He sat on the park bench, hands clasped between his legs, tears rolling down his cheeks, the collar of his thin jacket turned up.  It was a cold day.  The sky a frigid clarity whispering of a frigid cold when night fell.  Few people were in the park.  A vast empty space of dead foliage, dead dreams, dead hopes.

The man's face was an open canvas of pain, grief . . . hopelessness.  The portrait of a defeated man.  The tears sliding down his cheeks created a constant dripping of…

"Babe, I did it!  I got them all lined up!"

Bad karma.  The wrong thing to say.  He knew the moment the words left his lips all hell was going to break loose.  The Fickle Finger of Fate hated braggarts.  And all day long he had been bragging he could line up five fifty cent pieces on their edges, one after the other, in a long line of silver coinage.

His wife, the long-suffering Margene, looked up from the table where she had been reading the paper, pushed the…

She stood in the parking lot entrance of The Beltran--one hand holding an ancient suitcase smeared with a hundred different bumper stickers of towns known and long since forgotten.  Her make up had been hurriedly thrown on in a kind of slashing motiff.  Her hair, never known to be willingly compliant, looked like it had been blown dry with the exhaust of a jet engine.

He told her, "Be there at eight, sharp!  If we're gonna get out of this town alive, we gotta leave…

A dark street straight and true.

Lined by a series of silently standing brownstones glowing in the soft light of a bright moon.

The silence of the early morning hours almost deafening.  The bright twinkling stars above looking down on the scene below in sullen, expectant silence.  Like a portrait on a canvas--the images so sharp.  The colors so intense.  A masterpiece of the here and now.

In the shadows of an entrance door of a brownstone he stood motionlessly.  Gloved…