The End by Salvatore Scibona Page B

cards, prayer cards, matchbooks, eggshells. The men wore ties, but their hats were off. A woman kissed a heel of bread and tossed it into a puddle.
    Speculations, threats, and scoldings littered the air, slurred and shouted.
    “If it was the present day,” said a woman, “I already would have left you fifty times and a half.”
    “Once we get home, young man,” said a man, “I got a big stick waiting for you.”
    Somebody said, “No, just a friend from Oskaloosa Reformatory. Wanted to give him courage, but they wouldn’t let me.”
    “The Amish can take buses, but they can’t drive them, that’s all.”
    “Everything is in place and nothing is in order.”
    “I don’t remember it very clearly, you see,” someone said, “because it didn’t happen.”
    A priest pointing with a slow and curving finger at the asphalt insisted, “It doesn’t live here.”
    A human skull was immured in a niche bordering the courtyard of the convent, and various other bones—ribs and fingers and clavicles—were mortared around it in a pattern that resembled a chrysanthemum, and beneath it was an inscription in a copper plate reading: Let us perform works of justice and mercy while we are still in time. Someone said, “Now, you shut up and listen to me.” Someone else: “In the part of the brain where the rest of us have common sense they have money.”
    Children were climbing sweet-gum trees and telephone poles and ginkgo trees and Papa’s back. Were they trying to climb out? And what were they escaping from, exactly, and where were they escaping to?
    A man in a gas mask wearing black shorts and a white tank top and suspenders dragged a love seat onto a third-floor balcony and reclined on it, and observed the crowds, and unbuckled his mask to take a sip on his lemonade.
    A couple of police observed on horseback, as still as statuettes on the corners of Sixteenth and of Twenty-eighth. Also, pigeons and rats and alley cats.
    Somebody said, “What is that, Stanley? It looks like pie.”
    Hungarian was spoken, and Slovak, Rumanian, Polish, German, Russian, Croat, Greek, Lithuanian, Spanish, Bohemian; and if you looked closely you saw a couple of Japanese, army brides, it appeared. And there were multitudes of Italians from the crosstown neighborhoods and from the suburbs. And some colored were there, and they were being given what you call a wide berth, such as could be managed in the press. It was a neighborhood outside of which outsiders stayed except for once a year, on the fifteenth of August, when they descended in their tens of thousands. And there were the carny games where you paid a nickel to throw a softball at a pyramid of soup cans in the hope of winning a salami sandwich. In the central event, the Virgin was paraded out of the church and through the streets by men in white robes accompanied by torchbearers who until recently had covered their heads with pointed white hoods. However, the police, careful to prevent miscommunications and slanders, forbade them to wear the hoods anymore.
    At times you could not fully expand your chest to take in breath, such was the push of the bodies on your body. And the kids in the trees throwing spiny sweet-gum monkey balls at your head. There were moments you felt you might be crushed. It had happened, in 1947. A Slovak woman and her babe in arms were crushed right here. Imagine killing somebody with your chest, a pair of hot corpses borne along by the pressing of your body and other people’s bodies—and still you came, out of this instinct to cram into the streets, because the body, despite reason, insisted on satisfying an urge that nothing in your brittle, private, homebound individual interior could satisfy. What you felt was primitive—a grasshopper becoming a locust, a yard dog becoming a pack dog. The mind of the throng became your mind the way a whale takes on the desire of its pod to feel the sand of the beach under its belly.
    Europe was happening, right here, and it