Eleven Minutes in Chinatown

Coming up the stairs towards the front registers at Kam Man Market, Felicity was surprised to see that the sun had completely set during the thirty minutes she spent in the basement homewares section picking out the small bowls with blue fish at the bottom to bring back to her off campus apartment. She couldn’t believe that it got darker even earlier back at school in Boston, but it was entirely possible she had been too busy studying for finals to notice. to bring back to her off-campus apartment in Boston. As she was staring at the waiting for her credit card payment to process and staring at the inscrutable yet exorbitantly priced dried organic matter (mushrooms? Desiccated reptiles?) in the large, sealed jars on the counter, an elderly Chinese woman pushed the door open and stepped in. An icy wind swept in with her, temporarily erased the thick gamy smell of roasted duck from the warm air inside the store.  Felicity gathered her black plastic shopping bag with the carefully wrapped bowls, tucked the ends of her soft pink scarf around her neck, and lifted hood up as she prepared to brave the cold wind.  She stepped out onto the chaos of Canal Street.   

The predicted daytime high of 28 degrees had given her pause when she saw it the weather portion of the 6:30pm local news her mother insisted on watching before dinner every night, but she was pleased that she had decided to bundle up and stick to her plan of coming into New York City for the day.  Earlier she had met up with Sophie, her high school friend who was staying in her NYU dorm room over the winter holiday break to hide from her dysfunctional stepmother. Walking around the New Museum together had reminded her to follow through on her vague intentions to take advantage of the Boston art gallery scene and had made her feel like maybe she hadn’t changed as much in her first year and a half of college as she sometimes feared with her admittedly heavy marijuana use and sporadic class attendance. If she was being honest with herself, she had also enjoyed having Sophie as a friend who was not yet sick of hearing about him and therefore let her talk incessantly about Brian during lunch. Brian was a junior from somewhere in Illinois who Felicity was ragingly infatuated with despite agreeing with him a few months ago that she too wanted to “keep things casual”.

 Shuffling west on Canal Steet, Felicity kept her head down against the wind, wishing she had remembered to check the time on her phone before putting it back in her purse since she now didn’t want to take her hand out of her warm jacket pocket. She passed the N/Q/R/W Canal St stop and considered taking it up to Penn Station before remembering that it was four days before Christmas which meant Herald Square, where she would have to get off to walk across to Penn Station a block away, would be basically hell on earth. Her weekend trips into New York City in high school (both the ones her parents did and did not know about) certainly didn’t make her a native New Yorker, but they did make her savvy enough to avoid certain parts of Midtown around the holidays.

She walked another block to Church Street and stopped for a red light. Glancing up, she saw a small t-shirt nook across Canal Street with “New York Fucking City” shirts in bright colors hanging from the awning. She smiled, thinking of Brian’s story about being delighted to see these shirts and regretful about not buying one on his high school lacrosse trip to New York, because apparently t-shirts with curses on them were too rude for the part of the Midwest where he grew up. Should she buy one and surprise him with it when they got back to school in a few weeks or would that be weird? It was silly but the blue would look so good with his bright blue eyes. How would she give it to him when most of their nights started not with any type of premeditated date but instead with coincidental encounters at the usual campus bars or parties hosted by mutual friends, and then ended at his studio apartment? He would definitely think it was funny though, and if he too had started feeling like there might be something deeper to their relationship, it would prove that she actually listened to him. 

Realizing she had missed the green light she was waiting for to cross Church Street, she turned and took a step off the curb to cross Canal Street to the t-shirt store, telling herself she would just see how much the shirts cost. Before she took a second step though, Sophie’s flippant “I don’t know, it sounds like he’s just really into having sex with you on his terms” comment popped into her head and she changed her mind.  Cringing internally at what she knew on some level was most likely the truth, she stepped back into the corner to wait for the light to change again. When the white walking man appeared in the crosswalk signal, she hurried across Church Street against the wind towards the Canal Street A/C/E subway stop. Instead of wasting any energy on Brian, if she had time before her train she decided she would buy her father a black and white cookie at the Zaro’s Bakery next to the New Jersey Transit section of Penn Station. It would be a nice treat for him given her mother’s recent crackdown on sugar in their house following his diagnosis of pre-diabetes.

Halfway down the next block Felicity heard a shrill scream that eerily sliced above the baseline murmur of fake designer purse hawkers, giddy tourist babble, and rapid Chinese conversations surrounding her.  Spinning around, she watched in disbelief as a dark sedan which seemed to be moving far too fast for a small Manhattan surface street clipped the light post on the southeast corner of the T-shaped intersection where Church Street came from the south the meet Canal, the same intersection where she had been standing ninety seconds before contemplating a t-shirt purchase.  The car ricocheted off the post but instead of braking, it maintained its speed almost perpendicularly across all four lanes of Canal Street, hopped the opposite curb, plowed directly through a sidewalk vendor’s table as the tall African bookseller dove out of the way, and finally came to a stop after crashing through the T-shirt stand and lighting stand next door. To Felicity it had happened in the same kind of suspended slow-motion time as the time she slipped and dropped a full bowl of Lucky Charms in the freshman cafeteria her second day of class, but in real time it happened so fast she wasn’t sure if the elderly man in the T-shirt stand had even seen the car coming since he now seemed to have simply disappeared behind the front bumper.