Little Gifts

You’d forgotten how depressing Telegraph Avenue feels, especially this early on a Sunday morning in July. It’s summer, so most of the students have flown home, and the rest are pissed to be here, playing catch-up or getting ahead in their majors and therefore still asleep, hungover from all-night drinking or study parties or some inane combination of the two. Apart from the occasional street person begging change, mumbling obscenities from a doorway, the place is deserted. The fog’s chugged in like a bale of cold, wet cotton and unbound itself. An icy breeze sinks its teeth in, the way you remember.