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“Do you need help?” Eve asked the restaurant manager, her dark-blue eyes glowing with hope that bordered on desperation.
The Ellis Island refugees and the new millennium off-the-Boeings immigrants had one thing in common. They came looking for work. Exploring the labyrinths of New York streets they knocked on the doors of stores and restaurants asking the same question over and over again, in broken English. “Do you need help?” Half the minimum wage would do.
“No,” the manager answered with the same reply. His eyes traveled up and down Eve’s body. “And we have a sign in the window that says so. If you could read English.”
"Gran'pa Baltazar, tell us a story! Gran'pa Baltazar tell us a story!" the little ones nagged shrilly, tugging on the old man's tunic.
"Well, alright, my little pigeons, gather around" old Baltazar eyed the small fry affectionately. His four little grand children, all daughter's stock, nestled excitedly at his feet by the fire in the Great Hall.
"What story would you like to hear, my little fishes?"
“Eyes, black eyes that carve hollow secrets into your skull, empty experiences that grey not only your hair but fill in the wrinkles of your skin. You are a white wash canvas lost inside a storage basements cranny,” thought Yoma.
Yoma had travelled nowhere exotic. He had spent the majority of his 65 years exploring nothing but the inner workings of his own banal life. “I will see the world,” he whispered. This hushed prayer had been heard by friends, lovers, children, grandchildren and strangers for as long as Yoma could remember, he whispered “I am a million pieces of rock spread across every pixel of blue sky.” Yoma often spoke in this manner. Weaving Kerouac phrases that could leave a person frustrated with wonder. As a young boy a brick wall could suddenly become the peak of Everest, his mutt of a dog a faithful donkey and the air that floated amidst his left ear his knowledable Sherpa. As a man, the brick wall melted from Everest to a steel prison where he wrote lascivious theatrical pieces along side the Marquis De Sade and other men of great evil abilities. But as time went on, the brick wall froze into, well, a brick wall. The day Yoma stopped seeing flowers in the stars is the day Yoma meant it when he said, “I will see the world.”
