.

“Where are you?”

“The corner of 4th Avenue and 42nd Street in Brooklyn. Just outside a church.”

A phone number was requested; an injunction to stay was given; an ambulance was dispatched. During the conversation, Marianne had walked slowly until she stood over him. He was old, and looked homeless. He wore a leather jacket which was brown and cracking in places, and his skin was the same. His eyes were closed, his mouth open.

Ghostly fantasies started pricking at Marianne, alone in the barrage of snow and wind with what was probably a corpse. She shivered and set her mind to distracting itself: was he really dead?

She leaned down and tapped his shoulder. That was easy, it was covered with clothes, and not like touching a person at all. There was no response. She knelt and leaned her cheek over his open mouth to feel for breathing. That was much harder, deliberately positioning herself so that she could not see his face. She thought she felt the slightest stir of warmth and recoiled in horror. She had imagined his eyes bursting open and his arms flailing out to reach her.

He had not moved.

Frozen with shame, she reached out and touched his cheek and felt that his skin was ice cold. He had suffered—her fingers ran down the edge of an old scar. But it was not a hideous face, only a human one. She couldn’t remember ever seeing him before, but this was not a neighborhood of strangers. How had it taken death to make him visible?

The wind became shrill and deafening and the white lights of the fir tree blinked red. Out of this strangeness, the ambulance appeared. Marianne knew that the men who came down from the van asked questions and she answered them, but the body was gone and the ambulance was rounding the corner, silently, before she had made sense of this apparition.

The snow was falling and sticking to the sidewalk where the body had lain. With the clarity of thought that comes only in the bitterest cold, Marianne knew that she could never leave New York. It was a revelation and a penance: there was too much to see.

 

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