This month’s prompt: A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words
Write a brief response to this picture: Nighthawks (1942) by Edward Hopper.
Do they know how lucky they are?
Another step towards the light. Any closer and my nose will be pressing against the glass and the blond-haired behatted soda jerk will be shaking his fist and chasing me away.
They don’t like my kind around here. Even in the depths of night, after the jazz clubs have closed and the only customers are the late night stragglers too lonesome or too wretched to return to their solitary cells. Even in those few silent hours when the city almost sleeps, before the sun clambers into all but the darkest places, there are no open arms to welcome us; the hungry, the homeless, the voiceless unseen.
The wind is blowing colder now. I would like to travel south, but travelling means money or respectability and I have neither. And it is far too late to walk. I should have started a long time ago. Years ago. When I was still young and my legs would carry me further than the next dumpster or the next soup kitchen or the next mission.
Instead I will go to Our Lady of Mercy and pretend to pray for a black and white miracle to bring me shelter in the hardest of times. And if God himself turns me away, I will die on the streets like the rat I am.
Do they know how lucky they are, these nighthawks, that all they have to prey on is themselves?
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The perspective of the picture caught me as soon as I saw it and I knew I had to write this from the viewpoint of someone who envied these people and their connections – however tenuous.
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