Death, But Not Today

After my neo-mystical encounter with the black-suited Gandhi the day before, I woke with a start at six the next morning and practically leapt into the shower. With steaming water washing over me, I was thinking about the pictures I took the day before and the ones I might take that day, about the twenty-something girl at rest in my bed, and about the kind of flash I should buy for my camera.

That’s when I saw it.

A driveway separates my Alphabet City tenement building from the nursing home next door, and a small window in my bathroom – right next to the showerhead – overlooks it. The driveway serves multiple purposes for the home, among them being the place where ambulances pick up the ailing and the dead. I never saw the body beneath the sheet; just the stretcher upon which it rested and the blue-shirted medics who fed it into the idling ambulance.

I, too, I thought to myself, I, too, will someday be ferried from this world. But not today. Not today.

Picture. Brooklyn, New York: May 27, 2007, 347 Broadway, Las Palmera de mi Peublo, A Romantic Rivalry Leads Two Men to Fight One Another With Knives in a South Williamsburgh Restaurant, Leaving Both Men Seriously Wounded and the Inside of the Restaurant Sprayed With Blood, Here, One of the Contenders is Prepared for Transportation to a Hospital.