falling tub

Nobody thinks of it all day. Its ugly rusted edges catch a dirty shirt when one man leans over it to dump in the pieces of brick and concrete he broke from the top of the 53-story building with an axe. He cursed it and wheeled his barrow elsewhere. Men walk around it all morning, as it grows pregnant with unwanted bits of skyscraper.

Maybe it longed for the earth. Think of how good the ground feels underfoot after flying or sleeping.

Maybe an errant crane – like the ones I watched last summer from the top of the Morgan Stanley building in Midtown, their necks obscenely long, their loads hanging sadly from perfect hooks like prey – maybe the crane knocked it loose.

Maybe it was pushed. Everyone gets tired. Everyone gets angry. Everyone thinks nothing can happen that bad, nothing is going to fall off this godforsaken death-trap of a building, nothing actually plummets from the sky and lands on anybody…not really…

But it fell.

Slowly, through the humid October afternoon. The wind cradled the sheets of glass it knocked loose as it fell, and they floated through the air before crashing to the earth, home at last, back to the place where it all begins, where we keep walking, day after day, not looking up – that’s for tourists and, apparently, people who want to live.

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photo of building © Carol D’Auria/1010 WINS