My coat passes another dark window. An unleashed dog slinks to a grove of garbage cans. In the distance, someone whistles on the blacktop. A gray woman scurries from a door impaled on a black iron fence and hurries into the foyer of the house next door. A lamp flickers on and off.
Hands pull the curtains of a steaming window.
My hand lifted in front of my face covers them all, a nimbus of yellowed air crackling from my fingers. Behind my palm, a bedroom jumps from the second story. I hear the clatter of metal and turn to see a bone rattling across the sidewalk. Neither Julio with his foolish mouth nor Tonia with her steaming pots of soup or my wife, closeted with her creams and lipsticks in 13 colors, or the fog in the upstairs window can tell me what a man should be. We orbit the moon.