Amy found the scuffed glasses outside her fish-market stand just as she had found hundreds of items mornings before. Knife-sharpened pencils, boots smelling of goose liver, threadbare paisley socks and, of course, the wire rimmed glasses now, left lens cracked. Such were the things the stranger who slept in her booth left behind nightly and, often during the afternoon rush, returned for later; in the beginning quite angry, livid really, he demanded his possessions with confessions and apologies, spitting as much as shouting, frightening away regulars. A victim of robbery and subterfuge! Crimes against a man both hungry and homeless, a veteran no less, a war hero, or so he claimed. Over time his accusations softened. Eventually her recurring kindness begot gratitude, even embarrassment. Bashful and childlike, wool cap in hand, he'd come in search of his lost things and afterward extend in gratitude some stolen daffodils or scribbled sonnets (rhyming diskette with Monet, barrister with escritoire) that never made much sense. In time he left things deliberately, like trail ducks from one concrete timesharer to another, or so Amy suspected, a suspicion she shared with no one, or rather shared only in her writings, and only in sententious and highly metaphorical ways, for she too was an aspiring poet: wistful, determinedly insolvent, besotted by language and often seeing relational intentions where others did not.
Days passed. The unclaimed glasses gained dust beside the chalkboard specials. More foreboding than their cracked lens and owner's absence was the blood smeared right lens, at first unnoticed but now obvious to Amy and clearly indicating accident, perhaps violence, a deduction which the local police found both logical and not at all motivating, as did her neighboring vendors. Missing-person posters produced nothing, so she hung the glasses from a necklace with a handwritten sign, Recognize These?, which she wore each shift, then while shopping, to parties and dinners, then at all times but while sleeping or showering, like a wedding ring. She canvassed soup kitchens and shelters, walked noontime streets, midnight alleys, sought out the hidden hovels and brick building burrows, subterranean passageways, the abandoned trolley lines where forgotten people slept. One toothless woman said she could help but for a fifth of whiskey. Her senile husband freely offered the man's name––Chase. He professed to once knowing the man, a lyricist and a stevedore, though now dead and haunting the bell tower of St. Andrew's, the cathedral at Twelfth and Pike Street. Look there, the husband commanded.
Sky crepuscular and overcast, street lamps awakening in a hopscotch pattern toward Beacon Hill, Amy arrived ground level and did the only option remaining: she adorned the lopsided glasses and headed to the church she knew had no bells. Though around her neck for weeks, she had never worn the broken, bloodied glasses as glasses. Left eye shut, the world was a crimson haze––right eye shut, a bug eye kaleidoscope. Such alternated Amy's view, winking left and right with each footstep, as she ambled up Pike, evening headlights waterfalls of red, dandelion explosions of white. Signs seemed silly: NO RIGHT TURN suddenly NOR MIGHT URN; PEDESTRIAN CROSSING becoming EQUESTRIAN ROOSTING. Passers-by gave her wide berth; business people tossed change; the homeless ducked her gaze. All faces distorted, noses cubistically multiplied, Amy tried not to laugh, failed, snorted, giggled, howled. She reached the church––first pink, then white and topped with a dozen spires––and rounded the back to find a rickety staircase leading to a rotting door. Through one eye, a blood red warning carved into wood, "Guilty Looks Enter Tree Beers." Through the other, a child's enchantment, a fairytale.
The church attic stunk of musk and guano. Animals rustled. Amy heard soft chimes, chirping, a sibilous hum, perhaps flutes. She lit an old oil lantern found near the entrance; thousands of birds fluttered from their nests––grebes, loons, rails and gulls––but just as had the people, the birds gave Amy and her strange spectacles space. She wandered the derelict floor, noting hundreds of liquor bottles standing everywhere, catching both rain and wind, and singing (baritone bottles empty, sopranos nearly full), their song matched by rusty wind chimes hung center in the room, beneath which sat a writing table smooth and cold as the blarney stone, monolithic in size; beside that: a wool cap, smelly boots and two dissimilar socks. Around the desk were sketches of a woman shoveling crushed ice, setting out sandwich-board signs, giving change, sweeping––all drawn on old newsprint smelling of sockeye, sole, salmon and sea bass. Amy began to read the all-cap handwriting in the ledger left open, "THISTLE BEFORE AIM EASE–" then paused, closed one eye, and began again.
