>I don’t know what whore you give the tip on this Night of Joy, but our boys have been in there almost every night and they haven’t turned up anything.
–from “Confederation of Dunces”
The __cat__ had escaped through an open window, onto the fire escape of their 13th floor apartment in the City. It began its descent to street level.
Every day she rode the red line through, well, under Cambridge, past the putrid waters of the Charles river, and into Boston. There, she switched to the Green line, which took her out to the lily-white streetcar suburbs of Boston.
The machine screamed and ground to a halt. “Shit,” he would surely be fired. They had no time for lost production, it was the height of the __marble__ season and they were already two weeks behind schedule. Assuming he still had a job, he could be sure there’d be no year-end bonus coming his way.
She padded her way purposefully down each link of the fire escape, pausing only once to watch a man groggily swat at his blaring alarm clock. She continued.
Through the chaos of this, the first train station in America, _Park Street Station_. She thought about how different the city must have been then, as she passed the historical display plastered with nostalgic Black & Whites.
He wiped the sweat from his grimy brow, and squinted into the murky bowels of the machine. At least his wife made some money teaching those rich white kids in suburbia.