Night Shift

Summertime mosquitoes bite the skin of my thigh, leaving itchy, red marks. A car with a single headlight out makes a u-turn in an intersection. A midcentury side table sits in the road. The houses on the corner lack drapes; their carefully curated living rooms are meant to be seen, not lived in. Two houses left their front gates unlatched, dangling into the street.

No. 120

Manhunt

The helicopter swooped low in the sky, then banked, rose slightly, and hovered above the high school. Cop cars already blocked the roads, southbound and eastbound. A group of teenagers mingled on the grass between them, arriving too late to get to class. An hour before, two students raced down Olympic, swerving in and out of lanes. Screeching to a stop in front of the school, one of them pulled a gun and chased the others onto the campus. When they arrived, the officers began combing the schoolyard for the hidden students.

———

Over a bullhorn a cop instructed a man to drop his weapon. He had attempted robbery of a fast food restaurant, but companies don’t leave as much cash anymore, and the managers that had the keys to the safe were not on shift. He ran out to the road as the police rounded the corner. He placed the gun in his waistband and slid down an alley between apartment buildings as the whirring blades of a helicopter appeared overhead. The searchlight illuminated the dark alley as he removed the gun from his waistband and let it fall to the concrete.

No. 091

Stoppage

Traffic bottlenecked behind two empty cop cars and an abandoned SUV, hazards signalling the malfeasance at play. This forced cars to merge down to one lane at rush hour. A hundred feet farther, a third cop car sat in the parking lot of an apartment building. Four officers hung around the car chatting. Flashing police lights illuminated the slowly darkening street. 

No. 083

Comfort

A slender, short man wears a hoodie that covers his face. He walks with a crooked gait, nearly a limp, swaying side to side to keep his face hidden beneath the hood. The eyes scan over yards and fences. Neighbors post signs (“Throw package over fence.”) for this reason, though a fence is hardly a deterrent. A false sense of agency can bring comfort.

No. 069

Beware

Flyers reading “Beware” appeared in the neighborhood, on lamp posts, electrical boxes, and the bulletin board by the local grocer. They featured a candid photo, quite ugly, of a grizzled old man with a wiry beard. You could tell from his expression he maintained a nasty demeanor. They were difficult to avoid, their ugliness drawing you in, and the detailed story of the three goats he brought with him offering a bizarre peek into the neighborhood. 

He came into the grocer just before closing and grabbed a few bags of birdseed. The cashier recognized him from the flyers, but she did not know what she should do: call the police? Refuse to sell him the birdseed? She looked at the clock and saw the end of her shift and the five minute walk up the street to her home was mere minutes away. She quickly rang up the goods and avoided conversation. The wanted man carried the birdseed out the door and disappeared around the corner.

No. 064

Shoplifter

While inspecting a bundle of brussels sprouts, I heard a man raise his voice behind me. Whipping my head around, I saw the source: a man around my age, possibly younger, clutching at his backpack. The store security guard held onto the straps. An employee stood behind him.

“I told you, I don’t got shit in this backpack except the salad.” The security guard insisted he go through the backpack. The suspect repeated his phrase louder, so more people in the store could hear. Everyone now had their eyes on the altercation. Mine roamed to the pistol harnessed at the waist of the security guard.

The young man insisted there was nothing in his backpack, but tensions had grown too strong. To alleviate the situation, the security guard escorted him to an emergency exit. With permission, the suspect absconded with the salad. The emergency alarm kept ringing throughout the rest of the grocery store trip.

No. 053

Focus

To focus on a run, I’ll go without my glasses. Some may call this dangerous, but there’s a freedom in turning the world around me into passing blurs of pastel motion. The action turns meditative. Then, returning to stasis, I place the glasses on the bridge of my nose. In the corner of my eye a flash of movement. I turn my head—a neighbor leans against his balcony, blowing vape smoke into the air. His eyes are fixed on me, dripping sweat in the courtyard.

No. 040

Streams

For ambience, as they put it, my parents prefer to watch security camera live streams on YouTube. We had planned a family trip to the Florida Keys, and in anticipation, they watched, daily, the live footage of Duval Street. They knew which bars left their TVs on all night. They knew how often the public trash cans were emptied. It became a part of their routine to monitor the routine of a town and people they did not know.

No. 033

calculations

Today I counted all the cameras I encountered at work: one on parking garage level 3 (presumably one on every other level: P2, P1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6); one at the elevator from the parking garage to the main walkway; two outside the back door of the building; one at the security desk; one at each elevator bay separated by a series of badge-required gates; one at the vending machine in the kitchenette on the third floor (presumably one on every other level: 1, 2, and 4 and in the other two buildings, also four floors each); one on my laptop; one on the front of my phone; three on the back of my phone; four at the front gate of The Lot; two at the front doors of each building on either side of the courtyard; one in the focus room I accidentally walked into; one in the conference room I had a meeting in; one on each of my coworker’s computers; minimum one on each of my coworker’s cellphones; one rearview camera on my truck; one on every car in the parking lot manufactured after a certain year (total garage capacity: 1500); one front camera on certain models of certain cars manufactured after a certain year (total potential unknown).

As I calculated these amounts, B. approached me at my desk, coming to release his daily allotment of anger. It became a ritual of our relationship to vent—almost always the venting flowed one way: from the furnace of his anger to the icebox of my personality. Sometimes I felt similarly, and fueled the frustration. He complained about the actions of another team that had cross-dependencies with both of ours, going on, at length, about their lack of due diligence, of constantly turning to him and kicking the can.

“I can say this because I’m the kind of person that’s very self-critical. I’m very aware of my own flaws. It’s the only way I can get better. I guess it’s the Virgo in me.”

I understood his frustrations, and expressed my own discontent with the team in question. 

“When I have my yearly review next month, I’m going to go in on myself to D. I can sense all the ways that I’m failing, all the things I’m doing poorly. I can handle criticism from anyone; it’ll never be as hard on me as I am myself,” I said.

We continued at length on this subject; sometimes all it takes is another person who mirrors your personality to reflect back at you your own flaws. It’s one of the easiest ways to identify them.

No. 007