Cityscape — Scranton, PA

            Dan Mac Guill

            A cough in the study hall knocked his pinball mind into
orbit, and it took a while for him to look beyond immediate
surroundings and settle on what lay outside. He saw much
through a glass wall and from five floors up. Everything in
Scranton slid resignedly into, or crawled, panicking, out of the
cleft of the Lackawanna river valley. This evening in November
the housed streets, commercial routes, and interstates inclined,
and the shimmering, jitter-bug lights of the trucks and
SUVs fled deceptively quickly up and away over an orange,
indiscernible horizon.
            Hesitating at arm's length from the window—in the
giant, glass rectangle he saw variously the city and himself.
Hovering wall-bound, that great pane kept him apart from the
city. As he neared the glass in a few suspicious shuffles, the
visage before him grew and grew in his eyes. His reflected hair
and face together became a skin peeled onto the glass—an added
filter through which he then viewed the tones of the sundown
melting nervously into one another. He approached it with
increasing comfort until his lips just touched the window and
the city on the other side, so that all he saw resided within the
silhouetted outline of his own head.
            It was then that he comprehended the city which kept
him. Everywhere it levered itself, groaning, uphill, and was lit by
dimly-sparkling outbound, weekend traffic. Littered along the
crest of the Pocono Mountains, he saw electricity towers lit
weakly at their peaks. He saw musty, austere-looking buildings,
and dying, withered, coal-black trees, rooted in the shallow earth.
Pointing, grimacing, scratching up and out of the valley with a
whimper, the inhabitants of Scranton breathed shivery, impure
exhale, exhaust fumes, and cigarette smoke into the frozen,
freezing atmosphere. The churches lay prone and missionary,
and their spires protruded guiltily to heavens above. The city,
everywhere shimmering and blinking dusk into night, gazed star
-struck and infatuated toward worlds beyond the evaporating
horizon.
            By then the light had declined and darkness had fallen.
Shaking himself from his twilight reverie, he found himself
immersed in a fresh night. He withdrew from the huge pane,
and returned to the room. Attempting to settle again at his
desk, he found the chair far from comfortable, and a vague, new
unease chilled him. Shivering, he felt as if he had been placed,
effervescent into water, and dissolved. Away now from the
window and the cityscape, he felt somehow incomplete, now
somehow half there.