Dray by Tess Oliver

Author:Tess Oliver [Oliver, Tess]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tess Oliver
Published: 2014-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

Jolene and Dash had been very cool about taking me into their friendship circle, but it seemed that when they were with me they always acted shallow and disaffected as if they were trying a bit too hard to fit into their urban professional personas. Occasionally, I caught them saying something cryptic, something that meant little to me but that was obviously a source of importance to them. They’d been friends a long time, and it was clear from those brief exchanges that they knew each other’s deepest secrets. The careless, whatever attitude seemed to only be a self-defense mechanism for both of them. I would always be their semi-casual work friend, and I was fine with that. I’d left my deep connections, my secret exchanges and emotional ties back home in California.

The noise and my thoughts were not going to let me sleep. I sat up and propped a pillow behind me. I opened up my laptop to go through some of the clandestine photos I’d been taking while out on shoots for the magazine. It seemed all the while that we focused our lenses on dull, predictable city events, an entire underworld ripe with gritty, unwholesome and intriguing subjects swirled around us. But after several days on the streets, I came to realize that the bizarre stuff was only interesting to me because I’d never seen anything like it before.

The first file was of a woman sitting on a park bench with pigeons sitting on her legs and shoulders, eating bread crumbs directly off her coat, a coat that was layered with bird crap. It was as if she’d sat there for the last five years without moving. She seemed to be having full on conversations with the birds and with a little imagination one could hear the birds talking back to her in their own pigeon code.

I’d found her fascinating, but Jolene and Dash had barely given her a second glance. They’d taken more than a cursory look at a man standing on six-foot stilts painting wings on an intricately painted alligator adorning the second story wall of a building. But their only interest there had been the tartan scarf the man wore wrapped around his neck. Dash had a thing for scarves.

I clicked to the next folder. The first picture was of a homeless man who was leaning against the side of a trash bin with his pet chicken sitting next to him. His expression was not one of anguish or torment but more of humor. He and his chicken were having a good day out on the streets, and he seemed genuinely content with his plight. I’d asked him if I could take a picture of him, and he’d immediately straightened and turned his pet hen so I could capture her ‘best side’. It was the last photo I’d snapped, and it was the one that had made me realize that the human interest stories were fun but not particularly memorable. I could just as

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