outside

Spent the evening on the fire escape in a white lawn chair, reading and smoking and drinking rum & orange soda.  

I get a kind of voyeuristic rear-window-y thrill from learning of my alley.  A neighbor cleans his car, whistling along to that "Better Shape Up" song from Grease.  A friend walks by, and I almost yell down at him to tell him I still have his corkscrew, but don't for fear of startling the friend and the other neighbors, and drawing attention to myself.  A man walks up the fire escape in the building opposite to the top floor, where he spends a moment before being chased out by a girl saying she's fucking done with him, and he seems pretty done too.  She watches him go all the way back down.   The moon is big and becomes steadily more concentrated.  

Across the alley people are hanging out in front of that building where people are always hanging out.  Things seem steadily amicable until, at dusk, voices suddenly raise like posturing tomcats and the black guy tells the white guy to watch himself and the white guy calls the black guy a fucking nigger and the black guy says that's exactly what i'm talking about and one of them drives off.  Birds land closer to me than you'd expect and preen suspiciously.  I drop my lighter through the cracks in the fire escape.  An unseen neighbor below is whining about roommate drama.     

When the light's nearly gone the bats come, leafy black sacs dripping from crevices in brick and careening erratically with their velvet wings and dainty metallic "skree, skree."