Track Mangoes

David sat on the edge of the bench staring at the sidewalk with his chin pressed tightly against his chest. The wind whipped pieces of his hair into his eyes and onto his cheeks like pieces of leather being slapped against the flesh. A crumpled piece of sandwich paper sat next to him on the bench, moving slightly, a half eaten pastrami on rye within. David's cell phone, a chique thing so thin it looked as though one might be able to break it with two fingers, was open in his hand, a message across the screen from one of his friends who had been arrested the night before.

There had been a protest outside of a factory up North. Students from David's school had gathered there. They were killing people, not directly, David told those who asked, but indirectly, yet it was murder nonetheless. Murder or something like it.

Not an hour before David sat on the bench he had been standing in a line to get a sandwich from a cart that passed by the school every day at noon. While he stood there a girl had come up to him, flipping her hair and licking her teeth, asking him how the protest had gone. "Yes, fine," David told her, and she laughed slightly and asked him if he wasn't aware that they had all been arrested. "Yes," David said again, "I was there." She told him that she was glad that he wasn't arrested, though she couldn't imagine how on earth he got away. "It just wasn't worth it," he told her, "I've been arrested before." "For protest," she would ask with a smile and he would nod and she would tell him that she thought the police treated actual criminals with more respect and he would agree and say that activism was a tough business and she would laugh and he would forget what he had just said and purchase a sandwich from the man with the cart.

"What'll it be?" the sandwich man would ask him. The girl, standing behind and adjusting the straps of her purse, would laugh and say that she always went for the pastrami. David would order the pastrami even though he had promised a week ago that he would take a break from meat eating. And the sandwich man would mumble to himself in a breathless way something while he spread the mustard across a slice of white bread with a broad silver knife. David would lean in closer, opening the folds of his wallet, pulling out money, but really trying to hear what the man was mumbling.

It was when David handed the man a 10 dollar bill that he realized the man was saying the Shema, mindlessly reciting it under his breath, smiling the whole time.

The man opened the cash register and the sound of the bell drove David into a hot spell. No longer able to shove the change into the pockets of his snugly fitting jeans, David would throw the remaining change into the man's tip jar as the girl behind him stepped up and started to recite her order.

"Did you hear," she would tell the man. "They were all arrested last night."

Squirrels came up to the bench, eating pieces of lettuce and pastrami that had fallen at David's feet. The girl was sitting somewhere off in the distance devouring her sandwich. From his bench David could see the white strings of her headphones hanging out of her ears like a doubled headed tapeworm, moving, writhing, going deeper and deeper as she sat. The phone was still in his hand, frozen there, as if he were about to drop it on the sidewalk. His lips were moving as if kissed by a hot coal.

David was trying to recite the Shema but couldn't remember the words.