Blue and intelligent, they took in the scene of people passing up and down, and up and down the sidewalk, cars rumbling, tumbling down paved destinies, and the murmur of life as it squeezed by him. A cat, painted like orange marmalade, smeared itself against an old man's trouser leg as he minded his shop, the cat meowing and complaining until at last the old gentleman bent over and scratched it behind its left ear, its favorite spot. A matronly woman had her hands full of grocery bags as she walked to her car (the one she used for daily life, not the classic automobile her husband kept in the garage for Sunday drives). A boy, one of the dying breed of knights, leaped to her side to help her, eager to earn some small reward in Heaven. Two little girls made bouquets out of flowers plucked from an abandoned lot next door, thoroughly unaware in their innocence that they were actually weeds. A young woman tried to hail a taxi, not noticing a button had fallen off of her coat when she dressed that morning in the dark, early to work for the first time all week. A father and his son walked by returning from the park with a ball and bat, the father with gray hair encroaching on his black locks and his son with age encroaching on his youth.
Blue and intelligent, the eyes of the little boy sat in his head as the boy sat on his porch which sat on a house which sat in the middle of the block. Blind, he could not see these things but he knew they happened just the same.
"The eye of a little god,
four-cornered,
most of the time I meditated on the opposite wall."
Poem excerpt from Mirror by Silvia Plath.
Photo by Shana Rae
Short story by me.
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