AcmeShorts

When Sonia arrived in New York, Penn Station was nearly deserted. The air conditioning in the station was broken, and as she stepped out onto the platform, she gagged on the hot stale air. She wandered in a daze as the scattered passengers, barely covered in T-shirts and shorts, the backs of their sweaty legs impressed with the pattern of Amtrak upholstery, sagged up the stairs toward the exit.

She took a cab to the Upper West Side and then just wandered around the empty streets. The pavement under her feet had gone soft in the sun. She stopped at a sleepy outdoor café for a cold drink and watched the sweaty, disinterested people go by.

A week of constant 100-degree heat had soaked into the streets, and into the garbage that was ground into the streets, and stored itself as latent laziness. Even in the evenings, when the sun was gone, it stunted any motivation the city had by radiating out its soporific stench. The heat had driven most everyone out of Manhattan for the month of August, and those who remained were in a sort of heat-stroke trance, unable or uninterested in doing or saying much of anything at all.

A little old lady made her way down the sidewalk more slowly than Sonia thought possible. Sonia looked away, took a sip of her ice coffee, and then glanced back to find the old lady no further on her way than she had been before; and yet her legs were moving and she waddled from side to side, and breathed heavily from the exertion. Other people dragged themselves up and down the street under the oppressive heat, appeared around the corner, and disappeared in the other direction, but the little old lady seemed to make no progress at all. Sonia watched her with interest, imagining that, perhaps, through her years of experience, she had mastered a technique for managing the summer heat. She then imagined herself as an old lady, moving at a snail’s pace, not because of infirmity, but because of a deeper understanding of the universe and reconciliation with its inner laws. Maybe a new law of thermodynamics! As these fancies played out in her fancy, she gazed at the old lady, sipped on the iced coffee, and long after it was finished, lost in thought, sucked on the straw and slurped at the slow drippings of the ice.

Finally, the glass was empty and the little old lady turned to her. She opened her mouth as if to tell her something. Sonia leaned forward and gave the lady a friendly smile, having spent the last several minutes watching the woman, and imagining here life story and her metaphysical condition. The heat wasn’t so bad, maybe.

“Why won’t you help?” the old lady gasped, her face collapsing into an expression of deep sorrow. She fell face forward onto the sidewalk.

The old lady had been dying right in front of her. Her brain had cooked.