Allusions

Sirens approaching

The inner city portion of Boston smelled of beasts and fowl that dark and misty a.m., and through the bus window on the billboards and bakery windows were plastered dawnlit posters advertising the Broadway touring company’s next week arrival, to perform Mel Brook’s The Producers at the 5th Avenue theater.

Sirens arriving

When Martin wakes this morning, to the smell of the city coming through the bus window he’d used as pillow, he masturbates quietly, hand under a jacket in his lap, elbow careful not to awaken the actor friend next to him, the co-star in the evening’s Brooks musical. And on top of the jacket a Playboy spread of a nude woman on a beach, balanced precariously, her legs gone from the missing portion of the page.

Sirens avoided

And when, later, writing at his computer, eating breakfast of huevos rancheros, he would come across an essay he wrote for a college course on Ulysses, and laugh to himself at the allusions he’d suddenly find blooming and blossoming like flowers in time-lapse video, then, now, more than a hundred years after a somewhat fictional day in Dublin.