WALKING by Christina Franke

I walk up St Marks Place toward Second Avenue.  I'm young, very young, with a soft pretty face, long wavy brown hair, sad, watching, alone, wearing a baggy sweater, walking in the cold winter sun, looking at the people who walk toward me, looking at the men, the young men, thinking, "Is this the one?" "Is that the one?" and a young man with a face I like catches my eye and looks at me, reaches out his hand to touch my hand and smiles and says, "You're a girl I could fall in love with."  And I look at him and I smile and keep walking.

I walk on Avenue A between Ninth and Tenth, in the black cotton dress I wore all that summer, the dress I’d bought in a little store over on East Fifth, a dress with a drawstring neck, in black cotton, a cotton heavy enough that I wear it without a bra, walking in the heat, feeling almost naked in my cotton underpants and black cotton dress, my shoulders bare, arms bare, hot, my hair long and limp from the heat.  I walk, thinking about nothing, looking at nothing, and a small, wiry man comes up beside me and kicks me in the shins, kicks me hard, mumbling something I can't understand.  I stop walking, shocked, hurt, looking around, tears suddenly covering my face.  I stand on the sidewalk with all the people walking past, ignoring me, ignoring the crazy man who is now a bit ahead of me, still mumbling, walking fast, not kicking anyone else.

I walk downtown from Fifth Avenue and 28th Street, all the lights off, everyone walking, the horns honking, the Empire State Building black, the sun going down, the streets getting darker and darker.  I walk downtown to my neighborhood, to East 11 Street, up the dark stairs  of my building, into my dark apartment and I heat a can of bean and bacon soup on the gas stove, the telephone not working, with no tv, no radio, only knowing what I see and what we all see, that New York City is dark, that the lights have gone out.  I try the phone over and over but can't get a line so I leave my apartment, not wanting to be alone in the dark, and walk over to Avenue B looking for my friend John Efferson, the crazy poet who has an apartment swarming with cockroaches.  I pass a group of men standing in the dark around a large metal drum, full of fire, the light of the fire lighting them, warming them, and one of them looks at me, and says, "Get off the street little girl, you shouldn't be here, get off the street."