It wants to rain, and I want it to rain, too. Its belly is grumbling and gray. It holds back still, trembling and swollen with ozone.

All this frustrated desire makes it hard for the people in the city to be nice to each other. We get angry when there isn't a trash can nearby and we have to carry an empty cup an extra block. We buy a lot of lottery tickets. It seems like our feet smell particularly bad at the end of the day. We keep our shoes on most of the evening, even though it would be so much more comfortable to go barefoot, because we're afraid the people we love will realize we stink, and stop loving us so much.

Yet as I run in the thick afternoon, an unusually large number of people meet my eyes. Maybe because I am in a strange place between suffering and happiness, half out of the world's phase. I like to look at people as I run; it's one of the few times when I look without fear or apology even after someone meets my gaze. I feel like I could be wildly in love with any of them. It feels we're all marooned here, too close to the sun, and must band together to survive.

I whisk by and I'm gone forever.

As I get close to home, I see a trash truck has stopped in front of the house, and two guys have fanned out to pull together the block's plastic garbage cans. While it idles, the truck piddles out a little stream of putrid fluid from underneath, like a dog hunkered down to pee. The two men are both wearing smeared t-shirts and jeans, and they make a tremendous noise doing what they do -- banging the cans against the open maw of the trash truck, flinging the empty cans to the curb, yelling at the driver to advance a few yards for the next batch. The truck squeals and puffs violently every time it rolls forward. All this noise has a reason, but it is mostly hidden from view. People might say it's a form of expression, or the result of men being worked hard by a society that doesn't value their sweat, or that, perhaps, these men saw people playing trash collectors on television who made this much noise, and they've now patterned themselves after a fiction.

The truck and sky groan, heavy with refuse.