the complex

The rain falls sideways hitting the window horizontally. It's as if the wind has turned sideways in all its decision making and what was once a clear cut plan has now gone astray. Big wet drops slam against the glass and I can hear them pounding on the windows opposite this apartment. I'm sitting on the windowsill staring across the small courtyard with the over turned picnic table and the four by four slot of trampled grass. The Mexican children in the apartment next door are running around, soaking their crisp white Sunday shirts. A woman stands in the doorway of her stoop yelling in Spanish at them. I can see her push a strand of dark curly hair out of her eye. 

Where are the rest of the children? There used to be so many shrieking foreign languages that I wondered if this was where the melting pot started. Chinese kids, Indian kids, Spanish kids, Pakistani kids. They all played together with black barbie dolls with kinky hair and second hand bikes that had different parts sometimes glued on. A neon pink seat attached to a dark green body rolled safely down the block. Now these kids were mostly gone. 

Instead tall, dark, men in their twenties stood hunched over, spilling off their stoops and into the sidewalk. They smoked cigarettes and played rap music until three, sometimes four in the morning. Last night I heard a fight. Two guys and a girl were yelling at each other from the courtyard.

"I told you I DON'T have it," A girl protested.

"What you mean you DON'T have it? I gave it to you, right?"

"I know. I lost it."

"What you say you lost it for? You took it."

"I ain't taken shit!"

"Oh yeah? You think it just fell out your pocket? Real smart."

Then another man's voice.

"What the fuck man. I gave it to you and you gave it to this bitch? What'd you think she'd do? Give it back?"

"I'm NOT no bitch."

A piece of glass smashed against the sidewalk and everyone grew quiet. From somewhere off in the distance I heard sirens. They couldn't have gotten there so fast, yet the twenty somethings scattered, never to be heard from again.

The glass is scattered on the far left hand side of the courtyard next to number 14B's apartment. They have the ground floor one and I wonder when they look out the window if all they see is the dark brown glass glistening against the street. Maybe they don't see it at all. Maybe it's become like the rain and somehow the glistening is more like a clinking annoyance of something heading in the wrong direction.