The Great Race
Your ears are filled with the slap slap slap of your feet as you run, shoes hitting pavement still slightly damp from the early morning drizzle.
That staccato rhythm in your chest, as if it’s a heavy metal drummer sitting in there instead of a mass of dense muscle tissue.
Your engaged lungs pushing outward against your ribs, sucking at fresh oxygen. For a sliver of a second you imagine yourself a baleen whale in a nature documentary, a staid British naturalist narrating as you gulp at gallons of tiny crustaceans.
You are out of shape, but there is no time to dwell on it, as a man eager to get a start on the day’s lunch business maneuvers his felafel cart into your path and you carom off a concrete planter box while dodging it, suffering what will surely be a magnificent bruise on your thigh.
Remembering the expression of the companion you left two blocks behind as you finally noticed the time and sped out of the cafe, her face a medley of surprise and mirth, you push off the curb into the apparently vacant street, suddenly forced to dodge and apologize to the myriad drivers that appear as if out of nowhere to threaten you with vehicular manslaughter.
Finally you round the corner, and there: a woman with an unnaturally prim set to her shoulders, wearing a powder blue shirt and five-point black hat with a silver badge nesting in the center of it. In her hands a pad and pen engage in that most bureaucratic of copulations.
You surge forward as best you can, arm extended with coin pinched at the ready between thumb and forefinger, panting “Wuh! Wuh! WUH!” into the wind. Just a moment until you slide that shiny metal circle home. So close -
- and she tears the citation from the pad and slips it deftly under the windshield wiper of your car. “Have a nice day, sir,” she says as she walks off down the row of cars without looking back, leaving you a vanquished foe gasping fish-like on the pavement, unworthy of any further notice.
