When I was young, in my twenties, I walked past a man who had just been shot.
It was on Euclid Avenue, an ugly stretch with a brown strip mall of empty store fronts on one side and a gravel parking lot on this side, where the man lay over his bicycle, reaching up a light pole like he was reading braille on it. His skin was chocolate-dark and his blood was the bright red of cherry candy. He squinted up at the bright sun through blood trickling into his eyes. His hair was very short.
People were helping him up – just a few. An ambulance was on the way, a woman said. The sidewalk was littered with glass confetti and red lollipop disks of blood.
“Did he hit the pole?” I asked, thinking it an accident.
“No,” she said, holding his non-reaching arm, gently tugging him, “he’s been shot.”
Dazed, late to work, I continued walking. I cringed all the way to work. Could I have helped somehow? Helped him find the answer his fingers were searching for?
Today I cut my toe without knowing. It must have happened as I walked to my bed to sit down and read. It was a good book and I was absorbed for a few chapters. When I got up, I slipped in the pool of blood beside my bed. It was exactly the candy-red I remembered.
It took some time to find the cut, it really was quite small, and bandage it, and clean up the blood and wash the sheets. It wasn’t traumatic, it was just funny.
That section of Euclid Avenue where I saw the man struggling to read a light post is all gentrified now, flanked with brand-new buildings. There’s a bowling alley that sells risotto balls and micro brews. An off-duty policeman shot a man to death there a few weeks ago. The man had been ejected for fighting. His friends said he went back in just to get his coat. His blood would have hit clean, new pavement, white and smooth.
I imagine it looked like cherry candies.
