Good Man Down
Jim Eigo
It’s a hat shop, where a manikin is little more than her head. A neck, a slope of the shoulders, then the observing eye must himself supply the rest. A single model in pearlescent plastic, it replicates over and over, several on each of three levels in the busy shop window.
Rust, pumpkin, mustard, plum. Though clearly fashioned by the same hand, each hat (left to right, top to bottom) deviates mildly from the last. Velvet, muslin, silk. This season, in similarly doomy glamour, each individually lit manikin glimmers an allure all her own, the more pronounced for the gloom of the city street it shimmers out into.
Outside in the creeping twilight, a late model sedan of a sober color, commandeered by a posse of standard issue not-quite automatons, circles the block over and over. Out every available window now, craned in the direction of the fatal shop display, their marked but otherwise unadorned heads poke, crazy to see it if only one more time, giving full, unuttered cry to something like animal passion.
How many circuits can a dummy achieve before—too close to be safe!—their test vehicle, in effect unattended, progressing at cruising speed—oof!—rear-ends an idling dump truck just ahead? Natives gather on the sidewalk to gawk. None will confuse these faceless expressions, frozen on impact as if in stone, as if they’ve seen the same ghost, for human.
A flash explodes, goes out, explodes again, red, the color of danger, the color of desire. Lights replicate like crises, fireflies from hell. As many as flare in the heavy air, many more flare in the rearview mirror, in the plate-glass of the display window, in puddles in the gutter from an earlier cloudburst, in smithereens of splintered windshield.
By contrast the siren seems to go on forever.
It’s a hat shop, where a manikin is little more than her head. A neck, a slope of the shoulders, then the observing eye must himself supply the rest. A single model in pearlescent plastic, it replicates over and over, several on each of three levels in the busy shop window.
Rust, pumpkin, mustard, plum. Though clearly fashioned by the same hand, each hat (left to right, top to bottom) deviates mildly from the last. Velvet, muslin, silk. This season, in similarly doomy glamour, each individually lit manikin glimmers an allure all her own, the more pronounced for the gloom of the city street it shimmers out into.
Outside in the creeping twilight, a late model sedan of a sober color, commandeered by a posse of standard issue not-quite automatons, circles the block over and over. Out every available window now, craned in the direction of the fatal shop display, their marked but otherwise unadorned heads poke, crazy to see it if only one more time, giving full, unuttered cry to something like animal passion.
How many circuits can a dummy achieve before—too close to be safe!—their test vehicle, in effect unattended, progressing at cruising speed—oof!—rear-ends an idling dump truck just ahead? Natives gather on the sidewalk to gawk. None will confuse these faceless expressions, frozen on impact as if in stone, as if they’ve seen the same ghost, for human.
A flash explodes, goes out, explodes again, red, the color of danger, the color of desire. Lights replicate like crises, fireflies from hell. As many as flare in the heavy air, many more flare in the rearview mirror, in the plate-glass of the display window, in puddles in the gutter from an earlier cloudburst, in smithereens of splintered windshield.
By contrast the siren seems to go on forever.