Racing in the Dark

South Brooklyn is quiet. Where there was once an endless chaos of cars and trucks rolling up Sixth Avenue onto the highway, now there is only the expected. The morning begins with a lost Leviathan calling in the fog, a ship coming up an empty river under a silent bridge. Birds come next, in this city of perches, chirping and skittering in the ivy outside our home. The next few hours are tedious with the sound of truck tires hitting a single metal plate in the street outside.

And then we hear the distant sirens, high and lonesome in the empty streets.

The other night, during a Zoom session, I heard a siren outside my window and then outside the window of a friend a few blocks away. We were connected in space, briefly, by the thin strand of a rising note. This is the sound of the city, now: emergency.