Unsettled routine

Sidewalks express embellishments of stories that have already taken place.  My eyes have traced the sidewalk as I've walked mile after mile, recording fragments and forgotten details.  Discarded food containers, dropped reminder notes, store receipts, cash, broken glass, candy wrappers, leaves, fallen fruit, crushed flower petals.  Used dog waste bags left for someone else to deal with.  Cigarettes in every variety, some still in the pack.  Lost homework pages scribbled on wildly by little hands still learning how to write.  Trash escaped from the transfer to the collection truck.  Gardening equipment.  Broken sprinklers.  Screws, bolts and springs.  Business cards, shopping bags, coupons and dirty rags.  Jackets and underwear.  Expired squirrels and birds.  Uncollected yard sale signs.  Unwanted furniture and appliances waiting to be free-cycled.  Ruined couches and chairs.  Faded messages drawn in sidewalk chalk, paint, marker.  Inscriptions and paw prints left before the concrete had set.  Survey marks and the shorthand used to mark places for repair of the unseen, underground network.

Remnants of ordinary, daily life.

I've walked past a particular block on almost every route I've taken.  The routine of it is comforting.  The same dogs that regard me with sleepy eyes and casually alert ears.  They are bored with my regularity and stopped barking at me long ago.  Regular.  Routine.  Unchanging.

Today, the sidewalks showed evidence of a different story. An exception to the routine.  An event that unsettled the comfort of ordinary.

I noticed two officers, taking notes in a yard across the street from me, shiny badges on dark uniforms catching the morning sun out of the corner of my eye.  It seemed odd not to see a police cruiser close by.  Half a block later, I realized I was walking on more than dropped, dried fruit from the trees along the street.  I was walking on someone else's blood, a trail of burst droplets growing more urgent and leading all the way around the corner.  It was fresh and heavy enough here to be accompanied by more officers and a line up of police cars, but old enough not to smudge or take an impression of my footprints.  A spattered, wavering line ran from the public sidewalk up to a front porch.  Pools of blood on the porch and over the threshold of the open front door.  Something dramatic had happened to someone here.  An accident, maybe.  A crime.  A misunderstanding escalated to the point of being unrecoverable.  Latex gloves sat left behind from an investigator trying to piece it together.  A stillness hung in the neighborhood punctuated by the mumble of police radios and my footfalls as I continued home.

The sidewalk knows the story.  It was there the whole time.  But it's not telling any more than it already has.

-Andrea