Tom Scocca

A rim of soft pink, higher in the west, surrounded the sky.

A PIGEON HUNCHED up dark and round in the green of a locust tree, under dim skies. The air had lost its coolness. The clouds were irregular but gray all the way through. Brunchers sat right up beside the open windows of restaurants, with the brunch music carrying past them over fully empty outdoor tables. […]

The grass in Central Park was lush and springy underfoot, the air saturated with water and thick with vegetal smells.

On and on the rain pattered, in the suspended animation of a day going nowhere.

Sunlight got into fire escapes and grates and vents and the girders of the Queensboro Bridge. Bay windows let the light through like vitrines.

After lunch the clouds were back and the radar showed something oozing sideways toward land from the Atlantic.

Rats wandered calmly in and out the thickets.

A robin splashed in the manmade waterfall at the top of the Loch, over and over, throwing lines of spray off its wingtips with each bout of wiggling.

Once you recognize this pattern, you taste it everywhere.

Boiling instant ramen felt like toil in the kitchen.

Fumes of charcoal starter hung on Central Park West. The sky was deep blue in the gaps between the gray-shaded clouds.

The wine bar that had closed months and months ago and papered its windows was suddenly open for business and open to the street, with its front glass accordioned off to one end and a bare-shouldered woman in ruffles perched just in off the sidewalk, reading with a sweating glass of white wine on the bar in front of her.

Once upon a time we were supposed to pity the Soviet Bloc for their empty store shelves, left barren by their refusal to participate in consumer capitalism. Now American consumer capitalism has produced something beyond empty shelves: shelves filled with manufactured nothingness.