The Meadow Annual Literary Arts Journal 2017

The City These Days Kimberly Zerkel Paris, June 2016 He left the first day of the month. The weather had been the same for several weeks. All of the children arrived at school wearing Wellingtons and raincoats. Their sneakers and sandals were wrapped in plastic bags inside their backpacks. When I rode the train to and from work every day, they would announce that the Concorde metro station was closed for repairs. Each driver had a different way of telling us, ranging from overly polite and embellished, to barely audible and incomprehensible. The trash had begun to pile up on the sidewalks. Some of the bags were ripped open. The smell was remarkably faint. I went to get on the metro one morning and a woman walked up to me. She took my arm and asked me to help her get on the train. Of course, I said, and she awkwardly held my hand as we stepped inside one of the carriages. She let go and made her way towards a seat. If she was blind or disabled in any way, it wasn’t noticeable. She sat down by the door and waved me off. He emailed me about weather and violin concerts. I wrote back immediately but didn’t have anything clever to say. A seven-year-old pupil at my school would stand a foot or so back from the building while in the recreation yard and try to catch fat raindrops in her mouth. I could hear another teacher yell from across the yard but I laughed and said nothing. I exited the metro early one evening and a woman stopped me and asked for a tissue. She was heaving, hunched over a bench, after having just vomited. The building concierge had started putting bags of garbage down in the basement until the strike was over. On top of it all, we’ll have rats, a neighbor said. He emailed a few days later saying that we shouldn’t speak anymore. My colleague and I thought we heard gunshots while watching the Meadow 91