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There was a crashing sound, obviously broken glass. Besides that there was silence. This was odd, since the summer was simmering outside with buzzing heat bugs, honking horns, street music, shouting voices, laughing children, and all the other normal sounds of late august in New York. They say that the city is alive, that it swells with growth in the summer with people and life, from Wall Street to Fifth Avenue; from Soho to the Upper West Side; from the Bronx to Brooklyn; from Chinatown to Little Italy; from Central Park to the George Washington Bridge; where numerous bumper to bumper automobiles leaked out into New Jersey. But the silence was there, still, like a dark cloud in one's mind.

There were also closed eyes in an apartment on 138th street, above a pizza place and across from a market, that suddenly flue open at the sound of that crashing glass. They blinked, flashing hazel fire that was more green now than when they had gone to bed ten and three quarters hours ago. And this seemed more than acceptable, as a much needed ten and three quarters hours sleep for an insomniac was something that renewed the body and relieved that exhausted feeling from the soul. Ten and three quarters hours of sleep can do wonderful things for a person's mental health, and as an added bonus, that long awaited REM sleep which came after about seven ours of unconsciousness brought the most vivid dreams which these hazel eyes had had in a very long time.

And then the broken glass was remembered, the dream shattered. Shaking off the silence of deep sleep, the hazel eyes untangled the sweat-drenched sheets from his body, and went to the window if air-conditioned-less apartment for a breath of air. Unfortunately, New York City in late August is not the place one goes to for fresh air. The hazel eyes scanned the street below.

The street was clean, no remnants left of the terrible crash two nights before. Two cars had collided head on into each other while one was making an illegal left turn at nearly three o'clock in the morning. Surprisingly enough, the car making the left turn hadn't been a taxi. Hazel eyes squinted when he remembered the accident. It had been a very bad, with the sirens of ambulances mixing with that of police cars and flashing lights illuminating the night. The people inside the two cars must have been hurt badly. However, all that was left on that street corner to mark the accident the night before were a few shards of broken glass from the shattered windshield of one the cars scattered on the street below.

He wondered at that accident, and how fast they must have been driving to have had such a bad collision. He wondered who was inside, why they had been there, and if they were all right or not. He thought maybe in one car there could have been a young man, in his early twenties perhaps, who had been driving really fast on his way from a club. He had his date with him, a shapely Puerto Rican girl named Yolanda in a red dress. The two of them had been joking, laughing, perhaps with a bit of alcohol in their blood when the young man had made that illegal left hand turn. Neither one of the two young people probably even looked left before they turned. They were too caught up with each other.

The driver of the other car had been maybe form out of town, Connecticut perhaps. He was lost, forced to stay late for work and driving so early because he wanted to surprise his wife for their anniversary. His wife and he had been fighting, and she had accused him of never caring and never being there. She had wanted to know if he was having an affair. He was always gone, she had said. She was married to the picture of the man on her shelf. The real person was gone, all that was left was an emotionless unchanging picture. He was speeding, taking a short cut to the highway. There were roses in the passenger seat.

Hazel eyes walked away from that window never knowing who it was that

He walked into the kitchen area of the room, stubbing his toe on a screw that was sticking out of the metal divider on the floor which separated the living/bedroom area of his small apartment and the kitchen. His apartment was more or less one room with a closet that someone had put a toilet and a shower in, and a small marked-off area, which had been designated the kitchen by an empty refrigerator and an old gas stove. The oven had not been used since he had moved in, it was where he kept the food that did not belong in the refrigerator, which was to say, where he kept the bread and the corn flakes. The stove had been used once or twice but the microwave, which sat upon the counter area on top of the one cabinet where he kept his bowl, paper plates, and assorted utensils, whose original owners, various restaurants around the city, would never miss, was probably the most valuable cooking appliance on the face of the earth. It actually ranked up there among the most important inventions of all time with the wheel. Besides this there was also a small sink jammed into the corner next to the refrigerator.

It is a kind of sweet madness which the writer is subjected to. Why they choose to live the way they do could be asked of any genius, and probably yield the same results. If the genius is not of the obsessive compulsive type, in which case their house is completely clean and everything has nice neat labels written in clear hand writing, or perhaps printed in bold black and white letters, they are of the complete slob type, in which they are probably completely incapable of actually keeping anything of secondary interest which includes food, clothing, and various credit card bills, without loosing it amongst giant heaps of papers, books, diverse articles of clothing, and dirty dishes. Hazel eyes was of the latter brand of geniuses, but at least his heaps were organized into three large piles of papers, clothes, and dirty dishes, all of which had been pushed into a far corner of his small room, as far away from his working space as possible.