Hurry Up And Dream

I suspected my mechanic of beating his dog. Or I suspected the dog of having eaten the mechanic. Either way my car wasn’t ready, and I was supposed to meet a woman.

There was an old fashioned yellow cab, and then I was downtown, still worried about my car and the dog, and the day was gray. I had vague directions for where to meet the woman. We’d talked about it for weeks and I suddenly couldn’t remember her name nor the cafe where we’d agreed to sit for coffee, and now the streets were unrecognizable, and the architecture impossible. A bus drove up the side of a building and let people off on the sixth floor, and I couldn’t call the woman’s face to mind. 

That morning I’d been on the toilet and watched an old-time aristocrat with a stern face and a long dress saunter through the pattern in my floor tile. She took her hat off and looked back as she slipped under the door, and the look was one of disdain. 

So how do you get women to love you, became the question of the day. Stop kicking your dogs please, everyone, let’s start with that. In which cafe are you supposed to meet which woman, and did she say I’d spot her in a pink dress, or a white one? Have we talked for only weeks, or is she my mother?

I couldn’t make sense of the numbers on my watch. I was late, that was clear by the way it all felt, and I wished I weren’t standing at this crosswalk.

A boy tripped into the street and a bus made sure he was killed. Or a man thought his knife would look better in the neck of another man, right there on the curb. People thought it a good idea to scream, whatever the case. The day was collapsing around me; there were teeth on the edges of this thing. Surely the knife was meant for me! The light turned and I hurried into the future.

It was wearing on me. I was carless and hungry, whimpering, a kick to my ribs this whole day had been, and I thought I’d better call the woman to say I couldn’t make it. But the voice in the phone said to meet her on the 17th street of the NyQuil Building, way up where the pavement ended. It was the cafe with the flowers, and the sunlight on the wallpaper. Of course! She’d already ordered, she was waiting in her blue dress to clear everything up, please come soon, she had the best news about tomorrow.