Her head met the curb on Park and 84th. Simply a misstep as she went to make a turn, the skid of a weak ankle across the yellow ginkgos. Overnight, they had papered over that picturesque stretch, wedged their lobes into its cement creases and other unseen cleavages. The masses had done little to soften the fall. Inside of her skull— who knows, some demolition— so that when she regained consciousness, she could not offer her name at any stranger’s insistence.
Max ran all the way there in a T-shirt and stopped just beyond the dark semi-circle of onlookers. Beneath the oncoming sirens, he could hear murmurs, the rustling shhs of she, the rosy Os of exclamation, the hard K of okay as it curved into a question mark, all of these shrunken gasps eeking out in the small crowd as several more passersby slowed and pivoted, forming a gyre as if by gravity toward the dipped edge of the sidewalk. At some point, their peacoats and padded shoulders would make the necessary partition, so that he could manage a glimpse of her head-on.
It was Irma, undeniably: there was her spotted, beloved face, red runnelling down her temple. A foot off, a carton of milk split and soaked through a tote, and the smashed lens of spectacles. This was the mess that gathered under the wind (or whatever image that dallies, refuses to give up its stay, and overrides my own for a period of eight days).
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