There’s a corpse down the street.
A dead body covered in white, policemen mumbling in radios, a camera crew and a crowd of people: Latinos, Mexicans, Jewish kids in their hats and curls down the street yesterday morning.
Nothing moved.
I feared the body would rise if I came
too near. Besides, the policemen waved us back.
A Chinese lady, speaking to us, and when we shook our heads she asked, in broken English: The-body is yung?
We did not know.
Nobody knew.
Covered in white, still, frozen.
The murderer had a Halloween mask on, a kid said.
Leaves everywhere. Dead. We are shivering.
He must be very cold.
There was a murder down Clara street yesterday morning. I was lazy, typing in front of the computer. Looking up people that didn’t matter. Poring over their lives. Deliciously, when Ernest called.
“There’s a dead body right in front of me,” he had said.
And I dressed up in my sweater, pants and slippers, stepped out into the cold November and walked towards where a crowd had begun to gather.
A dead body in a white bag.
The police had made sure there were cars in front of the crime scene, so no one could take a good look unless they sauntered right over and craned their necks, vulgarly, blatantly. I saw the white bag. I had craned my neck just a little.
I wanted to go home.
Ernest kissed me and got the groceries. We were cooking Hainanese chicken for dinner. We saw a Youtube video, while looking up the recipe for bread pudding.
We didn’t go out last night. My swine mask and blonde wig hung there, waiting, expectant. I had wanted to dress up in sequins and fishnets and heels and a blonde drag wig and then the mask. I wanted to be a freak in a dress. A sexy pig. A fat chick. A Fascist pig. Swine flu. Pork. Oink oink.
We ended up watching Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Goblin music. Wet rain.
The dead body had curled up in my head.
We were biking down Prospect Park, leaves rustling under our wheels. It was dark, for 7 o clock. Daylight Savings Time.
We had come from a reading in a basement.
I thought I had left my hat down there. The lights had been turned off.
I had to go down the stairs and look for the lights, located not where lights normally are.
I had to go to the very back row. The last row of chairs.
Empty chairs.
I found the switch, but not my hat.
Nowhere on the shelves at the bookshop upstairs.
We went down the basement a second time.
It was even darker. Emptier.
Goblin music.
Outside, I found my hat slumped beside my bike. On the dark pavement, it looked like a dead rat.
A dead thing on my head.
We cooked Hainanese chicken that night; it was delicious.
(Very indifferent.)
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