Queen's Night

You’re walking along Queen Street at 2:30 in the morning (or otherwise known as the middle of the night). You’ve just come from a festive evening with some casual friends. You wouldn’t trust any of them with a secret, but they’re okay to hang out with. You’ve been playing poker, in fact, and finished on the winning end. Now you’re going home, to bed. You’re walking the home stretch to your building, which passes through Queen Street, a dirty part of Queen Street, between Sherbourne Street and Ontario Street. All the streets here are streets by name, no avenues or boulevards or even roads; the area is a grid of streets.

There are a couple of bars along the north side. They have smoky windows and dirty signs. You can’t see inside through the cigarmen and cigaretteers blocking the entrance. They used to be contained within the bars, but a law was passed that forced their release. They spread out from the doorway like weeds, dandelions, exhaling their pestilence in clouds of white, to float along with the breeze and choke the life out of beings elsewhere. The clouds give rise to more smokers, dotting the sidewalk, leaning against the walls, dangling over the curb.

You turn your gaze away and look east. It’s good to look where you are going in the middle of the night in an infested neighborhood. You know every shadow could be hiding a crack dealer, or a crack whore, pleasure for hire. Good job. You avoid tripping over a backpack laying in the middle of the sidewalk just a few steps ahead of you. It is in front of a taxi cab company, Diamond, rides for hire. You notice that you’re passing by a body shop, fixes for hire. Bent and twisted cars sulk silently in the small parking lot, awaiting their turn. You remember the building on the other side of the cab company was a paint store that burned down. All that remains is a broken shell that's now boarded up; nothing new has grown to replace it.

You think the backpack belongs to the pair of legs jutting out from the steps of the cab company’s entrance. The legs belong to a man, hunched over and fast asleep. He’s got a blanket draped across his thighs. It’s a chilly night and you wonder why he didn’t wrap himself with it. You get closer and realize that it’s not a blanket, but another person, a woman, also asleep, with her head in the man’s lap, and her shoes kicked off her feet and laying on their sides, like her.

You don’t get any closer. Instead you cross the street to the north side where your building is. You continue staring ahead. You don’t see anymore the man and woman asleep on the sidewalk; you don’t see anymore the haze embedded with smokers; you are blind to the boarded building and mangled cars. You tune them out; out of sight, out of mind. Now you enter the building and go up the elevator and into your apartment, your room, and your bed, where you tune out the rest of the world.