Off The Hook by Beth Achenbach She smells of perfume and smoke, her dangling hook has caught so many people that adore her. Today she is letting them loose as she drives towards the blue and clouds. The rusty vision of that car, her graying hair waving in the wind. The woman is escaping from this old city. A place called home, but now littered with waste and nature overgrown. Wildness spills out of it’s cracks as clunky trucks carry their loads, dead parts of the city dumping at an unknown location beyond the concrete barriers. Brick walls once brilliant with their reddish facades now crumble to the touch. Windows boarded up with warped plywood from the frequent rains haven’t seen the light in years. The woman crosses over the city limits trying not to be overcome with the heaviness that she will never return. She deeply inhales the new air, turns up the old car’s radio and tosses h...
This morning on my way to the train I was so very much in my head and became slightly annoyed because a couple was walking a bit too slow in front of me. See, it’s a NYC thing that I’ve unfortunately developed, walking fast and being unhappy when people are not walking at the same pace. We are all walking past a construction site and I make my move to go around them, then the woman lifts her arm, points and says loudly to her man friend “Look at the Hoe!” I thought it was amusing that she was excited by the site of a backhoe on a construction site so as I walked to their left I exclaimed “Who you calling a Ho?!” We all looked at one another and laughed a really good laugh. They were good sports, we had a moment, and I felt a tinge of guilt for faulting them for their slow walking. You never know how cool people really are until you give them a chance!
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