Vanitas of City in Sixteen Truths

Nonfiction | Zoe Grace Marquedant

A homeless man with unrelinquishing mange stopping traffic to stare at roadkill, which looked like a fistful of raw hamburger someone dropped on the street. Human feces. A girl I went to high school with who bullied everyone except the kid everyone else bullied. A high-flier wearing muted sweats stumbling up to the emergency button, that blue circle resembling the earth from space, and calmly relayed to the dispatcher that he was ODing again. A man carrying a watermelon like a child in a detachable car seat. A black and white cat with at least twenty-two toes laying in the sun and dust outside the Mobil. Either a sorority or a cult and their collective mother figure wearing apricot cloaks waiting out the morning’s mildly unpleasant weather in the first stomach of the subway station. While steadily rocking, a bulbous geriatric offering everyone a lick of his green apple lollipop, pulling it from his mouth again and again as if he was trying to start something. Tom Selleck. The lap dance of the man’s blanket as we crescendo into a run to catch up to the boys, laughing and refusing to tell them what happened. A toddler eating an entire sleeve of Ritz crackers with relish, stopping only to hold one aloft in a fist dusted with crumbs and offer it to me. An uninterrupted game of peek-a-boo traversing an approximate 173 feet under the boroughs. You. A man with a fork eating a flipped over sheet cake contained in the clear plastic cover it was sold in. An old P.E. teacher with a school group of coordinating polo shirts and khakis. A baby moving paddle ball hands over the cinderblock-like seated form of a very patient, rusty mastiff.