Seven Cop Cars

Bad things in your peripheral vision

Seven cop cars whizzed past in the other direction tonight on your way home, all at top speed, sirens and lights and the whole deal. Five were on the expressway and the last two were joining the chase, speeding across the overpass above you to catch the onramp. They were all headed to something in a part of town you just passed.

The powers-that-be scraped a trench through the city before you were born, took out stores and houses and neighborhoods, poured a concrete river and told the people on its shoreline to basically kiss the world’s ass. Now when you roll from home to work and back again, your commute across the graveyard of the first hundred years of this town is up a ramp and over a bridge and then through a moat that keeps you from seeing the people still hustling in those soot-greyed houses and bottle-choked yards. You get back to the quiet streets in no time at all.

Somewhere in a dirt and litter alley in one of those neighborhoods, or in the liminal maze of weeknight downtown, someone’s bleeding out onto cracked pavement, and maybe someone else is waving a knife or firing a gun, and people’s lives are being altered forever. Maybe a couple cars are gnarled together in a smoking scrape of metal made useless and lethal.