City: New York
Author: Maya Gat
Location: Atlantic Ave and Henry Street

I was dressed to impress. Literally. I had just started seeing this fella, and I suspected, from the story he told me on our first date of old drug habits formed due to back injuries received from a dominatrix ex-girlfriend who pushed him off a balcony out of enthusiasm for a threesome in which they were about to engage, that he was a tad racier than myself.

Actually, racy was understatement—but not a deterrent. In preparation for our second encounter I wore the sexiest shirt I could find: blue and backless, shaped into a “V,” pointing instructively toward my rear. The front was a loose-fitting shear fabric, providing ample room for bounce and suggestion. Coupled with sobering tweed pants and respectably low heels, I thought the suggestion was balanced—sexy enough to catch his attention, tame enough to communicate there wasn’t a price tag attached.

Apparently, I was wrong. The men of Brooklyn had a rather different opinion about my look. From my house to my destination, nearly every man I passed made a comment about my appearance, some incredibly creative, but all exceedingly objectifying. Growing up in New York City I know about catcalls, and in a twisted way I appreciate the occasional “Hey, beautiful.” But on this day, “Hey, beautiful” was a far cry from “Can I taste your vanilla?” which quickly degenerated into an onslaught of obscenities and overly graphic insinuations. By the time a car pulled along side me and drove at the rate of my gait with a man leaning out of the window hissing, “Baby, I wanna ride you all the way to where you’re goin’,” I could only shake my head in shame both for them and for me.

Comments were hitting me from all sides, that awful kissing sound, lips smacking, lips licking, shouts from passing cars: I was under attack and had to think fast. I scanned the intersection of Atlantic and Henry streets for some sort of solution. Across the way there was an apartment complex under construction, diagonally from me a row of brownstones, behind me a Sell it on eBay store alongside a bodega. I spent a moment pondering what I might be able to buy in a Sell it on eBay store that could resolve my predicament before I recalled that you couldn’t actually buy anything from a Sell it on eBay store (hence the sell-it-on-eBay concept)^[1]. So I walked into the bodega.

I bought one item for one dollar there that transformed me from a completely objectified sexual object to an entirely non-noteworthy person. Perhaps instinct told me this item would help, although a comprehensive narrative about the state of sexuality, feminism and our society could have brought me to the same conclusion. Holding my purchase, I lost all semblance of sex appeal instantly. I paraded up and down that same street for over an hour (as my date turned out to be far from punctual).With my new magical power I waltzed in front of the same men who had made me feel so dirty and small with their titles for me and derogatory requests of me, and not one single man made one single comment about what potential ice cream flavor I might taste like, or my need for their company. One item for one dollar from a bodega and I was saved, rendered completely invisible to all those previously insatiable men, rescued by my choice to buy the fucking New York Times.

City: New York
Author: Robb Todd
Location: Times Square

I walk up the avenue toward the lights of Times Square, stopping to spit in the gutter, fighting a summer cold on a warm night with a breeze. I wrote five headlines that will be in tomorrow’s newspaper. Nothing happy. Now I’m meeting my girlfriend in a place I usually avoid, the part of New York that is the least like New York, the part of New York that is hardest for me to love, the part of New York that is the most like the rest of America. I sip a cold beer in a paper bag, and weave between wandering tourists, their eyes toward the sky. Glowing lights ahead, cabbies honking their horns, brakes squealing, random laughter echoing off skyscraper walls, rising above the grinding city noise. I toss an empty can into the trash, and survey the corners for another deli to buy another beer, $2, $2.10, $1.60. Beats bar prices. Shouldn’t be sick still—it’s been a week. Feeling old. Or like a baby. But each sip refreshes. Music, like a marching band, but it’s coming from a bar. A young woman with a purse slung over her shoulder, flip-flops flipping and flopping, glances in every trash can, finally stopping to pluck a large half-eaten pretzel before continuing up the avenue. She doesn’t look homeless or strung out, but she scans the garbage. I walk under scaffolding, through a group of guys wearing cleaning crew uniforms, talking about women, loudly evaluating them as they pass, including the girl with the pretzel. They take up half the sidewalk, bottlenecking the spot. I save my spit for the next block so they don’t mistake a cold for an insult. My girlfriend calls. I tell her to meet me catty-corner from a restaurant with a giant, glowing lobster over its door. I explain what catty-corner means^[1]. Then I wait for her in the light of ads beaming suggestions into the outskirts of Times Square. A Coke does sound nice, shimmering red and white Pavlovian lights. There are ads for booze, drugs, clothes, video games, music, all being sold with sex. There are chain restaurants that promise the very same meal here that you can eat in Topeka and L.A. There are signs for businesses that claim to take care of your money, and places to spend your money to take care of your business. No gimmicks like sex needed. Cash is cash, and this is the neon fruit supermarket. I spit in the gutter, and my lungs have new space for air, and I feel better, because it’s the opposite of more is less, and the opposite of subtraction by addition. A mosquito bites me. My girlfriend calls. She’s on the corner waving. She runs toward me, kisses me, hugs me, and I forget about the ads, finish my beer, ride the subway home. But in bed, next to her in the dark, all I see are the lights, and the lights, and the lights.

City: shanghai
Author: Denis Wong
Location: the bus stop on Baise Lu, in front of the brothel, next to the Kedi

At the intersection of Baise Lu and Longchuan Lu, a line of yesterday’s noodle water ebbs away from an overturned vat, leaving an oily sheen on the sidewalk. Bits of food-like particles ride the thin skin of the opaque surface. I step aside to avoid the snaking, encroaching fluid and accidentally bump into an old grandma.

“Duibuqi,”^[1] I offer with a raised hand. She doesn’t look up. 

I am waiting for the 824 bus to Xujiahui^[2], or maybe a cab to Taikang Lu^[3] – it depends on which arrives first. I wave at yet another taxi, this one a rusted maroon, a three-star cab if the lights are real.^[4] It passes by.

I have a break-up with my Mandarin tutor waiting for me in Xujiahui. It really isn’t her, it’s me. My slow, awkward tongue refuses to make progress. She’s too nice to say how awful I sound, but I can tell by the crinkle above her nose when my tones fall flat. 

A 973 bus approaches, kicking up dust along the way. People get off, others replace them in a jumble. Grandma stays alongside me. 

On Taikang Lu, on the second floor of the Japanese café, Evelyn is probably sipping a cup of green tea. She’ll refuse offers for a second cup, her Midwestern politeness taking hold. Instead, she’ll order edamame, which she’ll carefully peel, taking care not to damage the beans. She is fresh, smiling maybe. By now, three days into her visit, the jetlag will have been left behind, lost somewhere between continents in the Pacific. 

I haven’t seen her yet. Obligations. Work. Mandarin lessons that need to be cancelled. 

It has been almost a year. Seven months longer than I promised. In fall, her internship at Tufts will begin, followed by residency.

I run my thumb along the folded corner of my new contract: two years.

A wailing screech interrupts my thoughts. It’s the 824. As the bus exhales, the center door slides open, revealing a wall of compressed bodies. Two men jostle past me and sidle into cracks within the foundation. I balance one foot on the edge, my toes curling inside my shoe. The ticket collector screams in Shanghainese and the shoving intensifies. With elbows angled inward, I dig for my metro card. There’s a nudge near my right kidney. Slight at first, then harder, insistent. It’s grandma, burrowing. 

“Hey, wait,” I say, in English, and this time, she does look up. Her dark, sunken eyes regard me for two long seconds, and then, with a firm thrust, she pushes me out the door and back onto the street. 

The bus pulls away, trailing exhaust. 

As I dust off, I see my contract lying on the sidewalk. The pages are half-soaked in noodle water, the edges of the letters blurred. 

I rest my index finger on the first page, and give it a gentle pull. The pages wrinkle, and a small tear appears.

Author: Anne Schwartz
Location: in the Square Trousseau, 12th arrondissement

It was a Paris summer morning like many others, hot when I woke up, the air in my apartment stuffy with sleep.  Outdoors, it was cooler but gray.  Not a promising start.  But there was marketing to be done.  A métro ride across town to the Marché d’Aligre and a couple of transactions later, the sun had come out, my canvas bag had been filled with Middle Eastern specialties, fresh fruit, and poulet rôti^[1], but my mood had only somewhat improved.

I stopped in at a boulangerie^[2] on Square Trousseau for a pain au chocolat^[3], my reward to myself for making myself understood in French, counting out the right change.  Tucked in off the busy rue du Faubourg Saint Antoine, the park across the street beckoned.  I crossed over, opened the hip high gate and found a green wooden bench in the shade. 

Sitting there, I tried to put my finger on what was bugging me. Complaining about living in Paris is something akin to high treason.^[4] So lucky to be living in Paris, how dare I have even one negative thought about living in the City of Lights?  The cafes, the boulevards, the fashion, the wine, the pastries, the art, the light as it filters through the chestnut trees— this is the stuff of legend, of dreams, I told myself, you ungrateful boor.

But for me, the joy and wonder of those first months had been fizzling away.  Alone for much of the time over the last few weeks, my new friends scattered to the four winds for the summer, I was learning that Paris is also the city of trash and worse on the sidewalks, the stench of urine in the metro, the homeless men sprawled in the doorways in even the most upscale parts of town.  Nary a smile on the street and people standing so close behind you in line that you feel the stickiness of their skin against yours and the stale smell of cigarette smoke on your neck. 

From my seat on the bench, though, life looked calm, quiet, and cool.  The traffic from the avenue seemed distant.  The air felt crisp.  The sidewalks around the square were freshly washed. The stores were just beginning to open, the grafitti disappearing as metal grates went up. In the park, a man sat at a table, tapping on his laptop.  The mothers at the playground were freeing children from their strollers who then rushed headlong for the sandbox and slides.  Empty ping pong tables gleamed silver in the filtered sunlight.  I took a deep bite into the buttery pastry, the warm chocolate, and felt a wave of renewal. 

Author: Catherine Vreeland
Location: near the Jardin du Luxembourg

On a late afternoon in the Luxembourg Gardens I was relaxing in a metal armchair with a Cara Black mystery when I was distracted by a grubby girl, 20ish, who seemed to be looking for something to eat. She nimbly snatched the pain au chocolat^[1] a little boy had set on his au pair’s^[2] lap, and then plucked an apple resting at the top of an open backpack. She didn’t run away or fuss at all, so the au pair and the backpack boy did not realize their food had gone.

Graceful, secretive and stony-faced, the girl’s body language belied the message of her muckiness. I wanted to give her a dress and invite her to a party. She disappeared, I went back to my book, and then suddenly she was standing in front of me with her dirty, sticky hand out. I hesitated, but passed over a 20-euro note and watched her crumble it. She didn’t move. I read another couple of pages. She still didn’t move.

“Do you want a meal?” I asked in English.
“That’d be bang on,” she said, and I caught the irony of a possible design. An educated ragamuffin? And with the secret of solo survival? More than mystery, she seemed to have promise, to be living (or rehearsing a role?) at a very interesting way station, but I didn’t know what it was she had that I wanted.
“Let’s go across the street,” I said, getting up and walking toward the fountain, heading for Le Rostand.^[3] She came along, silent.

In the big, noisy café, I was careful not to suggest she wash her hands. I looked over the menu, ordered first, and got several dishes, to be encouraging. The girl ordered lots of meat, and wine.

“Do you speak any French?” I asked offhandedly, as if continuing a conversation, hoping to get her story to flow.
“I just got here,” she tossed back, “and I’m sleeping rough. This is good rôti^[4], but the wine is a little off.” She went back to eating, like a spy decoding a particularly difficult communiqué. I remembered my first days in Paris forty years earlier. I hadn’t had a shred of her élan. Could she show me what it felt like to be her?

Suddenly she stood up, bowed slightly with a sardonic grin on her face, said “Merci, Madame,” and scooted out of the restaurant. The garçon appeared instantly. I asked for l’addition^[5], feeling oddly bereft.

Author: Lily Templeton
Location: near the Eiffel Tower

The métro stopped at Bir-Hakeim^[1] and showed no sign of moving again. It was irritating, like everything in this awful city I could not wait to leave. After the requisite time of impatient waiting with my fellow travellers, I got out of the crowded car and into the brisk night air. It would be a quick walk, at my usual speed. La Tour Eiffel stood her luminous vigil, her beacon tracing evanescent circles among the clouds.

My pace slowed at the middle of the bridge^[2] and I cast a resentful glance over my shoulder. She was still there, with her shining coat of orange and the green belt of the RER C at her feet.

A breath of air I did not know I was holding escaped me. I leaned against the railing and for a moment, we watched each other.

“I hate it here,” I told her to break the silence. “I’m leaving this place as soon as I can.”

Her light swept all of Paris.^[3] The Left Bank to where my high school stood, the Right Bank to where I live, and everything in between, those familiar places rife with memories.

Like my mother, she let my lie slide without reproach. Another sweep of her light and I was aware that it was getting late. My hands were cold. With a final sweep, she motioned me home. I knew what she meant. She should have been torn down at the end of the World’s Fair, and yet there she is, still standing, in a town that didn’t want her at first. Conceding my defeat, I gave her a wry smile before walking home.

City: New York
Author: Paul Weidknecht
Location: Gantry Plaza State Park

Long Island City, Queens. My cousin said it was the best place in the city to see the City, that there wasn’t a better spot to see fireworks on the Fourth. But it wasn’t the Fourth; it was a mild night in August, and he, my brother and I stood there at the end of the Gantry Plaza State Park pier looking out over the East River’s flickering blackness. Across the river, the lights were on at Walter Chrysler’s place, white triangles bright against the dark sky, with the nub of the Empire State, now in yellow, just visible from behind a tower of windows. To the right, the glass of the U.N. Building glowed a vague, quiet green.

We weren’t alone here. Nearby, lovers stood next to each other, leaning over the rail, whispering. A photographer prepared for his art, and after a series of soft clicks had his camera and tripod joined for a skyline shot, an enlarged copy promised to his friend.

One of us looked at Manhattan and mentioned something about calmness, tranquility. The words sounded strange, out of place—who describes New York City as calm?—but we nodded, muttering in agreement; it was calm.

In the distance, a lighted boat appeared. Several minutes later, it angled toward us. A tug, maybe. A ferry, someone else suggested; none of us able to pick up the shape. To our right, on the pier several feet away, fishermen continued casting to anything willing to eat, the whirr of line racing through the rod guides followed by a small splash of light as the bait found the surface of the dark water. The long, tiered boat approached with a loudness, a steady thumping—Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom—the heavy bass of a club’s sound system.

The cruise passed close, with laughter loud over the water, the top deck dense with undulant bodies; rhythmic in their shaking, dipping, swaying. I imagined each in a sheen of sweat, every head thrown back in a joy exaggerated by the moment, their voices folded over each other, like a mirror held up to a mirror that goes on and on.

Then there was a different sort of laughter, now drunken, mocking, sinister. And we knew. They were laughing at us—all of us—the losers on the pier who couldn’t find nightlife in the city that had perfected it. Seconds later we were laughing back reflexively, at the clowns in the floating club who hadn’t noticed serenity gliding right behind them.

And as the boat made its slow wide turn back toward wherever it had come, we listened to the blunt downbeat of the woofers, hearing the DJ shout to the party, “Make some noise!”

Author: Tory Hoen
Location: in Montmartre and a taxi

I had gone out for a drink and, eight hours later, I was still out, shimmying around an impromptu dance party at an artist’s apartment in Montmartre, amazed at how an evening in Paris could suddenly morph into a perfect parody of itself. I was still new to this city, and many of my early nights here went this way.

One apéro^[1] led to another, which, on this night, led to an art opening, then to a cheese plate—shared by all of us—and then the bartender reached behind the zinc bar to pull out a special wine he wanted us to try; the conversation escalated, the group became more and more delighted with itself, with the city, with the world at large. We sauntered over cobblestones. My friend stopped to pick up a playing card from the ground—a lucky sign. We passed Sacré Coeur and slipped through the apartment’s doorway, dancing through the halls of what seemed like an alternate world perched atop the city. Samurai swords hung on the walls and bossa nova floated through the secret garden in the courtyard. Paris itself felt like an alternate world, and I was incapable of separating the reality of it from the dream of it, if there is a difference.

I tumbled out of the magic apartment onto the cobblestones, where a taxi idled quietly. I jumped for it, knowing the Metro had long since stopped running for the night. As we descended, Sacré Coeur loomed higher and higher behind us, and the taxi driver asked the fatal question: “Qu’est-ce que vous faites à Paris?”^[2]

At this point, the truth still felt ridiculous. I was twenty-four. I had left everything familiar in New York to move here without knowing why. To write a novel, I told myself. To discover something. To stumble upon an opportunity that I could not yet anticipate. I wanted to tell him how New York had drained me of energy and how, as soon as I set foot on French soil, I knew I could create any kind of life I wanted.

But my limited French and the long wine-soaked evening prevented me from articulating all that I wanted to say. As we neared the Bastille, the Spirit of Liberty floated ahead of us, star-like in the black night.^[3] I had fifteen seconds to come up with something.

There is room to breathe here. Everything begs to be written down. You can be young and unpublished and a writer; these are not oxymorons. Paris wants writers; it helps them. “Paris est plus…” I tried to put a thought together.

“C’est plus…” he searched for words as well.

“C’est plus inspirant.”

“Vous avez trouvé le mot,” he confirmed.^[4]

Paris is its own reason. 

City: shanghai
Author: Panthea Lee
Location: the Arrivals area, Terminal A, Hongqiao Airport

His skin reminded me of those sweet potatoes I bought from street vendors, sandpapery and coarse-brown. A juicy mole dangled from his chin, and from that spot of soot sprouted one solitary hair. White. Wiry. Posture proud, it arched its back just so. Just suggestively so.

I ogled the come-hither curl, unable to turn away. Suddenly, it launched into a spirited jig. Up and down it heaved. And then, as if on cue, the soundtrack: a warbling ditty of phlegm-fired barks.

I shrank deeper into my seat and nuzzled the window.

The flight attendants began the emergency procedure demonstrations and I returned to my book. My neighbour, however, was spellbound. Brows furrowed, mouth ajar, he tried to memorize their every move. He tugged at his seatbelt. He unbuckled and rebuckled it. He looked for his lifejacket, seemingly unconvinced that it was indeed under the seat in front of him. He squirmed. He shed his coat. He fidgeted with the buttons on the armrest.

“Ni zai du yingyu.”

I looked up. Eh?

“Ni zai du yingyu.”

You are reading English.

“My daughter also knows how to read English,” he continued, his Putonghua^[1] gingered by a provincial pulse. “She spent six years in America!” The sprig of hair wagged emphatically.

“Oh,” I smiled, “that’s, uh, great.”

“Six years! She went to work there, to make a new life. And she worked very hard but, you know, it’s too hard in America. Everything is difficult. So now she’s come back to China. That’s why I’m going to Shanghai – she won’t come back to our village, but she’s sent for me. She wants me to be with her.” His back straightened six inches.

For the rest of the flight, I was treated to The Yu Family Saga (unedited, unabridged, 2001-08). The betrayal of filial duty as the rogue daughter set out for foreign lands. The radio silence. The heartache. The now-imminent reunion, only 1 hour and 43…42…41… minutes away.

We hit the tarmac.

“Well, it was very nice to meet –”

“Are we here? Great! You can meet Xiao Bai^[2].”

I started fumbling for excuses but it was no use. The decision had been made: we were in this together. And so, together, we entered the terminal. Resisting the dash for cabs, I inched along stiffly with my new friend, silently cursing our glacial pace as he, eyes wide, drank in every detail of Hongqiao^[3]. Seeing the automatic doors that marked the threshold of Arrivals, I halted. Mid-stride. I was inexplicably tense.

And then we were before them – a mob of placards and waiting, doting loved ones – exposed and ready to be claimed.

Hugging his bulging rucksack, Mr. Yu strained his neck and combed the crowd. I pretended that I, too, had someone to look for. Someone who would be waiting for me. (It wasn’t so improbable?) I tugged at my skirt. I fixed my hair. Did it again. Eyes ran over me, and moved on. I wished one set would stop, even for a second. Hell, would mistake me for someone else, for someone they wanted.

Just one person, just one second.

I locked eyes with a young, clean-cut man. He smiled, I brightened. I then noticed his sign (“Not you, love.”). Flustered, my eyes shot down, my heart deflated. Hundreds of eyes continued to dart around me, hundreds of eyes continued to pass me over.

“Ba!”

It was her! She charged at us, all outstretched arms and tears. And then she embraced my companion, and together they stood, wrapped up as one.

I turned, walked to the end of the taxi queue, and waited my turn.

City: shanghai
Author: Cam Rimington
Location: a rooftop whose location he’d rather you not know about

Phone calls home always leave me pensive – what am I doing here?

Well “here” on the crumbling roof is easy enough to answer. I’ve literally risen above the heat and mosquitoes of the manic streets below to get some perspective. Putuo^[1] is sweating today.

Seven floors up and I’m still dwarfed by the anonymous apartment towers behind me. I like being one of the myriad vignettes tenants see when they look out their greasy windows: here a solitary foreigner, there a yapping dog, a tired housewife gingerly bringing in her washing from the 18th floor or an old man limbering up by his basin in an off-white singlet that makes me think he lives alone.

I will love these grimy towers and the grubby little tiles that cover them, simply because I will imbue their charmless facades with affinity…

What am I doing here?

When I tire of that fruitless question, I distract myself by examining the neighbourhood skyline, scanning for telltale reminders of the new city in which I now find myself. There are a handful of unfamiliar characters scattered across high-rise billboards, but nothing conclusive. I could be anywhere, really. There are no landmarks here.

And so I have singled out my own: a dented glass edifice and the set of pockmarked triplets next to it. There is a chalet-style building with a garish cobalt roof and an ornate turret of some faux-European apartments, both framed perfectly by the green-clothed construction sites in front.

I’m selfish with this skyline of mine. I want to take a photo and smugly show it to others. I want to challenge them to find the exact spot where it was taken, confident that they would be unable to arrange all the elements in the right formation, at the correct angles, convinced that they could never experience this scene as I am experiencing it now. 

But what am I doing here?

The late afternoon throws amber and shadows across my broken rooftop. An idle zephyr glides lazily through me nudges something into place. I relinquish an easy sigh.

And, all at once, things become manageable. That nagging question ceases to matter. Here, suspended between the heights of the apartments and the heat of the street, my hesitation clears, my apprehension ebbs and nostalgia from cross-continental voices slips away. All at once, my doubts and second guesses give way to a pragmatic clarity. All at once, the simple fact of being here eclipses the reasons for it.

I smile at the simplicity of my newfound state of mind and hope that it lasts.

City: New York
Author: David Licata
Location: Noguchi Museum

The October afternoon belonged to me, and I wanted to escape myself, to go somewhere I’d always meant to go but hadn’t. I trekked to Long Island City’s Noguchi Museum: by tram over the East River, by foot over the rusting Roosevelt Island bridge and then down an industrial boulevard, finally reaching what was once the artist’s studio^[1]. On the first floor, The Stone Within, a vertical, vaguely cylindrical sculpture almost as tall as I and as wide as my apartment door, captivated me. I slid two fingers along a portion of polished black basalt and burned when I realized how much it felt like her skin.

I walked to the garden and sat on a wooden bench. A girl, seven or so, entered running, chased around the garden’s sculptures by a boy who could only be her younger brother. They giggled and their footsteps crackled on the gravel. Their parents entered seconds later.

“Stay on the path,” their mother said.

The father walked toward a fountain. “Yuki, Pedro, come here,” he said. He was younger than I, Latino, with short black hair and a chiseled, angular face. His fine clothes fit him well.

His children came to him but his wife, dressed in black, bird-like and sad-looking, did not.

“This is my favorite fountain in the whole world,” he said. He lowered his voice to the volume reserved for churches, and I could no longer hear him.

I was disappointed. The ex spoke affectedly of the garden, of the fountain, and I kept trying to see what she had seen here, to understand. Did she view it from this bench? Did her gaze wander to those bamboo trees and follow them upward? Did she think of me? Was she thinking of me now?

“Excuse me,” the father said to me, “would you take our picture?”

“Of course.”

“Mariko!” His wife joined him by the fountain. Water rose through its interior mysteriously and collected in a font, glazed over the top and down its sides and into the ground where the cycle began again. I took two photos of the family. “Great,” he said, looking at the screen. “Can you take one more?”

The family posed again. I said, “Say cheese.”

“Queso,” the father said. He hoisted the boy in the air as I depressed the shutter button; I had captured the son laughing in mid fall.

“Strangers take the best pictures,” the father said. His wife bowed.

On the N train home I didn’t think about the woman who wanted to delete me from her history, whom I desired but who no longer desired me; instead I thought about all the times the word “Anonymous” appeared on placards beside works of art, and I sensed I had done something important, something lasting.

Author: Jennifer K. Dick
Location: near the tip of Île de la Cité

Paris gathered under huddled packs.  Bridges or arabesques.  She, the late, of the… And who has been between the blonde floorboards? Remembering stories, afternoons (she) fanned night into water. The purloined letter and the patchwork clock ticking heart underfoot.  What did she store in there? Buoys in our thoughts, weights and average body height between streetlamps.  She in dreams, on the heat, takes down the packaging list and labels for supply crates. Things we’d need as cadavers: moccasins, candles, a good Hardy Boy novel. She wonders what Peter collects, bodies in underwater grottoes netted below bronze support beams, though she herself is steeled for the leap. To push past the Pont des Arts ^[1] in the off hours. Prefer to eat, to read, to ….? Huddled caverns and she cannot think. She had not reflection on this hand (to hard) surface. Which to palpate mid-street? She sounds between voices. Gilded angels taking off from Châtelet, Bastille, Invalides. Raft-like, Charon’s^[2] rotted wooden mass pontoons past Napoleon’s stashed mummies: canauxrama, ^[3] damp rags or a season. It seems her invalidated choices irritate a cumbersome number of well-wishers.  She leaves a note anyway, stuck under lion-paw. Cities or combustibles raked like raku pots crackling under pressure. She picks at the pieces, in tears, muttering spells to call them back to herself. Abracadabra. Melopoeia^[4]. “Tressle tables and incarnations of incandescence,” she asks, “and if the body is ink glowing slow into devise?” This scheme rooting for itself.  Why not?  Rapid incapacitation is like this stroll down Beaumarchais, round Printemps.  Pockets empty.  Carvaggio’s decapitated carcasses coming to life in the Louvre. She clamors onto the Tuileries.  She knows this is her doing, undoing, done because too many masses were in the shopping. Round the tables she gives over her coins.  Flipped heads up, a monkey tail’s writing back in the Cluny,^[5] writhing the back-handed permission behind the tapestries. “Where,” they repeat, “where did you” (numerical responsibility) “store…?” Admission in admonishment or rather.  She steadies herself.  Vaguely.  A contusion displaced.  Or places where things take off: Charles de Gaulle, Orly, a dug-up set of bones on a turn in Les Halles^[6].  Investigation leads her back and forth, bright then faded. For hours she licks the walls, reads the captions. This epoch’s insistence on a blank state.  She’s tabula rasa with a laugh. “This is the toe-tag labeller,” she says, “this is the job I want.” No use. Held up hand dismembered from its handout. Mice barrel down on the quais making their getaway. What was that again under the sweaty spotlight? Occupants stashed in the annals of her story?  If threats entreat response, letters cut from newspapers blacken skin. We feed on the Parisian, Le Monde, Libé, Le Figaro.^[7].  What out of hand is getting to?  This towards meandering.  Inadmissible relations and circumstantial books in an opened case. Squint towards a batch of things suspended, gathering round. It’s just a tourist trap, a treatise on a universe composed of tiny lights. Things, like her dialogues, just under the Seine. A pulse in hindsight trickling. 

Author: Jussara Nunes
Location: in the middle of the platform, direction Chateau de Vincennes.

It was quite late at night. I had just parted from my friends at the entrance of the station, each one of us taking a different metro line. Even though it was late in the evening, there were tons of people on the line 1 platform, some waiting, like me, to go home; some going somewhere else to continue partying. The Châtelet metro station^[1] is weird at any time of day or night and I don’t like it at all: always crowded, with its smelly-dirty corners, and strange people lurking about. There is some nice music to be heard now and then through the corridors, which function as some sort of performance space. Then there are the people like me who go there to take the metro. Châtelet. Such a nice name.^[2] Such a strange flora and fauna of nightlife.

I was standing there, earplugs tucked deep into my ears. I was away listening to some music. My earplugs serve as a shield to protect me against the violent world out there. I can’t hear, but I can see. And people can see me. He saw me.

I was leaning against the wall, midway down the platform. He passed once in front of me, going left.  He passed again going right. He crossed my field of vision again and again, until he saw that I had definitely seen him.  He caught my attention. He smiled. I pretended not to notice. He stopped and said something. I read a ‘Hello’ in his lips.

He was about 1,55m tall.^[3] Dark hair, quite long. He was wearing red lipstick, in a clownish style, the red had passed his lips, and had make up on his eyes. He insisted. Who knows why, but I take off my earplugs and stop the music. And listen to him. A dialogue out of nowhere and from the 5th dimension begins.

—You are beautiful. Don’t worry, I won’t harm you.

—Of course not, I wouldn’t let you.

—You are beautiful, I love your eyes. You’re Latin American right?

—Yup.

—Me too. I dance and sing.

—I see.

—Do you?

—No. So, that’s why you are wearing this make up.

—I love you, you know?

—No I don’t.

—Well, I really do.

—Ok.

—I will love you forever.

—Really? I’m sure you will say the same thing to someone else tomorrow.

I smile. He smiles.

The train pulls into the station. He waves goodbye and blow me a kiss. I blush. The crowd is looking at me.

I tuck my earplugs back in my ears.

Off I go. I never think of him. I think of him when I happen to take the metro at the same station around the same time. I wonder if he still dances somewhere nearby.

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Lindsay Lueders
Location: the Inokashira line, car 4, Kichijoji station

She was hopelessly sexy. It was undeniable; her allure was dripping from her sleeping body in teaspoons and unfolding into the night. Her legs, decorated in delicate black fishnets, were sliding further apart with every jerk of the locomotive. Her tumbling black head of locks rocked sweetly, bobbing and dangling on a limp, unconscious neck. In other cities of the world, I would have feared for her purity. 

But the gentlemen around her took a tangible pleasure not in gawking but in overseeing her safe transport home. If one of them had been holding a blanket, he would have wrapped her securely in it. They were watching over her in wordless, self-supervised agreement. 

When we arrived at Kichijoji, she remained oblivious in her seat. Dewy eyes closed, her porcelain arms and legs splayed attractively. Even her handbag was wide open, cosmetics and glosses nearly spilling out into our faces. 

Who would be the lucky man to alert her to the fact that we had reached the end of the line? This task, too, was approached with solemn modesty; too eager a volunteer would have appeared incongruently lewd. One young man appointed himself, stood and touched her shoulder, brimming with what could only have been honor. She rose in a deer-like wobble and her skirt fell back to its rightful length. The straps of her sling backs were squashed under her bare heels but I knew that she’d traipse into the dark evening safe from perversion, under the watchful eye of a careful and trustworthy society. 

Author: Richard Nahem
Location: in the Marais

I went to the bank on a Wednesday during the summer.  Sweating profusely, I anticipated what excuses not to take my deposit the teller might invent today.

I had first gone on Monday, to deposit money for the rent, but the sign said it was closed on Mondays in July and August. I went back the next day, but they were closed for lunch. I returned after lunch with all of my cash carefully counted out, even listing how many 20s, 10s, and 5s there were on my deposit slip. I waited for about 15 minutes since there was only one window open, practicing in my head how I was going to say “I want to make a deposit” in French. My turn came, I said my phrase, and the teller smiled at me and understood. She said “I‘m sorry but we don’t accept cash deposits on Tuesday.”

Flabbergasted, I said what do you mean? and then she said it again. I scratched my head and thought: this is incredible.  Société Générale, ^[1] the second largest bank in France, doesn’t want my money. I took my pile of bills and put them in my pocket, leaving the bank feeling defeated and bewildered. I tried to imagine if I had gone to the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York and they had refused my deposit, and laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea.

When I first moved to Paris in 2005 from New York, I was told by a number of friends that it was hard to open a French bank account and that banking in general was a difficult affair in France, to say the least. I thought I was proving them wrong when within 10 days of moving here I painlessly opened a bank account in less than 30 minutes. I told everyone I didn’t understand what they were talking about, and they said wait and see.

So there I was, Wednesday before lunch, back at the bank. I had even remembered to fill out the “special” deposit slip they said I needed in order to deposit “so much” cash. I got to the window and handed the teller my deposit.  She said “I’m sorry, but you can only deposit an amount this large at your own branch.” I looked around for the hidden cameras to see who was playing this cruel joke on me. Alas, there were none. This time I wasn’t defeated or bewildered. I started screaming New York-style obscenities.

I had to admit sheepishly to my friends that they were right, and they grinned that “I told you so” grin so proudly.

City: New York
Author: Jónas Knútsson
Location: Waverly Place, Greenwich Village

Next door to my apartment in the Village is a private ballroom. On weekends the patrons invade the neighborhood in stretch limos and whoop it up in the perfectly sound-proof den of iniquity, only to pour into the street as the feast draws to a close. The rest is pandemonium, a few feet from my one-way bedroom window. I never peek out as the incorporeal chorus lulls me to sleep.

A brawl. An older man keeps hollering, but the flow of his riff is never broken. I assume no one chooses to engage him.

“I’ve been shot twenty-seven times. Twenty-seven times I’ve been shot.”

During the ruckus, no one says a word except the guy bellowing, “I’ve been shot, twenty-seven times.”

The racket dies down. But the man keeps on shouting about being shot twenty-seven times. The ramblers have either gone home or been beaten to a pulp. But the man goes on shrieking, “I’ve been shot twenty-seven times.”

At last he falls silent.

Maybe he had been shot twenty-seven times.

“We need treatment.”

The woman is hysterical. She calls the man “son of a bitch,” “motherfucker.”

Every accusation is countered with the mantra, “We need treatment, baby. We need therapy.”

The man starts crying. The woman breaks into tears as well, but her torrent of rage flows uninterrupted: “You motherfucking son of a bitch. You son of a bitch motherfucker.”

“We need treatment,” the man concludes.

A long silence follows.

As I drift off into my long-deserved slumber, a lonely grumble ruptures the fragile silence outside:

“I’ve been shot twenty-seven times.”

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Edamame
Location: a kaiten sushi shop (now gone)

We watched as the trained sushi chefs silently and expertly added more plates onto the conveyor belt. It was late afternoon and there were maybe five other customers who sat perched on their stools in cramped quarters. Our gaze was focused on the freshest catch to satisfy our appetites.

A plate of ika^[1] nigiri sushi went round and round, waiting for someone to claim it and save it from yet another 360-degree turn on the belt. The ika had made too many turns. It was not attracting any one of us as we conspiratorially and collectively ignored its existence. One of the sushi chefs sprayed it with some water to give it a glistening exterior, just as a woman would put on fresh make-up to attract a suitor.

I remarked to my companion, “wouldn’t it be sad to become a dry piece of squid on the kaiten sushi of life?  That’s a fate one wants to avoid.” We laughed about it as we began making a conscious effort to avoid it while counting every turn it made.  Four, five, six…it went round and round, to a point where you wanted to ask the itamae-san^[2] to please put it out of its misery.

Years later, the shop went out of business.  And I too found myself discarded like some unwanted fish. 

City: New York
Author: Jill Widner
Location: The Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia

I’m walking down 68th Street toward Wollman Lake, thinking about Joni Mitchell’s 29 skaters and anonymity and the blank face at the window that stares and stares and stares and stares.

Halfway down the block, on the second-floor balcony of a narrow gray stone building, I notice a red and white flag whipping in the wind. On the wall, a small bronze plaque engraved with a Garuda bird reads, “Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia.”

It is an elegant 19th century mansion between Madison and Fifth Avenue. The air is so cold, so bright, the glass in the windows on the upper floors seems to vibrate.

The entrance at the top of the stairs is locked, but another staircase leads to the basement. I turn the knob. This door is open. Inside, behind what must be a security window, a woman is working at a desk. I am so terrible at beginnings. I don’t know what to say.

She is suspicious. “What do you want?”

“I saw the flag outside. I grew up in Indonesia. Nearly 40 years ago. I don’t know what I want. I just know I had to come in.”

“Where did you live, Jakarta?”

“Sumatra.”

“Where?”

“Near Palembang.”

Her face softens infinitesimally. She points across the hall toward another room, where several office workers are moving about behind another glass window. “He is from Palembang.”

I am standing on the public side of the security glass in a narrow waiting room. Except for a straight-backed wooden bench against one wall, the room is empty.^[1] A row of windows near the ceiling is meant to let in the light, but this is the basement of the mansion; the glass is grimy and wrought iron bars block the view of the sidewalk outside. I see the man from Palembang through the security window. He is speaking on the phone. I wait. I look from the bench to the bars on the windows.

It is the man’s parents who are from Palembang. He was raised in Jakarta. But he is familiar with Sungai Gerong, the oil camp across the river from Palembang, where I grew up. Though a little self conscious, a little shy, he seems willing to talk. He is younger than I am. Maybe he is uncertain of his English. He remembers the name of a dish particular to Palembang, a fish from the Musi River simmered in chili sauce. He asks me if I know it. I don’t. It isn’t long before we have run out of things to say.

He walks me to the front door. Hands me his business card. The receptionist is watching us through the security glass. She asks me where I live now.

“Washington.”

“D.C.?”

“State. Washington State.”

Suddenly she is speaking to me in Indonesian. “Tadi kita terbang ke…” I know at once what she is saying. “We flew to Seattle not too long ago.” I don’t know why sometimes it’s so easy and sometimes so hard.

I glance at the business card: Department of Consular Affairs, Consulate General of Indonesia. I turn it over. He has written something on the back. Without reading, I ask, “Does this say, Saya mau pulang?”

He doesn’t understand. “It is my email address.”

“Because I used to say that—Saya mau pulang—or think it—I want to go home. Because this never felt like home. I always thought I would return.”

The woman is skeptical. “Tidak terlalu panas—It isn’t too hot for you?”

I shrug.

Of course, she is probably right. We were expatriates. We had A.C. in every room. What would I have known of the heat.

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Hakanai
Location: a karaoke box near the Hachiko exit of Shibuya station

Loveless in the karaoke box, I watched lyrics roll across a TV screen in time to unsung songs. A tongue was moving around my big toe, like a warm slug crawling. 

The owner of the tongue lifted his mouth from my foot for a moment and held the foot in his hand. He paused, and I looked at him, thinking that he might be going to speak, but the pause was not a long one. No sooner had he left my big toe than he started on the next one, with the same concentration.

I’d met him an hour before at Hachiko^[1], the dog statue at Shibuya crossing. Hachiko’s story reminded me of another dog in another town, a different dog with the same story. All over the world, people were building monuments to obsessive compulsive canines. Philandering humans were fascinated by these exemplars of fidelity. 

“By the way, did I mention that I’m married?” he said, looking up from my middle toe. 

“No, but your advert was about feet, wasn’t it? Not long-term relationships.”

As he moved onto the next toe, I wondered how he decided the length of time to spend on each one. Or was it that once he had explored a particular toe he got bored and needed to find another. And what would happen after the tenth toe? Would he return to the first? Or would he travel further to the sole and heel of my foot? If he returned to the first toe and took as long there, I might have to spend all day in this karaoke box. 

He looked up again.

“There have been lots of famous foot fetishists, you know. Baudelaire was one, Goethe was one.”

“Goethe?”

“Yeah. People have tried to play down his erotic side, but it’s there in his writing.”

“Have you read the Sorrows of Young Werther?”

“Of course.”

“I think of it all the time when I see Lotte^[2] products.”

“That company’s named after her, you know.”

“What about Lotteria^[3]?”

“Same company,” he said, “Poor Goethe. His great unrequited love has been reduced to a fast food chain.” He reflected for a moment, then returned to my toes.

Later, outside the karaoke building, we said goodbye and that we’d meet again and then we parted. 

And I lost myself in the crowds wondering about it all. 

Author: Catharine Hewitson
Location: a bench on the left-hand side of the church, L’eglise St. Gervais et St. Protais

I had been alone in Paris for thirteen days. It took a dreary, uneventful morning for it to finally sink in that my family were hundreds of miles away. Although my first couple of weeks in the City of Light had been a song and a dance, I was craving human contact and conversation.

Like any other day, I left my little apartment on the rue de la Verrerie^[1] to spend the day with my sole companion: Paris. Turning onto the busy rue de Rivoli, I crossed over, intending to head to the quai{ref2} but instead of trying to fight the traffic running around the Hotel de Ville, I turned left onto the place Saint-Gervais.

L’Eglise St. Gervais et St. Protais^[3] stood before me; its flaking red doors beckoning me. I think I sought some kind of sanctuary. Despite the solitude, it was getting pretty noisy in my head.

For a moment I stood staring up at the immense church, then I pushed open the doors and stepped into the huge hall. On instinct, I turned left and tiptoed halfway down the stone-flagged pathway. I sat myself down on a bench looking into the nave of the church.

In front of me, on the opposite wall, was the most beautiful stained glass window I had ever seen: a riot of colour and pattern in an otherwise tranquil space.

At once I felt a flood of emotion: of respect for such a building steeped in history, of desire for something to believe in, of helplessness and above all, loneliness.

At 12.59pm I wrote in my journal: “I have been fine until now, I think.”

I felt a heightened awareness of not only the sounds that were around me, but the sounds that weren’t; the cacophony of horns and sirens I was so used to hearing had been drowned out and the voice in my head that kept reciting a perpetual to-do list had finally quietened.

In a way I wanted to hear the sound of my own wail reverberate around the cavities of this huge edifice. Instead I sat in silence and stared at the panes of glass and their pretty kaleidoscopic patterns, as though they might give me answers.

I couldn’t work out what I was looking at, but it reminded me of an Yves Saint Laurent dress, of mermaids and of Christmas.

Although I felt the cold emptiness of isolation, looking at that window I also felt warm inside; as though my body were a glass jar filled with glow worms. I sat for a while, gazing into the myriad of scarlet, gold and cobalt configurations. After a while I felt content; as though the colours had spoken to me and comforted me.

I don’t know what it was about that window, but I found solace there on that lonely day in Paris.

City: New York
Author: Kit Born
Location: McCrory’s store on 63rd Drive

My friend Danny and I always got into trouble, but what did you expect in 5th Grade?

We were supposed to go back to his house. We had spent the afternoon at my house, which was typical, and it was time for him to go home for dinner. We decided to go back to his house in a very circuitous route. Instead of heading southeast, we decided to head northwest, past our church, past the LIRR tracks and down to McCrory’s.

Danny and I each had five bucks.

We decided that it was time to become spies. We got to the store, passed the crowds of old ladies and plastic flowers, and picked up some Zebra pellet guns (Airsoft has nothing on these!) These guns came with 200 pellets and a sweet shoulder holster – perfect for hiding under our private school cardigans. We rushed for the checkout counter, plunked down our cash, and hit the street.

On the way home, to complete the spy image, Danny busted out a bottle of Brut 33 aftershave, which he insisted on us splashing ourselves with, all over those tight, wide-striped polo shirts.

We weren’t very good spies, as we decided to go back the route we had come, and just as we were about to pass by my house again, there was my mom, waiting, as was Danny’s step-dad. Mom wanted to know why we weren’t at Danny’s house, and where we had gone. I told her we stopped at McCrory’s on the way there, and she reminded me that McCrory’s was in no way on the way to Danny’s house. Moreover, where did I get the idea to spend money without asking her? Sure, I had some money in my piggy bank (which I thought was mine to do with as I pleased) but it was not to be used without permission.

Mom saw what I had bought, marched right over to the trash can and threw it in. This was to by my punishment for not going to Danny’s house straightaway and for spending money on useless, random stuff. Plus, I think my mom didn’t want us playing with guns. (At that time, I never would have thought that as a dad I’d side with my mom now too.)

So ended my career as a spy.

Danny had been a much better spy, as he was wearing his gun under his jacket already. He had no visible evidence. His dad drove him home. I took the heat and spent the next week “in lockup” if you will. Danny brought his heat to school each day and would shoot plastic pellets wherever he pleased when no one was looking. I remember picking up little yellow plastic pellets off the floor and telling myself, “Man, if only I had taken my gun out of the package on the way and hidden it like Danny did.” Over and over, I got to thinking: If only I could go back and do the mission again.

Author: Nadia Hamdan
Location: downtown Sofia

An ordinary day, a Wednesday. It’s December. The sun has been shining for the last few days and it is incredibly warm for December at a city like Sofia. Finally I make up my mind to put on my skirt, the fashionable boots and sunglasses so that I feel cool throughout the day. I have to do thousands of chores throughout the city and I know I will have to walk and wait in long queues throughout the day, yet I know that this is going to be one wonderful day in Sofia. After work, my usual wide smile on my face, I get down to the chores. The moment I go out there goes the rain and it is raining cats and dogs. The sun is gone all of a sudden. A biting, cold wind starts blowing and temperatures drop. This is the day when all the deadlines for all my chores expire despite the bad joke that the weather is playing on me. I don’t have much of a choice, except to face it and keep my smile. The obstacles, however, have not started yet.  A few jeeps and taxicabs speed by when the traffic light is red and I miraculously escape death, I am starting to get nervous. The traffic is hellish, maybe due to the rain. In the tram the people are bustling again, hitting me on the feet and sweeping me away as they fight to get to the three precious free seats. One of the windows of the dirty and cold tram is broken, letting in the rain. I, however, keep on smiling. I know that this is going to be a wonderful day. As I am getting off the tram one man bumps into me and I drop my bag in a huge puddle near the City Centre Sofia. Everyone is staring at me with a sneer and sympathy. All the things that were in the bag are scattered – I get them together and keep going, my bag dripping and dirty. In the meanwhile I drop my MP3-player and it gets wet too. Its battery is down and it stops playing, because maybe it is already damaged. Finally I get to the place where I should line up in a long queue to pay my bills. Finally one nice thing – there is no queue of people waiting. I keep on smiling. I make an attempt to enter the shop, but it is closed – it is audit time. I am turning to the other side – I am very angry now and at that moment a Mercedes speeds by and a shower of muddy water pours on me. Not an unusual thing in Sofia. The traffic jams are getting worse and worse. I abandon the hope that this will be one wonderful day. I am wet all over, my bag is crumpled like a banitsa. I regret my decision to put on my skirt, because it is freezing cold. I find out that my boots are letting the water through and my feet are wet as well. On my way home, riding on the tram, a lady standing next to me gets on my stocking and it runs a ladder. Today I hate everybody. I am disgusted that in my city live only idiots. The easiest thing to do is to start shouting at the woman and vent my frustration on her, but finally I decide that she is not the one to blame for spoiling my wonderful day. I get off the tram at the stop at the Central Hali. I have just a few miles to go to get to my home and get warm. My whole body starts shaking with fever, I must have caught a cold. The traffic light is red again and counts sixty seconds. Sixty seconds during which I have nowhere to hide from the rain… There is no point in it too for my whole body is soaked to the bone. I am desperate and even feel apathy towards what turns out to be my worst day. The flood is relentless and I look like shit, the wet is making my hair curlier, even though I have been flat ironing it for more than forty minutes in the morning. The countdown shows there are forty seconds to go before the traffic light turns green. At this disgusting moment the rain suddenly stops. I look right and I see a woman standing next to me, a woman whom I don’t know, aged about 25, pretty short and frail, holding her umbrella above my head. I look at her questioning and puzzled. She smiles back at me and says “I know you could not have been worse, but here is some shelter at least while you wait at the traffic lights.” I smile back, I am amazed and happy. There is no reason to say why. It was so kind and exhilarating to see at least one polite person. The woman I don’t know can’t help me physically, me being soaked to the bone, but somehow it … turns out to be one truly wonderful day in Sofia.

Author: Pavel Hadjiev
Location: 85 Tzar Samuil Street

The regular beat of “Still D.R.E” was coming out of the pizzeria. I have never been the greatest fan of this song, but it was still something unique for us — us kids from the Women’s Bazaar. Of course, at the top place of our chart was Gumeni Glavi’s song “Izviniavai Skapa” (Rubber Heads, Excuse me my dear). The mere thought of Shamara beating his girlfriend provoked my admiration over his arrogance and at the same time I felt disgust at the barbarous act of violence. Later I found out that such a combination of feelings is just impossible. The reason for liking the song was not just the fact that the girls did not pay any attention to us. Except for the girls in my class, my friends and me did not know other representatives of the opposite sex. Actually, we did not think we are ugly but our training suits covered with dust and our long combed-back home-cut hair revealed boyish poverty.

The vents of the pizzeria took the smell of ham, mushrooms and spaghetti right into the library club. No one of us had ever been in the pizzeria. Gigo stuffed his hand in the pocket, had a deep sigh and said in his perky manner “Lets go to the comps!”

Me and Niki looked at him as if he bitterly cursed us. There was a reason behind this, of course. Throughout the whole week I was studying hard doing math and reading literature. I was not spending anything, so I can go to the neighborhood computer club in the weekend and play some Counter Strike. The library club on Tsar Samuil Street was our meeting point although we didn’t know how it was called. All we did before was playing hide and seek, football, and basketball. Until computer clubs started opening everywhere. This changed our everyday life completely. We rarely gathered at the library club. We could not breathe without spending our pocket money to see how the Diablo characters pass another level. Yet, we were united. As we had no money to go to computer cafés, we continued to play football in the library club yard and to listen the same Bulgarian rap music. We had no mobile phones but we did not need them – they bring only problems. The library club united us, and despite the bad and neglected field, and the worn out clothes, I felt happy. There was nothing more pleasant for me than to get together with these guys at night, to play Chipicao, and to tell each other stories that no-one of the others believed for a reason.

One evening my parents told me that our apartment had been sought, and that we were moving out. I could not stop crying. 

Author: Tereza Zaharieva
Location: the yard of the 73 school

It was one of those wonderful summer vacation days, where my only care was hanging out with my friends. Not that the school was a big obstacle but it is much better when no school duties weigh on your mind. So one fine afternoon my best friend Mitko rang at the door bell and told me he got one of those scooters that were so convenient to cruise on along the jammed streets of the city. So far so good, but we were fifteen-years-old and one may obtain a permit to drive a scooter only when aged 16. But this didn’t stop his parents to give him the scooter as a gift. So out we went together with another friend of ours to enjoy a ride on the brand new acquisition. Knowing we would be breaking the law if we were riding on the street, we decided to go to the yard of our school, which, being vacation time, was completely empty. We dragged the black motorbike to the schoolyard, making our way through numerous small streets so that we avoid meeting the police and finally we reached the school. Mitko got on the scooter and sped away. Keeping in mind that it was his first attempt he did it pretty well. Even I went on it the scooter, despite my fear of high speeds, not that this soap-box was able to be that fast, but still … Off I was, making a few circles around the yard and making plans to show off the new toy to the whole district. After that we and the other guy, Yana, sat on the staircase in front of the entrance of the school. Being typical girls we could not remain interested in a vehicle for too long. Mitko being a typical guy continued to cruise forwards and backwards in the yard. Yana and I talked all kinds of stuff, which I find impossible to remember now, but at the same time we were watching Mitko, who continued to show off, trying to attract our attention.

It was then, at one moment, when he had reached the furthest part of the yard that he stepped on the accelerator and headed towards us. I was watching him coming closer and closer to the wall of the school building and he was growing bigger and bigger, while his speed was growing ferociously … I remember thinking each second: “Now he is going to press the brakes, now he is going to press the brakes …,” but he was not pressing the brakes and the next memory I have replays only in slow motion … just like in the movies. I thought it was impossible to see something in this way, but up to this very day I remember how the motorbike was flying towards me and just two meters to my side it slammed into the wall … I saw the motorbike swirling around and my best friend was hurled up and his body slammed against the wall, after which he slowly fell to the ground. For a second the terrifying thought that I had lost him crossed my mind. I remember how I got up and ran towards him, I remember the relief I felt when I saw him standing up.

The experience did teach me something — that was the first time that I felt what it feels like to lose a friend. I had so many things that I wanted to tell him: how much he meant to me and how it was thanks to his friendship that I am the person that I am now. Unfortunately I have not had the guts to tell him all these things to this very day. Why? I myself don’t know. It is much easier to keep our mouth shut and talk about everyday stuff, the kind of stuff we discussed with my friends on the staircase on that day and which has left no imprint on my mind. The stuff that made us laugh but did not let us discuss our feelings. I do hope that he knows how I feel about him and one day I will have the courage to tell him how much my friendship means to me. 

Author: Svetlin Davidov
Location: the park in Zone B-18 neighbourhood, between Pirotska St. and Simeon St.

Despite being a quiet child, I was something of a foolster from time to time. Sometimes I apologized, sometimes I did not. My mother often told me: “Some day your children will behave just like you do you and you’ll see what all my fuss is about …”

I am already the happy father of a small boy, called Alexander. To be honest, I must admit I have always been longing for a son like him. Now, when I see how he is growing up, I often remember about what my mom said. It is very funny to observe his way of seeing life, the way he laughs, the way he copies each and every word and gesture of mine and his mother.

One day we were walking through a park in zone B. There were many mothers with their children in the nearby park as the weather was warm and sunny. Alexander is very curious and is constantly asking: “What’s that?” My wife Ani and I explain to him what each thing is in detail and he usually repeat what he understands in his baby language.

That day, on the bench next to us, there were three women, who were speaking quietly as their babies were sleeping in the prams ^[1]. Alexander approached them and, standing on tiptoe, tried to see what was in the prams. Then he returned to us and said they contained some “thing”. We explained to him that those were babies and that he also was a baby at one point earlier in his life. He looked at us and said with his sweet voice: “Mommy, buy a baby for me”. We all started laughing. He looked at us wondering and repeated the question: “Mommy, buy a baby for me”. Then we explained to him that some things could not be bought and that of all the unpurchasable items in the world, babies were perhaps first on the list. 

Author: Dragomir Simeonov
Location: the blue telephone cabin

“Cool, someone has thrust something into the coin slot!,” the girl lisped and hit the coin slot with the receiver. He was startled and didn’t immediately understand what was going on. He stood a few steps behind her, awaiting his turn to use the phone. “Is it damaged?,” he asked in a second. “Screw them!,” she said without paying attention to the man and continued showering abuses against the unknown culprit. Then she turned to the man behind her, looked at him severely as if he was involved in the embarrassing situation and moved away with a theatrical walk.

He has not looked at her but approached the phone quickly to see a crushed sheet of paper stuck into the slot. He tried to pull it out but did not manage to. Only now did he realized what the girl was so upset about, and turned to see if she was still around. She was not there, and there was not other phone around, but the call he had to make could not wait. He searched for something thin in his pockets that he could use to pick out the ball stuck in the slot. The only thing that seemed somewhat appropriate was his keys but unfortunately none of them would fit. He leaned forward to study the object carefully. It was white, long about a centimeter and half, and burned at one end. It was a cigarette stub, of course it was a stub. Whoever stuck it in there crashed it first so that it could go through the slot, and now the stub had regained its former size and was stuck. “How can someone stick stubs in the telephone slot!” — he got angry in a somewhat dignified manner, but was still really angry. “What if somebody needs to make an urgent call” — he continued to look at the ground continuing with his thoughts. A pin, a paper clip, a piece of wire — he was looking for something with which to pick out that piece of trash. However, the only thing he found to his liking was a crushed plastic straw. With it he resumed his attempts to reach the intruder; the stub was stubbornly trying to resist. He was entirely engrossed in his mission. This stub was not only his own problem, it was the stub which interferes with the normal development of life. There is always such a small stub that spoils everything. He thought that it was not a bad theme for an article — the stub which … damn it.

He felt he was sweating, he took off his jacket, and squeezed it between his knees so that both his hands could be free. In a few minutes he raised his head to rest but also to enjoy his partial success — he had managed to peel of the paper from the stub, now only the beige spongy body of the stub remained in the slot. Maybe he should pour some water to get it wet — it might get out more easily that way? He looked around, thought of how this might look from the side, then spat into the slot, and continued to reach with the straw. Fiber by fiber the stub was falling apart. He was coming closer with each second. His fierceness was growing, the tip of his tongue was showing between his closed lips, his jacket was down at his ankles. He suddenly froze, put the straw on the phone, and carefully, in a surgical like manner, caught the sticking out piece of the stub with the tip of his nails. Then slowly and triumphantly he pulled it out of the slot. He took a deep breath and smiled. The good triumphed despite all setbacks. Even stubs, and people who stick them in street phones slots could not stop the good ones.

He looked at his watch. His call was more than half an hour late and there was hardly a chance of someone still waiting for him, but he still felt he should try. He took out the coin from his pocket, put it in the slot, it fell into the coin chamber with a clang, and … nothing showed on the display. He knocked on it. He then hit it on the side with his fist. The coin was gone for good in the steel body of the phone. God knows how many coins this phone had swallowed before someone felt obliged to stop the injustice by sticking a stub into the slot. And he lost so much precious time to pull it out. He was now looking for something on the ground. He found it. He leaned, took it in his hand, crushed it, and stuck it into the coin slot. One small stub again took on the role of savior, martyr, in the greedy coin slot. He thought to himself, “Hopefully, the next person trying to make a call will not understand the world order so one-sidedly.”

Author: Luidmil Kardjilov
Location: Aprilov street

I often pass by that place. And I see the large, heavy barrier. I look further, and I spot the other barrier, which is just as large and as heavy. And between these two barriers is locked the street – the street of my childhood. This is the Aprilov Street, in downtown Sofia, between Oborishte and Shipka. I played here, I rode a bicycle here, I also got into a car here for the first time, into my father’s car. This was a notable event for me as well as for our street. In the spring of 1965 there was only one car in my street but in fact this was not a regular car but a Cadillac. The limousine of the American Ambassador. Every Saturday the drive would drive out of the garage, right across from the entrance of our house, and would start to burnish this huge American monster. An incredible sight. The open door disclosed unsuspected beauties. Leather upholstery, a smell of something fine, a massive wheel, and an enormous engine under the bonnet. For me this was a great amusement and an unrealized dream. A dream which actually all of a sudden came true. Because my father bought a car. Well, it was not a Cadillac, it was not even a Mercedes, it was not even a Ford, it was just a Wartburg. So from that moment there were two cars on our street. My father’s Wartburg, and the Cadillac of His Excellency. And the Saturday afternoons received a new meaning. My father and I started to wash the car together, with a hose and a soft brush, with soap-suds, the Wartburg started to shine fabulously. It was an enemy worthy of the huge Cadillac’s steel. We were washing, and so was the ambassador’s driver. In those years they often showed Nixon on television, my God, they showed how he was riding in a Cadillac just like the one parked next to our Wartburg. This is the street of my childhood. With the cracked paving stones, with the ants wriggling among them. With the lilac in the yard, and with the cats hidden in the house entrances. And the two cars. My father’s car, and the ambassador’s car. Then unnoticeably things changed. The cars became three as the writer Nayden Valchev also bought a Wartburg. Then, the following year, a little further down the street a Moskvich appeared, after a while a Volga started to park nearby. Time passed. There were more and more cars. Today the street is beyond recognition. The barriers stand proudly guarding the residence, and cars occupy the sidewalks. I stand by and look – is this the street of my childhood?

Author: Mihail Dyuzev
Location: a bench at Alexander Nevsky Square (the third on the left when you face the entrance)

I love early morning Sofia. No hellish traffic, the people whom I meet know exactly where they are going. The familiar sight of bustling, hurrying people comes in the “later” hours of the morning.

That happened about ten years ago. I was a student and was going to my classes at the university, which started at 8 am. It so happened that I got to the Rectorate much earlier. With nothing else to do, I bought a cup of coffee from the van at the N280 bus stop and headed towards Saint Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, where there are many benches, besides the weather was fine.

And so, the place is the third bench on your left when you face the entry of the cathedral. It is May, a bit cold at 7.20 am. The ambience is kind of ghostly, because of the light fog, the domes of the Othodox Christian giant sticking out through it.

I was sipping slowly from the cup of unexpectedly strong coffee and drawing on yet another cigarette, bizarrely calm. That’s when I thought about the strength of this place. I am the least religious person you will ever find, but at that moment I felt as if I was in front of an altar without being in a church.

There was no need to think about anything, I did not even try, I was just enjoying the timelessness of the moment. The noise from the city was not yet getting to the third bench where I was and may be that was the reason why the toll of the bells shook me all over. I did not only hear the bells, I felt them with every inch of my body. There was something grand in that moment, at least this is how I felt it. All of a sudden I felt one complete whole with the majesty of the temple.

That was a weird feeling, I admit. Even now when I pass through that place I remember that moment and even feel a bit jealous of myself that I did manage to feel it.

Author: Yana Nikolova
Location: the square in front of the Central Baths

“The stretch of the crank.” That’s what I call the 100-meter long stretch between the TSUM and the Central Baths, or, to put it more pragmatically — between Serdika underground station and the station of the mythical tram N. 22. I hate and I love this place. I hate it as, in my opinion, it is that part of the capital where one can meet more mentally deceased people per square meter than anywhere else. I love it … for the same reason. I like to observe the inhabitants of that tiny piece of land in the centre of Sofia. I like the meek mad man in a purple suit, who always listens to a song that can be heard due belting from his scratchy retro transistor set. “It is raining roses …” — I can hear this suspicious, sugary refrain in spite of the buzzing noise …

I like also the swarthy street sweeper, who idly takes a drag on her cheep cigarette during yet another long break between two short sweeps.

I like Ginka as well. Or Binka. Or may be Dochka. ^[1] I do not know the name of the woman, who sells refreshments but I am sure it sounds like that. She always shouts, not so convincing: “Hot sesame rings, pleeeease!” I like her because Ginka, Binka or Dochka, or whatever her name is, is the singular inhabitant of the stretch who could be possibly called “normal”. I like her and I hate her. For the same reason.

Squeal. The standard “squeak”. The tram drags its rusty trunk totter to me with a lazy movement. I get on. I wave goodbye in my imagination to my weird, new-old friends through the window, dirty due to the numerous touches, millions of flies and dozens of thoughtful looks. I know I am going to see them again tomorrow. Here, between TSUM and the Central Baths, between Serdika underground station and the tram N. 22 station. Between two melancholic, crazy smiles in a tired, long day.

The tram moves off. A weird man, rocking back and forth to an imagined rhythm who sits next to me introduces himself: “Nice to meet you, I’m Stirlitz!” Then he begins to reveal to me the secrets of the world conspiracy. 

City: London
Author: Evelyn Owen
Location: Globe Road

Crossing, I turned right and homewards. In front of me, staggering along the pavement, was an old man in a raincoat. On his head he wore one of those white caps that Muslim men often wear^[1]. He had a wiry beard and a walking stick poking out from his coat at a funny angle. He lurched slightly, his hunched back rocking from side to side, hips obviously not what they were.

As he swayed to the right and I got a glimpse over his shoulder, I saw approaching from the opposite direction an elderly, papery-skinned lady in dark blue. She too had a walking stick, and was shuffling along at an even slower pace. Her white hair was perfectly set, pillar box lips pressed firmly together in concentration, watery eyes fixed on the cracks in the paving stones. Her stick waved about alarmingly as she made to plant it a little further along in preparation for her next shuffle.

I smiled to myself. ‘When these two old dears meet,’ I thought, ‘there’s not going to be enough pavement to go around. They’ll be nodding courteously and trying to edge round each other without whacking each other with their canes. How polite old people always are. No doubt there’ll be profuse apologies and great embarrassment all round.’

I slowed down, not wanting to interfere in their doddering manoeuvres. The old man took another step. They were almost parallel now. Time to negotiate the passing.

The old man hawked and spat loudly.

‘Don’t do that! That’s filthy, spitting in public^[2].’

The imaginary bonds of old age and dodgy hips and walking sticks came crashing down. The old man lurched right, the old woman ploughed onward, glowering, her trusty stick forging ahead, and as she passed me, her fury scorched my bare left cheek. I nipped round her, side-stepped and pressed on past the old man, who snorted loudly as I went by. His phlegm sat wetly on the tarmac, a marker of the confrontation, soon to evaporate.

Author: Tom Frozart
Location: 5th arrondissement

Cluny - La Sorbonne, 7:50AM – The front carriage is packed out with schoolgirls looking down at their knees, revising lessons, or reflecting on the virtues of silence and humility.  No males in sight; nannies or elder sisters shepherd the younger ones.  Would they raise their eyes, they’d get a glimpse at their fate, in the shape of a ghastly figure standing by the door.  Navy blue skirt, bottle green tights, no defined age, repeated pregnancies have taken their toll; her soul is okay though, she’s just received Holy Communion at Saint-Nicolas, one station before.  From Boulogne they’ll cross the river in procession and climb to Saint Pie X, the Roman Catholic sanctuary across the street from my office.  Behind its high walls, nuns instil the blessings of motherhood in innocent minds, at bay from the nefarious influence of Babylon-upon-Seine and its wagonloads of sinners.

The two next carriages are full up too; Africans and Eastern European escapees, Chinese and Turks, West Indians and Arabs, all trying to catch up on their sleep.  A Gypsy plays an accordion on a screeching mode.  The underground artist composes his face to suit each fragment of clichéd tune chosen to cheer up any dozing audience; he locks his eyes onto a first traveller, shifts at random to another one in the hope of extorting a smile of compassion that a kid in tattered clothes will convert into petty cash.  Yet the begging cup will stay empty; might have studied psycho-musicology under the late Ceaucescu, too early for Piaf, Lemarque, and Katchaturian.  No space for the Holy Trinity in non-Christian lives, not the right line, not the right time.

I’m tucked between a pram and the door in the second last carriage, standing on the last free spot, looking through the glass into the last wagon.  A space-time enclave where boys and girls call out to each other and show off in the latest cheap and hype gear fallen from the shelf; final destination: Boulogne’s coed Jewish complex.  They won’t cross the Catholic girls getting out at the opposite end of the platform.  Sephardic Jews, exiled en masse to their foster motherland, after France lost its colonies in North Africa.  No au pairs looking after pre-schoolers, mothers and aunts as required.  Most belong to families in the rag trade; boys in kippahs and Nikes; tarted up teen girls exposing midriffs, muffin waists and inflated boobs; flesh ranks high on the womanhood scale, no catwalk material.  Wedding photos pass hands, giggles will be heard all the way to the terminus.  Within a few years they’ll work in some fashion shop, marry, come back to Line 10 at 7:50, in mum’s seat and shoes, last carriage.

7:51AM, doors slam shut.  A black hole sucks away the white and turquoise time capsule; Cluny station shrinks to a pinhead in the distance.

Et voilà.

Author: Chris Huntington
Location: in the Marais

For twelve months after my wife left me, I lived in the Marais, on the Rue Vieille du Temple, in a tiny room the size of an American car.  My single window looked down four stories to a corner market that once sold horsemeat and still had a sign advertising as much on its wall.  Every night, I would lay down on my folding couch— sometimes collapsing in my jeans and collared shirt— and stare at the wooden beams in my ceiling and thought about the century or two they’d been floating there above the street.  I would think about how long my lonely room had existed before I’d gotten there, how I was just a bee without a hive and that soon this city would be alive without me.  I wasn’t planning suicide exactly, but it felt like if things continued the way they were, my body would disintegrate.  I felt wholly incapable of feeling anything except sad.

The afternoon before I moved out, a friend of a friend dropped by. She was just moving to the city and I had told her the day before that she could have a box of plates and frying pans I would otherwise be throwing away.  When she arrived I had been cleaning the shower, and stood there barefoot and shirtless in the doorway.  Laura was ten years younger than me and asked to see the view from my window.  I showed her the long street and how we could lean on my rail and watch the bald spots and dogs on leashes and umbrellas go by.  We were sitting knee to knee on my couch when the realtor came by to show the place.  The realtor had a kind of Gallic horror at interrupting anything chemical between a man and woman.  The realtor, the client, and Laura left at roughly the same time, in a mixture of awkwardness and humor.  Laura wished me well and a good life.

That night, I said good-bye to my friends at a bar up the street.  My friends— French, American, English— each sat shoulder-to-shoulder with me at the a tiny table in the Klein Holland ^[1] and we all knew we might never see each other again.  After each one squeezed me good-bye and left for the last metro, I went up the four flights of stairs to my apartment, where I lay down and watched the headlights make huge shadows out of the roofbeams.  It was one in the morning my last night in Paris when the window said my name.  I rose from bed and went to the rail.  On the opposite sidewalk, Laura and a friend were staring up at me.  I raised one finger: wait, wait.  As I moved away, I saw the friend hug Laura good-night and then Laura’s red hair was crossing the street to my door.  And I had a sudden, incandescent certainty that I would never die and would always be loved.

City: London
Author: Stephen Ledger-Lomas
Location: Highbury & Islington tube platform

She looked up at me between a mass of tangled arms, knotted brows and apathetic expressions of uncomfortable misery. At first I noticed her pupils, which were dusk and oak and silent. I glanced away uncomfortably and scanned hundreds of other vacant expressions^[1]. Then our eyes flicked back together again, and a tear was gathering on her cheek.

The carriage roared on towards Highbury, juddering on bent rails, and every time I glanced back, she was trying harder to stifle tears as she looked at the floor. I wanted to ask her what was wrong, and a million terrible possibilities flicked through my mind, but I couldn’t speak through the tension, and I couldn’t bear the thought that nobody might be able to help.

Fists clenched on cold rails as the train came to an abrupt halt at its destination and the cattle roared out of the gate and she was ahead of me and almost gone. I swerved through the crowd and found her sitting alone on the last bench on that grim platform, just before the gaping tunnel, turned away from the world. Everyone had moved on. The final commuter clicked away in her accountancy heels^[2].

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

She was lying.

I left.

City: shanghai
Author: Parker Woltz
Location: DVD store on Huashan at Zhaojiabang

She looked like a Chinese Cyndi Lauper: her hair was permed, frizzing out every which way, and bright-colored bangles climbed up her arms. It was January and she wore a black wool dress with hot pink and black striped tights. A thick scarf coiled around her neck. Her hand, slender and pale, like a doll’s hand, gripped the dirty metal pole of the metro car. She leaned back, talking and laughing with her two male friends while the train rushed out of Xujiahui^[1] and into the guts of Shanghai.

I couldn’t look away from her smile. Her teeth were beautiful, white like fresh milk, and her eyes crinkled when she laughed. She laughed a lot, little giggles that bubbled out of her like sputtering water.

I clutched my Lonely Planet guidebook and stared at the girl, wishing I knew her, wishing that she was my friend, wishing that, at the very least, I knew how to speak her language. A few stops later, she exited the train. I strained to keep my eyes on that crazy perm but the automatic doors hissed shut and she was gone.

I stood in the crowded train and felt suddenly, overwhelmingly, conscious of all the hundreds and thousands and millions of people living and daydreaming and losing and praying and wondering and sleeping and hoping and aching and loving and eating and laughing and wishing and doing all of the things that humans do, all around me. And even in the midst of all that life, I felt alone.

A month later, I was walking along Huashan Lu^[2] the day before I was to leave Shanghai. It was a chilly afternoon but it was bright; I looked down at the sun-dappled sidewalk as I walked, dodging globs of spit. And then something made me look up.

There she was, still smiling. Her hands – those tiny, porcelain doll hands – were in her coat pockets and she walked briskly with her friends, her perm bouncing in the winter breeze.

And then the most amazing thing happened. Our eyes met and I swear, I swear, she smiled at me.

Maybe it’s not such a lonely planet after all. 

City: shanghai
Author: Matt Diehl
Location: Logo Bar

As a Shanghai newbie (not ”niu bi”^[1], which my trip turned out to be – see “cow’s bollocks” for a close translation), I was dazzled by the ride into the city from the airport. Having never been to Asia, I was not prepared for the sheer, undiluted futurism of the Shanghai skyline; while locals may be over it, its shamelessness and commitment to progress stunned my retinas.

After a quick, post-airport drop-off, I was rushed by my entourage to a restaurant in the back of an office building. Despite the odd location, it was a clean, minimalist, humming place; the beautiful quirk was that it only served delicious tuna sashimi and a tofu broth with vegetables^[2] – not what I expected for my first meal on the Chinese mainland. At dinner, I met brilliant, amazing people who were as creative as the visionaries that first drew me to move to New York City, an auspicious sign. Then, fully stuffed on tuna belly, we walked down the street to Logo^[3].

The second I walked in, my mind reeled. Not because it was the greatest bar in the world (Logo itself was familiar: dark, dank, smoky), or because the greatest music was playing (electronic music floated in the air like the haze of smoke), or because I met the love of my life (who knows? maybe I did…), but because it was so authentic and familiar, and clashed so brilliantly with my ride in from the airport. It was full of writers, artists, fashion illustrators, DJs and dancers – in other words, it was like the bars that drew me to move to NYC. (See a pattern here?)

How could this scene co-exist with the man-made sci-fi skyline I’d seen just hours earlier? How could these seemingly disparate worlds co-exist? Wouldn’t they come together and explode like anti-matter?

Within a couple of hours, I realized that on the one hand, Shanghai spoke in the lingua franca of young, creative urban bohemia. The people I was meeting had the energy, will and inspiration of those that initially made NYC exciting, which it no longer is (cf. “New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down,” LCD Soundsystem). But even though this was all familiar, there was a movement and aesthetic that couldn’t have happened everywhere else; in this short time, I viscerally experienced the paradigm shift that hysterical headlines in the Western media about the “New Asia” couldn’t capture.

I knew this was largely an expat experience, and not the quote-unquote “real China”. But I felt that the “real China” infused the whole experience – it wouldn’t have been the same anywhere else. It was clear that the real China experience isn’t something that can be forced or diluted; it will find you, and that night in Shanghai, it was finding me in its own special way…

City: New York
Author: Denise Reich
Location: the Unisphere

“Come down,” they coax. Steven and Nick, all of nine and seven years old, are rolling their eyes at me. They’ve already clambered up and back down again like miniature mountain goats. “Just put your foot there. No, there. You’re not even listening!” I shrink back.

“Damn it, we don’t have time for this,” my mother storms, pacing back and forth. “Get down here.”

I don’t say anything. I don’t move. I simply clutch the rusting, peeling hulk of the globe and hang on tight.

The park is in such a state of decay that the fountains at the base of the Unisphere^[1] have been switched off, and the pool, which normally serves as a protective moat, has run dry in the July heat. We’d stepped easily over the shin-high barrier and run in.

We embrace the world. It becomes our personal jungle gym. We shimmy up the base, run around the concave curve and wave. The boys jump down after a few minutes, but my feet grow roots in the steel. I simply stop.

“Come down!” my mother snaps. The boys snicker behind their hands. They’re not even real New Yorkers, they’re just visiting friends, and they have quite an attitude.

I’m not afraid. I like heights. I’m frozen, fixed in place like the taut cables that support the structure from the inside out. The brushed steel of Africa reflects the sun and makes me squint, even in the ample shade.

I am twelve years old, I will be starting the 8th grade in eight weeks, and I am tired. I haven’t eaten since last night, and when I look straight up I’m dizzy. The interior of the globe is as hollow as the open anorexic space below my ribs. We’re both fraying and exhausted. 

I sit down on the base and dangle my feet over the edge, dipping my toes into the air. Nick points at a spot somewhere below my heel. “Look, the step is right there.” I remain motionless, and the quartet below me explodes in frustration again.

A park vehicle pulls up at the edge of the pool, and a tall ranger, clad in regulation green, comes running across the cracked cement. My mother’s face flushes, and I know she’s thinking of ways to explain how I came to be on the Unisphere in the first place, but the ranger bustles by without a word. He climbs halfway up the base and squints at me.

“Need a hand?” The voice is the first gentle one I’ve heard all day. He isn’t furious with me. He can’t fix anything; he can’t stop me from hiding my breakfast and lunch again tomorrow, but he can get me down off the Unisphere. I nod, and he nods back, and extends his hand. I grasp it and the steps sprout out of the metal again, and in a minute I am firmly back on the ground.

City: shanghai
Author: Casey Whale
Location: the fruit stall beside her house

Wavy Girl is waving to me from across the street. She does that, hence the nickname. I don’t know her real name, or how old she is, but she looks about three. It’s hard to tell with Chinese girls though; maybe she’s really 30, but I doubt it.

The fruit shop^[1] next to my building is where I buy my fruit. I buy fruit every morning on my way to work, so I’m there quite a bit. That’s where Wavy Girl lives, with her mum who sells me the fruit. They live in a small room/large cupboard in the back of the shop.

Sometimes I think Wavy Girl has quite a nice life. Her days are filled, as far as I can tell, with playtime, trips to the public toilets in the nearby laneway, and, of course, waving to customers. She is safe to walk around on the street, as all the vendors take it upon themselves to keep an eye out for her. The cramped living space would bother me, but for a little one who hasn’t known anything else, it is probably nothing. I just hope that she’s not too cold in the winter.

Wavy Girl’s hair makes me smile; her mum always ties it up into small fountains on top of her head that sway madly as she waves. It’s strange how her hair seemingly reacts to her mood – her fountains wilt and slump when she is tired and grumpy.

I’m about to move house and a part of me is sad because my life will soon lack Wavy Girl. I wonder if she will even notice I’m gone.

It’s strange – I never noticed how much she made me smile until now (cue Joni Mitchell: “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone…”).

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Daniel Snyder
Location: an unnamed anime and games shop

August, rapacious. Akihabara ^[1] wears the heat like a suit lined with pointed daggers. The people scowl, hurting too much to hurry across the avenues. The buildings have ruptured: stores spill forth their wares like overripe fruit. Customers flit in and out, thirsting for the wet air conditioning.

She’s sitting in front of a store, in the twilit zone between scarring heat and sluggish cold, at a fold-out table. She could be 18 or 29.  Her face is beautiful, fit for recycling after one use. And she’s wearing a costume. A maid, or a princess, or some role that involves white lace and a black frock. She does not sweat, she doesn’t even slouch in her seat.

Behind her is a banner with a very different picture. It’s the picture of a woman with great dishplate eyes and long blonde plastic hair in a complicated braid. That woman is not dainty, she is dressed plate armor of European design. That portrait is flanked by kanji more like Rorschach blots than any written language. There is no passing resemblance between the two women. But many interchangeable heroines can be seen in the store, and up and down the block.

Ten minutes pass.

In that time, one scrawny boy has visited the table. The two shook hands politely, limply, as Japanese do. They spoke. She smiled a plasticine smile. He went away. Her posture is as fixed as it has ever been.

A half hour more will pass before she has another visitor.

There will come a time—when the sponsor pulls out, or later tonight when she’s alone in her tiny apartment, or yet today as this abominable heat rakes its claws against the anarchic cool —that the facade will crack, then splinter. Ichor will gush out of this carefully constructed image. And the drying human remains left behind, what will become of them? Will they try and pull back inside their shell? Will they beg for the attention this lifestyle didn’t grant them? Will they lie fetal, scared beyond any recovery, and mew out in blind horror at their fate?

City: London
Author: Dylan Carline
Location: Brixton Station

We were to meet outside the tube station in Brixton. She was an old friend I hadn’t seen for years. The premise: a date. Riding up the escalator into the night, my first time here, I noticed acute drops in temperature with each weary clunk, and a regular metallic grinding that quite clearly meant ‘please use the stairs’.

It was colder than I expected. A still night, but dry compared to what I had become used to. Trails of breath lingered, their form and meaning suspended in transient beauty, inexorably decaying from this fragile state. Once gone, they were replaced, in seamless exchange, by the heavily breathing procession of people around me. I wondered if I was the only person here without an imminent need to be in another place, and therefore the only one capable of appreciating this scene. I briefly entertained the notion that it was entirely for me. Abruptly, someone buffeted me from behind. Evidently I was in the way. Rousing myself with a deep, icy breath, I realised that I had begun to tingle slightly.

The dense ball of excitement in my stomach wouldn’t attribute itself specifically to either the forthcoming event or the fact that I was back in London. It probably comprised an amount of both. Where I live (the Lake District, in case you’re interested), you don’t see that many people, especially at night, and the ones you do see are generally all made in the same factory. I spent ten minutes waiting at the top of the escalator, but could have happily been there for an hour.

A gig must have been happening somewhere^[1]. Hundreds of young people dressed brightly in day-glo trousers and coats filed past me. Resplendent non-conformity! Many of them wore sunglasses as well. I couldn’t decide whether this was part of the uniform or a safety-inspired consequence of their collective hue^[2]. One of them caught me grinning and shot me ‘die hippy’ neon rays from under his star-shaped glasses, before being sucked back into the amoebic mass. For some reason this tickled me, disproportionately so. I grinned even more.

From the dazzling stream of passers-by she suddenly emerged, instantaneously silhouetted against the crowd. Then, walking closer, I noticed her looking quizzically at the childish grin that refused to leave my face. To my relief, she giggled. We wandered off to eat, leaving our trails of laughter, unmistakably visible, hanging in the air outside the station.

City: New York
Author: Anne Germanacos
Location: Broadway between 70th and 71st

My last night in New York for at least six months, I walked through Broadway’s balmy June air, keeping pace with the bodies. I couldn’t avoid the realization that it was time my son grew up. I pictured myself telling him: You’re the age I was when I gave birth to you.

Two nights before, we’d been together on the same street, Broadway between 70th and 71st, walking with the crowds. Throngs of people had moved up the street past the big stores, flowing out in a neat curve where a naked man was performing some kind of sacrament. People were fastidious in avoiding him. Like everyone else, we speeded up but not without looking his way.

The first glance revealed a naked man touching himself. Looking again, sideways, I saw that the naked man’s hands only mimicked a fondling. His penis was uncircumcised, not quite flaccid. I tried not to look but did, though I didn’t want my son to notice my fascination, less for the flesh itself than for its treatment.

We’d been returning from a Broadway show. All day he’d been rude and aggressive. When we reached his apartment, he insisted that I should leave him alone. So I did, for the next two days.

Arriving there now in order to say goodbye, I listened while he sang elaborate ascending scales. I knocked as he hit high F.

City: shanghai
Author: Jack Sidders
Location: the top of the escalator at Exit 7, Jing’an Temple metro station

I had only been in Shanghai but a few days when, walking back from work along Nanjing Xi Lu^[1], I came across my first city busker. Happily high on Constant Discovery as is generally the case with fresh arrivals, I stopped to listen. The melody was alien but more curious was the attention the minstrel drew. In London, I was used to buskers, no matter how talented, being determinedly ignored.

Here, passers-by not only stopped to watch, they did so wearing polished smiles and toothless grins. Eyes were closed deep in meditation. Perusing the watching faces, I, too, began to drift off in reverie. Suddenly, the crowd’s attention grew fervent. A disturbance rippled through the back of the group, eventually bursting through the assembly to the musical oasis at its core.

Police.

Quickly and quietly, policemen handcuffed the musician. As they turned to leave, the crowd began shouting, words indecipherable to my ear but clearly in protest. Soon, cars had stopped on the street and bicycles had been abandoned as their owners gathered to have their say. Then, seemingly in an attempt to fend off the hostile onlookers, the policemen unbuckled the musician’s trousers. My amusement dissipated, and was replaced by disgust.

Until this point, the experience, while odd, had at least made sense to me. Upon seeing the delinquent busker dragged from the scene, with his trousers at his ankles, I felt lost.

A monk, no doubt drawn to the throng from Jing’an Temple^[2] just around the corner, studied me. Reading my confusion, he spoke: “He has lost face. Now he will never commit this crime again.”

I stared. My first encounter with a Buddhist monk and I was speechless. But no sooner had he begun to impart his wisdom on me, he turned, pulled out his state-of-the-art mobile phone and walked off, destroying my quaint, half-formed illusion of simple monk life just as the policemen had destroyed the beauty of a stranger’s music with an act of violence and humiliation. 

City: shanghai
Author: Rose Longhurst
Location: the Family Mart on Zhangyang Lu

It’s the early hours of the morning and we’re outside the Family Mart^[1] in Pudong. In the moments before light breaks the enormous streets are empty, parallel lines running into the distance mirroring the sharp silhouettes of the buildings shooting off into the sky. Apart from the occasional tai-chi practitioner, our group are the only people breaking the silence, as the city is on the brink of stirring.

We’re in limbo also. Neither happily drunk nor queasily remorseful, we’re unwilling to let go of the night we’ve just shared, but wary of being present when the city wakes. We can sense the clocks uniformly ticking toward alarms, but for now our peace is only disturbed by the repetitive tinny jingle emanating from the Family Mart entrance as we sit on the cool marble steps outside, eating unidentifiable fried food with our hands. The street cooking is what brings us here, and I’m in the process of negotiating a meal.

There are two types of food-vendor^[2] outside Family Mart: the lady with the things speared on sticks, and a woman with a large table covered in bowls of raw meat, vegetables and rice.

Tonight I’m eschewing my usual order of ‘miscellaneous green root on a stick’ for the more substantial offers of the fried-rice vendor. I’m looking at a bowl of what appears to be bamboo shoots, but I’m wary, having recently been given chicken as a vegetarian option in a restaurant. Despite my best efforts, the stall owner is unable to comprehend my basic Mandarin, and after several attempts at “Is this vegetarian?” and “Is this meat?” I resorted to just naming animals while pointing at the bowl desperately. She stares at me blankly.

My Italian friend, who speaks no Chinese and yet seems to have fared well during her time here, comes over to see if progress can be made utilising her significant sign-language skills. As physically expressive as the Italians often are, none of our group are expecting the elaborate mime that then follows. Like a parody of a street-performer, she begins to silently portray a tree growing, starting as a seed emerging from the earth, twisting upwards. As we all stare at her open-mouthed, she then starts to beg like a dog, barking and licking my hand.

We’re all entranced, street-food vendors and European students alike, as she furiously mimes various animals and plants. The vendor doesn’t have the slightest hint of recognition in her eyes; she looks confused, nervous almost, and this charade continues until a Chinese-speaking friend arrives.

“What’s Elena doing?” she asks me.

“Trying to ascertain whether it’s bamboo shoots in that bowl”, I respond.

Everyone holds their breath. Finally, someone who can break the stalemate. This futile exchange can come to an end, and the catharsis of a question answered will buoy the dying embers of our evening.

Words are exchanged with the vendor.

“She says it’s pig intestine.”

City: shanghai
Author: Paul Hartnett
Location: the Raffles department store at People’s Square

14.02
I hope this is going to work. Feels kind of weird.

14.03
Rodney said this would be a good place to get pictures. Raffles^[1]. Hm, Don’t know. Will have to wait and see.

14.05
Feel kind of wonky. What time is it back in London? Jet lag, a curse.

14.07
Not sunny, not dark. Light’s kind of OK.

14.10
People think this kind of photography^[2] is so easy, that you just go out and there are stunners every five minutes.

14.20
Maybe I should have applied for a journalist’s visa. What happens if I get stopped and questioned?

14.40
Nothing yet. This is how a fisherman feels, waiting for the bait to get taken. Maybe I’m getting too old for this. I kind of feel like a dirty old man, stalking the streets. For ‘street-style’? Yeah, right. Oh, I’m getting paranoid.

14.41
Oh, here’s one. Nice bit of customising on the collar.

14.46
That was easy enough. Giving a card always helps.

14.48
And here’s another. Cool hair. Six hairstyles all on the same head. And, yep, some piece of crazy MADE IN HONG KONG plastic toy crap to accessorise. Coolio.

14.55
Nearly an hour, and that’s all I’ve got. There’s just so much black cotton about, black denim. Just black. Just nothing. Where are all the individuals?

13.01
It’s like… one long catwalk of H&M zombies. Where are all the individuals?

14.02
Oh, here’s one. Fabulous. Those shoes are just…

City: shanghai
Author: Anita Hawkins
Location: the lane outside her house

It’s often too easy to slip into ‘small’ in Shanghai. The city heaves, flails and flourishes around you constantly and steadily, irregardless of you and your current state of mind.

I was feeling the ‘small’ one day early autumn, but picking myself up around me, I decidedly tried to heave myself out of the apartment and into the day ahead.

Slipping down the stairs of my little low-rise^[1], I ramshackled myself onto the back lane on Yongfu Lu upon which the apartment lies. Upon hitting the cold, I was met by a little dust and a well-padded elderly lady.

She seized my arm. “Why are you wearing that?”

“What?”, I shortened, fallen leaves crackling at me.

“Your skirt.”

“What’s wrong with my skirt?”

“Your bones are cold.”

My memory-of-moments flash back to adolescent negotiations with my dear Mother over hem-lengths. Suddenly, I’m liking this new argument.

I clamour back to my apartment, return to the lane re-clothed, and there’s smiles, not small.

City: New York
Author: Ling Ma
Location: The third floor of Henri Bendel

After I gave my resignation notice to my boss on a Friday evening in September, I left my workplace at 40th and Broadway for one of the last times and walked a mile to Henri Bendel^[1] to meet my best friend, and several of her college friends, at the store’s Chocolate Bar. Blocks pass quickly in New York, and on that evening the chilly breeze was nice amid the dusk and the traffic.

Though it was my first time at Henri Bendel, I didn’t linger in the main atrium to smell the Annick Goutal scents (there is a personal favorite in mind that smells like peaches and gasoline, issued once a year) or try a new hand cream. I walked up the spiraled stairs to the third floor, and there they were, a bouquet of post-collegiate girls sitting at a circular corner booth. I saw business wear, identically crossed pairs of legs, fresh-combed manes of hair.

We took turns talking about what we did, what we were doing, all these endlessly interesting things.

“I just quit my job,” I said. It was a relief to say.

“Uh, what?!” my best friend exclaimed. “Why, how, when?” The others devoured me with nervous questions.

I explained that it was something I had decided the previous night. The only way to do it was quickly, before I lost my nerve, and think about the consequences later. It had been my first day job, for which I oversaw from New York the manufacture of Bibles in humid areas of Asian countries. I didn’t hate the work.

My chocolate drink was cold and creamy; it matched the weather. I imagined the air inside my lungs was slowly condensing from the shift in climate—from the chilly weather outdoors to this interior retail roast. Unmoored by a profession, I was a vague, jobless entity now, and I felt myself disengaging from the careerist conversation.

The voices languished, and when there was little left to tally of our meager accomplishments, we gathered our fall jackets.

Between the Chocolate Bar and the exit elevator, one has to walk the length of the curiously situated lingerie department. I looked at all the delicious confections I could no longer afford, flimsy swathes of expensive fabrics in rashes of pinks, abnormal growths of lace, stitched hard blacks. I slowed my pace, marveling at these alien delicacies. 

If there was anything my first job had imparted to me, it was how to dissemble an object, in spite of its interesting whole, down to its unremarkable parts. A Bible—the ultimate exercise in product packaging—can be cross-sectioned and reduced to its paper stock, ribbon marker, mull lining and other assorted offal.

That’s when I knew I wanted to live in New York: in the midst of staring at those fragile bralets and bodysuits, when I refrained from deconstructing anything. I did not want to. More than anything, I wanted to be a sensualist. To live in a city that prizes and offers these luxurious and unnecessary articles at overmarked prices is wasteful, self-defeatist and terribly escapist. Specifically, I wanted to be a sensualist in New York.

City: London
Author: Gemma Barder
Location: Abbey Road zebra crossing

As birthdays go, it had been a good one. Presents in bed, a stroll through Regent’s Park, shopping on Oxford Street, then dinner at Maggiore’s in Covent Garden.
All of those places could produce a thousand different moments of joy and excitement, but today was going to be topped off with the ultimate moment. The most joyous, the most exciting.
Hopping out of St John’s Wood tube, strolling back to the tiny flat we rented together, our stomachs were full of rich, expensive food. The May evening air was just getting a little chilly. I was chattering on about something, but he was quiet and holding my hand that little bit tighter than usual. As we reached Abbey Road, he stopped me.

At times amusing, sometimes annoying, sometimes completely lost, tourists crowd the zebra crossing on Abbey Road (the one I padded over every day to catch my bus to work). It must have been photographed a million times^[1]. I often wonder how many of those photographs I have popped up on. When a guy in Japan flicks through his holiday photos and shows his friends a picture of the ‘famous Abbey Road crossing’, there I will be with my Tesco carrier bag, or chatting on my mobile, or hopping off the bus. I’ve been asked to take the photos myself, directed people to point their cameras in the right direction so they can get just the right shot, and have been caught up in the numerous daily tours that pass by the studios every day. Before that moment, the crossing meant two things: the Beatles and ‘almost home’.

Now, at 11pm, the only people to see him and I on Abbey Road were the occasional car and anyone who happened to be logging onto the live webcam the studios have pointing at the crossing 24 hours a day.

‘I need to stop you’, he said. My stomach leapt. He was watching the road, and instantly I knew why. As soon as the traffic cleared, he led me into the middle of the crossing and got down on one knee^[2].

I won’t tell you what he said, that’s just for me. But as you can guess, I said ‘yes’, and now, wherever we travel, that place will always be ours.

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Jason Gray
Location: the 7-11 at the intersection of Mejiro-dori and Senkawa-dori

Light turns green, I roll across the intersection. Walking along the sidewalk in front of me, a fashionable young woman. Burgundy crushed velvet skirt over other layers, black leather boots, vintage coat, long straight black hair. Goth-ish. Can’t see her face.

Walking with purpose. Confident strides, but not exactly in a hurry. Forget ogling. She’s on some kind of mission. Not going into that 7-11, like I am. 

I glance at her face as I roll in front of her. Her eyes and skin are slightly reddened. Her lip ring twitches. Distant eyes. Drugs?

I park my bicyclette at the combini.^[1] Another glance. She tugs at something on her wrist. Is she trying to yank a thread from the pouch in her hand? Is the thread imaginary? Her face twitches again. That jerky hand motion…

She passes behind me. I turn to watch her walk away. She’s not pulling. 

She’s cutting. Slashing. 

One of those cheap pink plastic-handled straight razors that Japanese women use to shave their armpits. At least twenty gashes down the pale underside of her left forearm. Some are like cat scratches, others are deep slits. Blood oozes. 

Suddenly the blade is the only focused object in my field of vision. It sniks across her wrist again. I wince, more than her.

She walks and slashes. People go in and out of the combini, cross crosswalks. She beelines straight through. Nobody notices her, she notices nobody.

I look around for the omawari-san.^[2] At night there’s usually at least one rookie on their mountain bike stationed at the big junction. Not tonight.

I watch her continue down the sidewalk, alone, small. Her right arm jerks with each slice as big transport trucks rumble past. 

City: London
Author: Jen Paton
Location: across the street from the National Portrait Gallery

Embodying all stereotypes of what is wrong with young women today, I clutch my latte, scowling at this grey day through my hungover haze. I’ve met up with my girlfriends this drizzly Saturday afternoon to get us a dose of culture by checking out the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibit of Vanity Fair photographs.

But the exhibit is full until 4:30, and now I’m cranky and have a vague headache, a woozy stomach, and 3 and a half hours to kill in this crowded, tourist-teeming, smelly square of central London, when really I’d rather curl up in my tiny studio^[1] reading Anna Karenina. After last night’s excessively gay dinner party, my little plan for venturing outside has lost its lustre.

We’re bemoaning our fate when a white van pulls up ahead of us. Its back doors spring open and three scruffily-groomed men burst forth. One plugs his guitar in while the second sets up his mic. A third – the drummer – settles into a throne-like seat in the back of the van. A crowd gathers, and an impromptu rock concert begins.

Traffic stops – the entire top deck of a double-decker bus swivels around, open-mouthed. A group of seven year old girls on a ‘Princess Birthday Tour’, decked out in neon tafetta skirts, start to boogie. Cell phone^[2] cameras are raised in adulation as we wonder if these guys are famous and we just don’t recognise them.

It is unclear what the t-shirted young singer is singing. Something that sounds like ‘Penguins in your tea…can’t kill the flee DUH NAH NAH NAH NAHHH’.  The drummer is smugly holding the whole set together with a Mona Lisa smile on his face – as drummers do. One ebullient blonde chick is jumping up and down screaming as if we really were at a concert – as blonde chicks do. When they finish their set of two songs, we burst into applause.

‘Thank you, London!’ cries possibly-famous scruffy lead singer. The van folds up and drives away.

Newly bouyed by London’s awesomeness, I turn up a red-lanterned street (it’s Chinese New Year after all) to get some Orange Duck.

City: London
Author: Emma Hardy
Location: Trafalgar Square

We arrive on the economy bus service from The North^[1], so we aren’t actually allowed into Victoria Coach Station, and get turfed out two streets away. It’s a relief to be standing up, and our legs take another twenty minutes to fully get into their stride. Nearing Trafalgar Square, all we can think of is food. We wait at the pedestrian crossing, spotting somewhere cheap on the other side of the road.

As we cross, I feel the zip on my backpack give way. I turn and see the contents of my bag spilling out across the black and white pathway of the crossing. I yell, and you leap into action, grabbing toiletries and socks. I try to prevent any further spillage. Around us, drivers beep their horns and pedestrians trample on my clean jumpers and skirts. Nobody stops to help, except for you. We finally reach the other side of the crossing. It seems like minutes have passed, but it can only have been seconds.

We buy sandwiches and eat them sitting on the concrete steps in the sunshine in Trafalgar Square. We take photos on our mobile phones. I try to play about with perspective so it looks like you are actually standing next to Lord Nelson at the top of his column. As you pose, I worry about what life will be like for you if you move here, whether there will be someone to pick up your things when you drop them.

We practise your potential interview questions, work out how to get to the hostel that we will stay in overnight, comment on how much more expensive things are here. We kill time looking at portraits in a gallery^[2] and drinking coffee to help pep you up.

I circuit the gallery for a second time while you go for your interview. I can’t help but hope you don’t get the job.

City: London
Author: Cecilia
Location: Arnold Circus

Alley cat as I am, I always try and cut through the atmospheric back streets rather than walk up Shoreditch High Street on my way to Brick Lane. I can’t remember when I first discovered Arnold Circus, but since I did, it has become something of a ritual to circle this dreamy little round park with the octagonal band stand sitting like a jewel in its centre, and some rather handsome old council buildings surrounding it.^[1]

The month of April was beautiful in London last year, balmy with golden evenings and apple trees in premature bloom. I was inspired to throw an outdoor picnic for my birthday with the theme of naughty shepherds and shepherdesses, and what better setting for such an event than this picturesque little band stand?

Invitations were sent out, and an eyebrow-raising amount was spent on delicacies and fine wines. My best friend Amanda came early to mine so that we could transform into an Arcadian sheep-herding couple. Powdered wigs, painted beauty spots, bloomers and staffs adorned with silk ribbons - we looked like an 18th century porcelain couple come to life!

We pranced down Dalston lane to the local cab office. ‘Spur your horses sir, and take us to Arnold Circus!’ we commanded the frightened taxi driver.
We were the first to arrive, and promptly started to lay out the scrumptious repast over a checked linen cloth. It looked amazing, like a painting by Boucher.

Suddenly, the spell was broken by some aggressive hip-hop music, and as we looked up, two young lads were approaching us, using their mobiles like pocket-sized boom boxes.^[2] A quick look around and yep, there were tracksuit-clad figures coming from every direction, closing in on us.

It was obvious that we had chosen for our picnic spot the very place were all the male youths from the council estates gathered at 7pm every night to plan drug deals or discuss highland dance and world politics or whatever it is that they tend to do.

I could not help but smile when I saw their looks of disbelief as they discovered us. They came to a halt, forming a circle around us.

‘What the ****’?

Their normal hangout was transformed into a pastoral idyll, and inhabited by two white-powdered creatures in bloomers.

‘Are you ghosts?’ was the first reaction. I think I could detect some genuine fear in his voice.

‘Or freemasons?’ suggested one of his little friends.

My mobile beeped, as to confirm that we were indeed earthly mortals. I had several texts, all saying the same thing: problems on the tube, everyone was coming late. No moral support to be expected from fellow shepherds and garden nymphs, no chance for bloomers and wigs to outnumber tracksuits - we were on our own.

I swallowed and looked at Amanda. She seemed to be set on just blanking out any disturbing element, and was chewing on her cucumber sandwich as if the future of England depended on it. I grabbed the bottle of champagne.

‘Oh well, Arnold Circus is for everyone. How selfish of me to claim it for my birthday! Whoever touches my shepherd staff will be a dead juvenile delinquent though…’

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Selena Hoy
Location: the arch in HaraMachida

It’s a brisk winter evening. Coming out of Japanese class, we crossed the plaza beneath the tall silver arch that stretches from the keitai^[1] shop to the dilapidated tiled alcove containing a Doutor^[2], a boba-tea shop^[3], and a small, bright toy-train jungle gym usually surrounded by a smattering of grandparents resting with their shopping, while their young charges cavort on the astro-turf. More lonely a place than before, now that the Tokyu Hands^[4] has closed up shop and moved down the road. We happened on two pubescent boys in middle school uniforms with navy blue short-pants sharing a tentative, tender kiss. One was touching the other’s hair at the side of his face, just barely. Their schoolbags were puddled around their socks, forgotten.

PDA is fairly non-existent in Japan: the most you usually get is some hetero hand-holding - and then only with young couples. And regular gayness isn’t seen much, even in ultra-modern Tokyo. Though you’re likely to see a flaming transvestite if you wander Shinjuku’s Kabuki-cho^[5], the sighting of non-theatrical same-sex public affection is extremely rare.

Add this to the fact that our little outpost of Machida^[6] isn’t exactly the center of hipster Tokyo, and that the lovers were probably pre-teen.

I don’t know those young boys, but I know that adolescent love and desire is hard enough to reckon with when you’re straight. With all the other factors compounding the difficulty, we felt as though we had stumbled across something special happening.

Hang tough, young men.

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Reuben Stanton
Location: a jazz bar in Kichijoji

We found the place by accident. Trying bars at random.

She must have been in her eary 20s. She was not classically pretty. She had a sadness, a kindness, a melancholy. She placed small plates of olives and crackers in front of us at the old man’s behest and I knew we were being charged just to sit down. She took her place at the other end of the bar next to the only other customer, a youngish, tired looking salaryman with his own whisky bottle and a half-empty glass. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. The old man said something, too quiet for us to hear, and she smiled softly in return.

What is it like to be the daughter (I’m guessing, the daughter) of an old Japanese man? To be the daughter (yes, definitely his daughter) of the owner of a small jazz bar in Kichijoji?^[1]

He seemed kind. The bar had a large cabinet filled with bottles of Suntory and Canadian Club, with tags and names handwritten in kanji. Many regulars, I guess, or many people who splurged one night and never came back. The amplifier on the stereo was one of those vintage valve affairs, and was featured on a poster near the doorway.

How many nights had she sat there, amongst the bottles and the obscure records and the crimson velvet walls? I desperately wanted to talk to her, but my Japanese was limited to “biiru futatsu kudasai”^[2] and “eki wa dochira desu ka”^[3] – hardly engrossing conversation. I tried to listen to what my friend was saying, tried to look away, while my wandering, drunken mind created its own history.

Her mother had died young, unexpectedly, tragically. She had travelled with her father to New York and Chicago to see where the real jazz was played.^[4] But his dreams of being a professional musician had been too difficult to follow with his daughter in tow, and he had returned to Tokyo and opened this bar. He hadn’t wanted to return, and she knew this. That was years ago. Recently she had begun making excuses to help him out at the bar, but the real reason she came was that still, more than anything, she loved to watch him play.

He turned away, switched off the stereo, and collected the double bass that leant against the back wall. He stood poised, his eyes closed tight, his right hand index finger floating and ready to fall on the thick E string, warm and golden in the light.

As he played, she would close her eyes and gently sway to the music. Occasionally, when he played a certain phrase, a certain riff, she would smile, slowly, knowingly, as if the riff contained a personal joke, a message just for her.

City: London
Author: John
Location: The Three Kings

Twenty years. Well, twenty-two actually. Twenty-two long bloody long bloody long years, and here I was in the pub once more. In Clerkenwell. Waiting for the woman I’d chased with a single-mindedness that still surprised and embarrassed me when I thought about it. And, of course, I’d got nowhere. Doesn’t do to look that keen. But for all three of my college years she’d been the shaping vision. That’s what I called her, after some lit-crit book I was reading at the time.

Tall, double-barreled^[1] and with an attitude – what was not to like? Although I had a series of semi-significant others to help pass the time when I was supposed to be studying, she only had to walk past and all of them became absent.

Then the unthinkable had happened. We met and became ‘friends’. Just about the last thing I had in mind really, but I went along with it in the hope that she might come round. Somewhat predictably, she didn’t. Later, surprisingly I’d had the briefest of things with her wannabe model sister who’d disappeared off to Italy after we’d spent a pretty useful weekend in an Eastbourne wedding cake hotel.

And now here I was in the Three Kings trying to look EC1 boho and hoping that she hadn’t changed, even if I had. And I had. Used to be relatively trendy, that’s what people said, and as the years clicked away I’d morphed into what I hoped might be regarded as stylish. Would the same have happened to her? Ostentatiously reading the Guardian^[2] – that’s where she was working now. Amazingly she’d rung up out of the blue (still don’t know how she got my work number) and asked if I knew who was speaking.

I should have. The deep-toned big sister voice wrapped itself around me and of course it was familiar, but not enough, apparently. In spite of this failing, an assignation was made and I was left to reflect on how things would be between us.

And then, in she walked, asking if I needed a drink. Like it was yesterday. The hair was more or less the same, and mercifully, figure and face seemed little altered. We even seemed to have a certain amount in common.

Two more drinks and twenty-two recovered years later, we made an appointment to meet again. Clerkenwell was working its shabby magic upon us both. Kisses were exchanged. She left. Looking around, I thought the Three Kings had been a good choice, all in all.

Actually, I mislaid her number and she didn’t ring. Well, what did I expect? Haven’t been back to the Three Kings either. Probably for the best. As one door shuts, another closes.

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Darryl Wee
Location: a slope in Hiroo

Nostalgia is a different color, and camera angle, each time you try to revisit it. This is a problem if, like me, you try very hard to be proprietary about it and keep scrupulous tabs on your memories. Tracking down your own past is a treacherous task, though. Things never quite look the same as your memory each time you try to track it down in ‘real’ life.

Coming back to Tokyo nineteen years after I spent a year here as a seven year-old, I tried to retrace the old hill route near where I used to live. A gentle slope near Hiroo Station, past the park strewn with fallen pinecones opposite the Red Cross building, to and from the Jewish Center where the school bus would pick me up. The problem was, my approach was wrong. My playback memory unfurls uphill, from Hiroo station past Hiroo Garden Hills. Nineteen years later, I decide to come from the other direction, from Ebisu station, downhill towards Hiroo. I walked in a daze past shopping streets I forgot I remembered. 

It’s a different film. Or rather, just an unfaithful remake by a different director taking too many liberties with the screenplay.

Also, I’m not nearly as small as I used to be, so instead of an Ozu-type^[2] waist-high tatami^[3] view, I now have a view that’s too high by half, too much overhead vision. Also, the beautiful sugi ^[4] lining the slope on the way to my house, just like me, have grown up. They now form a canopy that interferes with the lighting. 

There were other problems with the light on that slope. 80’s-memories, like the films from that era, are saturated with color. It must be something to do with the film stock. That day, though, Hiroo looked too subdued; the summer’s woolly light, bleached and overcast, failed to replicate my ‘nostalgia’. What I needed was a better location scout sensitive to the nuances of season, aspect, walking speed, and angle of approach. I felt frustrated with myself. With a professional studio shoot I would have been able to control these things, edit sounds, tweak the lighting, and then later in post-production, colorize or decolorize the film stock as necessary.

But I had only a fading film negative in my head, poorly resolved, made on the clunky technology of the eighties. Better to borrow your nostalgia from the professionals, I thought. Is there a better common-use archive than film? It’s well-curated, organized, and endlessly replayable, to recolor our own blotchy memories with. Nostalgia isn’t an easy indulgence for amateurs with little technical skill. Maybe its source image should be locked into a time capsule and stowed away, with no intention of a later rediscovery. See it only once, roll it over again in your head now and then, but make sure that repeat viewings don’t cloud that first, enchanted screening. 

City: London
Author: Andrew Flynn
Location: the King’s Road

It’s the first day of the Peter Jones^[1] summer sale and the rain has not let up all morning, varying only it seems in its intensity. I can see each outward breath condensing into dandelion-fine white mist on my way to the parking ticket dispenser. It’s the end of June but it could easily be October if it were not for the green. I’m sticky damp by the time we get to the store where nothing, it is said, is ever knowingly undersold.

The sale is a disappointment. I suppose there’s a special irony about sales: the stuff that’s discounted is the stuff that won’t otherwise sell. If you like something you see - I mean, really like it - then the chances are it is indeed a truly likeable thing.^[2] And, because of its inherent universal likeableness, it will inevitably, as night follows day, lack the little red tag that says: ‘Today you have been blessed’. Also, my excitable waist-high shopping companion only wanted to look at the toys. And it was crowded. So very, very crowded.

As we trudge back through the rain along the red brick streets, clutching our solitary duvet cover, trying to find where daddy left the car, I reflect on how we’ll laugh about this later. Irony, like fine brandy, is best enjoyed when it’s had time to mature, I decide.

The traffic is crawling along the stretch of the King’s Road in front of the store’s facade. I have a few moments to study the man in the red cloak and sandals holding a bucket and a sign. He must surely be collecting money, but he makes no approach to any passer-by, doesn’t even rattle his vessel. Sir Alan would most definitely not be impressed. He stays rooted to the spot, sometimes shifting his weight to the other foot, sometimes glancing up and down the street, but little else. I notice then that his is the calmest face here. I like to think that his sign says something spiritually wrong-footing like: ‘Nothing is forever, to live is to suffer, please give generously’.

But maybe he’s not collecting money at all. Perhaps he’s collecting a little bit of the suffering that passes in front of him on the pavement. With the rain and the traffic and the frustrations of the PJ sale, trade will probably pick up soon. He might even need a bigger bucket. I suspect there’ll be one on offer in the basement.

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Rick Kennedy
Location: a pastry shop in Shibuya

I was looking for canvases, having taken up oil painting. I knew I could buy some at an enormous art store in Shinjuku, but here I was in Shibuya, wandering around, and I saw this store called “Palette” which looked as though it had some painting equipment in the window. So I knocked on the door; maybe they’d have some.

“Excuse me, I’d like to buy some canvases,” I said.

“Canvases? What are canvases?” said a long, lanky young man.

“Ah, I don’t know the Japanese for canvases. That’s the English word. They are used to paint pictures on.” And I pantomimed painting a picture.

“Hmm. Oh, you mean kanbasu. For oil painting.” He pronounced the word a little different than I did, in a Japanese way.

“Well yes. I thought I could buy some from you.”

“Ah, we don’t have any…but please come in. I will make some telephone calls. I know some places in Shibuya which might have canvases.”

I thanked him and went inside the shop, which upon closer inspection revealed itself to be a pastry shop, not an art-supply shop at all. The name of the shop, Palette, was a metaphor.

After five minutes, the young man came to me to apologize. He could discover no place in Shibuya which sells canvases. I would have to go to Seikaido^[1] in Shinjuku, 10 minutes away on the Yamanote line, instead.

“I am so very sorry,” the man said, “but anyway please take one of these little cheese cakes …”^[2]

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Aneta Glinkowska
Location: Ueno Park

My Ueno memories revolve around the homeless living in the park. In particular, believe it or not, the grooming habits of the homeless. The Ueno homeless, in their homely blue tents with shoes neatly lined up at their entrances, remind me of the character from Imamura’s “Warm Water Under a Red Bridge.”^[1] The eccentric character supports his blue tent with stacks of books he’s read. I also think of the group of homeless gourmets from the ramen western “Tampopo.”^[2] These are homeless who can fix you a perfect omuraisu^[3], hand you the best ramen recipe or direct you to a ramen shop which would get a Michelin Guide star, if there was a category for it.

Once, walking through Ueno to the National Museum, as I was about to enter the museum grounds, I spotted to my left two lines of men, 10 or 15 in all, waiting for something. There were a few blue crates and coolers standing around, as though the group was on a picnic. I realized that the men, quite neatly dressed, were the inhabitants of the blue, makeshift tents in the bushes. They were lined up for a free haircut given by two young women. The idea of a haircutting service for the homeless struck me as unique and, if nothing else, yet another
rare quirk of Tokyo.

A year later, I invited Eugene, a classmate from my Japanese lessons to Ueno Park. As we walked through the park, I told Eugene about the homeless men lined up for haircuts the year before. Mid-story, looking up, I was surprised to find men once again in line at the very same spot. But this time, instead of the bizarre sight of young women cutting hair, the homeless were waiting for their turn with older, male barbers dressed in white uniforms with red crosses on them. Strangely, there was something appropriate about these old men cutting the hair of the homeless.

If you ask an average Tokyo dweller—long or short term—about Ueno Park they will likely tell you of its many cultural institutions or advise you to visit it for exotic street performers, or perhaps a stroll during the hanami season. As much as I enjoy those myself, I’ll tell you, I saw a dozen men getting their haircuts in the middle of the park two years in a row and I keep going back for more of the surreal. 

City: London
Author: Janet Nesaule
Location: a pub in Canning Town

‘This is fantastic,’ I say, ‘a real East End pub’.

‘Yeah, it is. We always come here.’ Charlie speaks with pride. He produces his crumpled newspaper and turns to the sports pages. West Ham are doing well in the league. 

I am determined to love everything about Canning Town – this grey dockland, Ladysmith Road with its row of dirty redbrick houses, Pete’s house – I love Pete. I am up from Devon, my first time in the East End.

Pete introduces me to Big Jean. She sells stuff, mainly her slimming pills, Black Bombers. She is gargantuan, ‘but the doctor ain’t cottoned on yet’.^[1] Big Jean lives next door to Pete with Jean, Little Jean and Baby Jean.

‘Why Jean?’

‘Guess they must like the name.’ We are Art Students. Pete buys some Bombers.

The pub starts to fill. Men from the docks still in their work clothes, loud conversations and braying laughter. Two black men, my first up-close, come over.

‘Give us a tune, Pete.’

He plays The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Waiting for my Man’.

‘Nah, Pete – not that!’

Charlie’s voice: ‘Fancy a few whelks,^[2] Jan?’ His arm comes over my shoulder, proffering a small plastic dish.

‘Thanks, Charlie. Lovely.’

Dear god, they look so disgusting, but I sense that this could be some sort of challenge. Will I pass the test and be accepted by the good folk of Canning Town? It seems important. 

I spear a whelk with the cocktail stick provided and put it into my mouth. The taste is salt water, and the rubbery texture never-ending. I take a big swig of beer and try to wash it down, but the whelk stays.

‘Have another’, says Charlie, delightedly.

‘What’s going on?’ Pete has returned from the bar.  ‘Fuck’s sake, Charlie, what you doing?’

‘I’m eating whelks’, I say miserably, my eyes beginning to fill with tears.

‘Why? They stink.’

Of course, I knew this, but I ate the whelk to prove something. I suppose you could say to prove my commitment to Pete. Obviously this was unnecessary.