Black

Posted on August 21, 2005 in Neighborhood

From the parking lot out front of our favorite Peruvian restaurant: cold halogen lamps and a refrigerating blackness so thick that you cannot see the mountains that rise less than a mile before you. You might think you have been dropped on the Great Plains.

At 9:30 pm, the fireworks finale at Disneyland happens. Your ears cannot tell what direction the noise comes from. Bouquets of firey sound foisted at you from the left and from the right, as if there is a massacre.

Today, within the arcade of Trader Joe’s, a cool concrete bench. Lynn comes out. We step onto the torrid asphalt, black as the furnace of Milton’s hell.