Dusk

I put down my phone.

The rummaging sound on the other side of the wall had been growing louder. I skirted over to the window, opening it wider with a shoulder-heavy shove, and stuck my head and chest out.

At first I didn’t see anything, the grays and reds of the dusk light mixed in perfectly with the shadows. Just as I thought about going back in, a sharper noise rose from the dumpster. I caught motion out of the corner of my eye. Just over the rim of the green metallic side was a man’s torso.

The faint outline made a sudden movement. What I only guessed is that he had jumped up. After that dramatic movement came the crumpling of other people’s used goods. Though they probably aren’t so good any more.

The figure, a bum I guess, hopped from the dumpster onto the faded asphalt. The speed with which he moved made him seem somewhat accomplished. He didn’t even take much of a pause upon hitting the ground.

What could he have found?

He walked away to the sound of brisk scraping, pushing through the darkness under my window. I must have been completely invisible to him, though there was less gray and more red here on the 8th floor. My curiosity had peaked, I thought, which let me nearly withdraw from the window.

But at the dawn of that consideration, the scraping broke. It went from a rhythmic pulsing to a crunching sound as the lone footsteps were joined by others. Whether it was two or four or more, I couldn’t tell. But the noise was no longer heading away from me. It was directly beneath.

I tried to make my eyes follow what was happening through the dark. The sun had retreated even more however, which made this nearly impossible. I listened to the soundtrack of scraping and grunting.  This fight of sorts, could it have been started by the object in the dumpster? If there was an object.

The groaning turned to the sounds of contact. Chromatic collisions. I felt an exorbitant mixture of relief, curiosity and helplessness. Relief because I was far from the heat of the fight. The other two because I partly wish I was.

For a minute, the noise turned into an epitome of tension. Like the start of gunfire from opposing gangs. There was a booming sound of force on the dumpster’s side. My terror culminated, and was followed by moments of silence. How many, I can hardly count as everything in me was bent on making light out of what had become underwhelming dark, but dark nonetheless.

When the moments dissolved, the original scraping sound came back. But of only one pair of feet. One person was leaving, and from the sound of it, one person was not. The footsteps were twice the pace of what I had heard in the beginning. In seconds they were around the corner of the wall which headed toward the row. In shock, I remained.

I took a tighter grip on the window sill and tried to lean further and further out, hoping to see what I should have known I couldn’t. My stomach was now a pruny, airless sac. I was obsessed, inside and out, for the next minute, or ten minutes, or hour, wondering exactly what had happened in the alley.

And why?

I picked up my phone.