Morning commute
At Essex, three men got on the J train. They all wore faux fur hats over knit caps and shouldered garish Le Sport Sac bags covered in loud pink and blue cartoon prints and the words “Le Sport Sac” on all the binding. The men stood in a triangle around one of the poles with the bags resting on their backs so that I could see they all still had the price tags hanging off of them. The bags sold for several hundred dollars, something I’ve never been able to wrap my head around. The man whose face I could see was wearing heavy plastic rimmed glasses and held a postcard against his chest. When he saw I was looking, he flashed the postcard, bending it between his thumb and middle finger so that it caught the fluorescents. It too was brightly colored, though I don’t know if it was name-brand. The bags looked empty and out of place and I wondered briefly if they had stolen them. I wondered if they were trying to sell them. They didn’t seem to be doing either. They mostly talked to each other. I looked away from the man with the glasses and he pressed the card back against his chest. At Bowery they all got off, walked to the next door on the same car, and got back on one pole down from where they started. I looked back at them and the man with the glasses flashed his postcard.
