The Artful Trade

That day, like every other, the brokers poured snake oil into telephones, and traders howled orders. Money, as it always does, chased more. In the office towers, ticker tape raced. But down below in Manhattan’s side streets, dimes limped after dollars on betting slips. That day, like every other, brokers poured snake oil into telephones, and traders howled orders. Money, as it always does, chased more. In the office towers, ticker tape raced. But down below in Manhattan’s side streets, dimes limped after dollars on betting slips. The numbers racket. Any working stiff understands that a dime’s worth of maybe could buy a dollar’s worth of almost. Almost enough when the month's end shows up with its hand out. Eight million souls each day tried to find the right combination to transform themselves. Tried to conjure up some mathematical formula for rest or the square root of happiness. Some equation that would, for a moment stop the world from reaching into your wallet. And a...

Monarchs “There are no straight lines in Nature,” Vane told me. “And all living things are trying to get somewhere else.” I was proofing an article on migration patterns for the scientific journal. Dr. Elias Vane, was a leading entomologist. A bug guy and one of the world’s foremost experts on migration. “Think whales routes and cattle drives.” “Old couples go to Florida each winter,” I said. “Exactly,” he said. “You see, we all have migration patterns. Repetition so deeply ingrained that all living things carry, but remain hidden even from themselves. Most of these paths can be understood by simple observation,” he said. “But sometimes even science cannot fathom what secret routes are in play. What ancient hungers and worries…what desires and fears…drive living creatures.” “For example?” I asked. “Take the monarch butterfly,” he murmured in measured tones. “Every year by the millions, monarchs try to escape the cold. They make an annual flight from central Canada to M...

The platform was empty except a beggar wearing a dead man’s suit. Under his tattooed arm he carried a violin case. All around him were people desperately trying to get where they were sure they needed to be. Each with a timetable, a schedule, and a train number. The city has always been a numbers game. Lives there are measured by salaries and bonuses. People gauge themselves by age and weight, by their credit scores and debts, by dress sizes or the number of shots needed to go home alone again on a Friday night. Failure is measured by the number of unpaid bills stacked up beside a bed. But success is measured in square feet. Dreams, like apartments, are studio-sized small or circus-tent big. They are a pair of shoes that no longer fit or your daddy’s wingtips, too big to wear. For Dabo, the payout was fifty to one. But he had beaten the numbers game even before his feet touched the city’s soil. There were 6 million dead and only a handful of survivors. It was this terrible ide...

I was not much older than a boy. A runaway living in a third floor walkup in Hell’s Kitchen. Looking for whatever work I could find to pay the rent and keep my belly still. Morris was a last call shape up worker. Unreliable because of the three day drunks he sometimes went on after his son died and his wife left. But the city took him on in a pinch and then he convinced them it was a two man job. So they let him hire me, just a kid, on the cheap. Off the books. But the project manager made it clear. I was supposed to make him show up on time. The runaway babysitting the soul scarred drunk. Both of us trying to rewire those townhouses and ourselves before we were burned to the ground by the slow fire of a faulty connection or memory. Both of us trying to earn back the light we each had lost. “It’s all wired up wrong.” he said again and again. “All of it.” We spent that summer changing out substandard wires some low life contractor had used to wire up a line of refurbed shells i...

Confetti There is an ancient Irish legend I heard as a boy. The story goes that God created mankind and angels. Men wandered the earth and angels the heavens. Both man and angel were alone. Seeing this God broke man’s heart in two and gave half to woman. He cut the human heart in two so that together they might solve their loneliness. But he left the angels hearts intact…unbroken. Only a broken heart can ever hope to become full. So these creatures remained, small and empty, locked up in the eternity of themselves. They knew nothing of what it is to flee into someone else eyes or offer shelter in your own. To become larger than your own want. Most quietly endured that existence.But there was one kind that watched humanity from afar, then drawn to it came to dwell among the living. This kind of angel fell in love with humanity. But there was, as always, a price. Beneath the human beauty,intoxicating and irresistible,was the acid of living. Its irrevocable flaws. Its sorrow, its inh...