Top of the East (the east is red)

For a novel approach to the scenery, I envisaged the river afire, from the mouth of the Fore to the Million Dollar Bridge, and how the city’s features would have been lit up. From the remodeled Top of the East I look to the optometrist’s storefront – under the marquee’s patina of age and dusted over letters, the retired couple who ran it reduced their hours to a handful a week until it was impossible to get an appointment, even of you threatened to become blind without their learned intervention in the form of reading glasses or the fluid for contact lenses. And do not place alcohol in the container that holds them because they will most certainly burn, and the light your eyes experience will be an artificially induced burning light, like bringing your unshielded eyes to the sun on a beach day. The arsonists on the other hand enjoyed themselves as I imagined them, touching a naphtha and kerosene-laced oil slick over the Fore. As boys, they had lit up garbage cans on the street after prowling the bars. But in their advanced careers they needed to do something spectacular, something that they could brag to their grandchildren about in the nursing home, nudging them with their elbows while they are on their lap, offering them candies their mother had forbidden, thanking them for the flask refills they had snuck past the nurses at the psychiatric hospital for old folks. Lord, don’t let me be identified by a tag tied to my toe: let me be recognized for something big, for the moment when a city is on fire, when the fumes race up the side streets from the burning river, when the wooden framed houses are enveloped in fire and all you see of them are charred frames and beams and rafters, the domestic items tossed on the scorched lawns and curbs by the trash pickup or consumed in seconds, the likely fate of raincoats, slippers, and lacy nightgowns along with Playskool houses and round pegs and square holes and dad’s stacks of Field and Stream and Playboy.
The waitress breaks the daydream with the bill. How dry the air sifting in the cracks of the cords of firewood beside a house in Windham in which the inhabitants feel they have felicitously escaped the blandishments of Sodom-by-the-sea.

Perhaps they daydreamed a slightly different version, perhaps with the narrative kinks removed. Surely their pastor fervently prays for them, but throws his hands in the air with thoughts about the rest, and who are we to confront him, busy with his convocations for businesses going bankrupt, their inheritor cooped in some asylum, bleary from his medication and unable to read the codicils the attorney has placed before his eyes, on which plays a film of fire on the other side of my daydream, which has ceased as soon as I noticed how cold weather makes the lamplight look different, crystalline if you will, not blurred as through a haze, in radial points instead of in auras with indefinite outlines. But as I write an obscene song travels through the window, a curse repeated in the chorus over twenty times, like a rosette in a decorative motif or a song hook that insists that you insert the CD in the tray for an eternity!