Eastland, Detroit Michigan

Cars were parked in the sense that the man was seated but there was no one playing chess between the cars only a chorus of alarms sounding under the aqua blue sky that had a tint of rose while the sun set on Eastland, the place where out of towners came to get malled and shopped out of their instinctive credit line.

Brady had no idea that there were no chess games going on between the parked cars, and was surprised that no man nor men could be seen seated in front of tables hunkering on elbows and callused palms over a chess board they hadn't touched. This was not the Fourth of July. It was instead his birthday, a day without the graces a greaseless salad gives you--often times he felt sluggish when there was the wrong dressing on the lettuce, gamy , bittersweet nonsense concocted from Miracle Whip and even grosser things.

Brady liked his salad with a punch of mayonaise, no chaser, and preferred it not chopped up with a knife but cut up with    safety scissors, the ones you find in kindergarten class during art period, the ones that will not cut the skin as you make your erratic, swerving way through piles of  orange and blue construction paper in an urgent attempt to  create a sun that would get a gold star and, Brady's drifting thinking assumed, increase the gravity around the school room and force the solar system to collapse on itself, into a nasty, compressed ball of gung ho. But what of the parked car s , and who left this baby here?  There were odd things afoot in this Michigan twilight. All kinds of things did not spell kosher.