Mairéad Byrne

WATER

Near the piazza at the end of the street there is a drinking fountain and in the fountain there is water for which you need to walk through the streets (a very

long time) to the piazza at the end of the street.

If you could go through the streets, if you have limbs sturdy enough to make

your way through the crowded streets, and the heat, though they weigh like iron, you could get this fountain water, you could get this cool water, you could be refreshed if you had the energy to go and the energy to bend your head and drink.

The energy you drink is called water.  The energy to get the water is called walking, or forward march.

The feeling when you walk through crowds toward the end of the street goes on

a very long time.  People are eating in all the restaurants and you can’t quite believe that there will be a fountain where you stop a hole with your finger and water spurts out. What do you care about the little tables and the loaded platters of food or the dour tight faces of the tourists or even the smooth attentive ones?

There is silence in all the houses and you can't quite believe the Walgreens will be lit by round bushes of light and that there will be people compact as skittles in there and that you have the energy to walk through snow, and boots, and the energy of money to pay for soup that would give you energy to walk through the snow the next time to the Walgreens at the end of the street.

It takes a very long time to walk through the crowd.

You walk in the middle of the street into a raw caesura torn between the people on the right and the people on the left, not counting the very large guys at right angles outside the restaurants calling people in. You can no longer call a crowd a crowd. It is a matrix. A gel. You are just another sticky particle.

No-one hears you as you walk that very long short way. 

No-one hears you as you stand at the window to look outside feeling the heat’s declaration of intent, no longer remembering the nights of looking silently for a long time at the bead of light that is a plane traveling across the sky or the pleasant mornings in the bus-shelter on North Main Street watching the world lurch by.

Mairéad Byrne