on the corner where two narrow Chinatown streets meet, beneath a faded red-and-green striped awning dripping overnight moisture, a fish stall to the left with crushed ice and whole fish arranged in plastic trays, a man directing a hose across the pavement so that a sheet of grey water moves scales and ice chips toward the storm drain at her feet — last bite of sesame pancake held mid-air, she has turned slightly from the stall to watch the hosing water redirect around her shoe
The sesame pancake was two dollars and the woman who handed it to me had already looked past me before I'd finished paying.
Sesame pancake held in one hand, layers visible at the torn edge, sesame seeds catching flat grey morning light
Seven in the morning on Mott and the street was running on its own logic. A man was hosing down the pavement in front of a fish stall, the water pushing scales and ice melt toward the gutter. The smell of it — cold water, seaweed, the metallic edge underneath — cut through the ambient humidity before the day had fully decided to be warm. The light was grey and flat and everything under the awnings was the same dim brightness. I stood at the corner of Bayard and Mulberry and ate the pancake slowly, watching a delivery being unloaded, a conversation happening at a frequency too fast to follow.
I'd planned to walk to one particular street. I got there and found a padlock, a chain, a notice I read enough of to understand. I stood there a moment. Then I turned around.
Manhattan Bridge span looming overhead from the sidewalk below, its blue-grey steel and riveted understructure filling the upper frame
East. I hadn't planned Two Bridges but my feet had apparently made a different itinerary. The blocks below the Manhattan Bridge have a quality I don't know how to categorize — the housing projects facing the water, an old man reading on a bench at eight in the morning, a strip of sidewalk where someone has planted tomatoes and something leafy in containers that shouldn't have survived August. I stopped in front of it for longer than made sense. No sign. Nobody asking credit.
a strip of sidewalk below the Manhattan Bridge anchorage, the bridge's massive granite base filling the upper-left of the frame, a row of plastic containers — mismatched buckets, a cracked five-gallon jug, an old colander — planted with small tomato vines and something broad-leafed, the plants leaning windward; a bench six meters back where an old man sits with a newspaper folded small against the gusting drizzle — she has crouched to look at a cluster of small green tomatoes on the vine, not touching, rain coming in sideways off the East River and catching the olive shirt fabric
The drizzle came in sideways off the water. I pulled on the olive shirt from my bag and kept walking.
The herbal medicine shop on Canal — drawers all the way to the ceiling, the smell like dried bark and something mineral and time — was open. An old man behind the counter writing in a ledger. I didn't need anything. I stood in the doorway for a moment, then stepped back onto the street.
the narrow doorway of a Canal Street herbal medicine shop, floor-to-ceiling wooden drawer units visible inside in a warm amber interior — each drawer faced with a small handwritten label — the smell of the place meeting the wet pavement smell at the threshold; behind her the street in grey morning light, a delivery cart half-visible, a produce crate stacked against the exterior wall — she has just stepped back out of the shop onto the sidewalk, pausing in the doorway threshold — one foot inside, one out — neither committed to the street nor to returning
The tomatoes were small and still green.
What she wore
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I was dressed before I thought about it — the skirt, the white top, the loafers. The kind of outfit that doesn't ask anything of a seven a.m. fish market.
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The drizzle came in sideways under the bridge and I pulled the shirt on from my bag — olive, soft, nothing I had to think about.
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I changed into the linen trousers before dinner because I wanted to feel like a different version of the same day, not like I was starting over.