Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Clearly impossible

I heard them disagreeing about the woman on the bench who was conversing in a loud drunken voice with a bearded man on a cafe stool: one saying the fact that the woman was without feet or hands and yet still able to smoke and even talk as she was smoking was something that, curiously, heartened her; the other that the continuing existence of this woman, who was also substantially toothless, and whom she saw week after week in a similar spot on the street, not so much depressed her as made her fearful because she often imagined the woman following her as she went up the hill to the station in the mornings and calling out her name -- and then wrestling her to the ground in that blank part of the underpass, which was clearly impossible, and vile.

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