Stop, Light
The stoplight on Gray and Lone gives me enough time to glance over and see the drip-dripping water falling off the side of a green dumpster by the Kwik Trip gas station. It’s just enough time to see the morning sun catch the murky drops and almost hold them there.
It’s just enough time for me to roll down the window and breathe in the morning before getting to the office, and see the woman in baggy cargo pants, tight tank top, and pink crocs with a shade of hair of similar hue take a drag on her cigarette with a spare arm crossed over the flesh of her stomach; it’s enough time for her to cross one leg over the other in front of the dumpster and bow her head whilst scratching her pink head with the index holding the cigarette. It’s even enough time to see her unmistakably start crying, thinking she’s invisible to the ribbon of traffic. And yet gleaming, along with the falling drops of trash water—she is gleaming, and smoking, and then puts her smoke out and hops into this ancient Corolla with a license plate from a state I never think about.
It’s enough time, if you can believe it, for a couple of construction workers to walk up to the dump and toss their morning brews of coffee within, swishing their hands clean and tipping their hats against the sun, discussing the job of the day. And they’re gone, now, too, in trucks almost too big for the road, zipping east to a project.
It’s also barely enough time for the gas station clerk to sneak out the backdoor, handling a heavy black trash bag by the blue loops and hauling it hence with a red huff. Man, I have to think as the kid swings twice his weight into the dump—he must do this many, many times a day. And still that water drips from the dumpster’s handle.
It’s not enough time to stay there all day—just enough for the cruel honk of a horn behind me as the light on Gray and Lone turns green, and we all speed forward without much space to give, like little drops falling, gleaming, smoking, to end up in a puddle most of us might wish to miss.
But on the way home at the end of the day, I see the water’s been all dried up, and this time, the light beckons me through without stopping. Quick trip home.
You know, for some reason that maybe I’ll figure out when I’m about to fall asleep, I wish the light would stop more, and longer, and finally, forever.