liminal encounter

for vanishing point

I RECOGNIZED HER FATHER IMMEDIATELY, although I had never met him, by the twin mountain dogs at either side of him. Although I hadn’t met them either, and they certainly wouldn’t have recognized me. The three of them on the streetcorner waiting for the light to change. I must have recognized them from a photograph. I must have come within ten feet of them. And then they were crossing, and then they were gone.

            I passed to the far side of the street without waiting for the signal, on an orthogonal line of flight, headed south. I don’t know what I was doing. My mouth was dry, I felt lightheaded. The cars were passing by, the water in the gutters was running up the wheel wells. It was not raining anymore, even if the sky was overcast and the air was damp, even if I felt myself suffocating in the humidity. Summer had struggled, is struggling, will struggle, against the umbilical cord of spring. I was watching (now I watch myself watching) the patterns that people make on the sidewalk without even realizing it: flows and counterflows, furrows, whorls, lines, cascading past one another in all directions, everything taking the path of least resistance, everything proceeding to its entropic maximum, in accordance with (if you’ll forgive me the phrase) some obscure laws of thermodynamics or fluid mechanics.