Blood In The Street

A dead man. A former doctor. A time thief. A third man.

Sep 01, 2023

By the time the man’s blood had begun to dry on the pavement, the three had dispersed. None realized that each was heading in the same direction. The former doctor returned to her 42nd-floor office and its corporate trappings. The time thief to his wretched studio. The third man present wandered the streets with a pen and paper, hoping they might warm him.

In the meantime, the center of attention on that Sunday afternoon at the empty intersection of Concord and 67th Street had risen above his body.

How did this happen? he wondered. Why didn’t they help me?

It really was the damndest thing.

He wanted to reclaim from his vest his pocket watch, a family heirloom. He was being sentimental – the dead don’t wear pocket watches.

No one had seen what had not transpired. Four strangers, one with an open head wound, united by a seemingly random, empty intersection. Nothing was random that day.

The injured man had collapsed suddenly, cracked his head, and called out for help. Each heard the cry, yet no one moved until she stepped forward. A former emergency room doctor who had traded saving lives for venture capital, she knew best that they could still save him.

“We need to get him to a hospital,” she had implored. “There’s still time, but not much and we don’t have what we need.”

“One of you, please have a phone,” she screamed as if such a possession could be expected – and indeed she was correct.

Yet the time thief hoarded that treasure, knowing now full well that without just one simple call, the stranger would die. He prayed the phone would not ring and betray him. The former doctor, the third man, and the injured man clung to hope, but the thief knew better, or so he thought. Sin would haunt him forever.

The former doctor’s office was now as cold as the wind outside. She realized that it was just her – chilling guilt, shame, desperation, weakness, all mixing inside. The truth is that she could not actually feel. Curiosity took her to the far side of the building where she could look down upon the intersection. The man was still dead.

Music blared in the time thief’s studio. It stank of food and foul deeds, of lack of ambition and a refrigerator with insides crawling with mold. He wanted to set a flamethrower to everything. Just torch it. Everything except the wall where paint commemorated his favorite band, Wicked Pissah. No one had heard of them, but he had 26 live recordings.

I hate this place, he thought. And this day, this God-awful day. It was blasphemy; he believed in nothing.

I had my cell phone. Whom was I trying to hurt?

The dead man didn’t know either.

The time thief turned Wicked Pissah up loud, loud, loud until the bass sloshed his organs and made him feel strangely alive. Still, nothing could keep away the image of the dead man’s open, glassy eyes. The band continued thumping.

The third man walked.

Who was this man who just died before me? The woman – was she a doctor? And that freakazoid?

None of it made sense to him, and his rational mind—the one addicted to crossword puzzles and Graham Crackers that break perfectly along their perforations—yearned for order. He begged for any way to cleanse his misappropriated dishonor. At the singular point where desperation met Reason, the third man concluded he could not.

He tried to quiet the whirlpool in his head. He knew only one way to make sense of this, so he sat in the empty urban street.

He pulled out his instruments and began to write.

Hefty Matters

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