Ben Hecht
Life
The sun was shining in the dirty street.
Old women with shapeless bodies waddled along on their way to market.
Bearded old men who looked like the fathers of Jerusalem walked flatfooted, nodding back and forth.
“The tread of the processional surviving in Halsted street,” thought Moisse, the young dramatist who was moving with the crowd.
Children sprawled in the refuse-laden alleys. One of them ragged and clotted with dirt stood half-dressed on the curbing and urinated into the street.
Wagons rumbled, filled with fruits and iron and rags and vegetables.
Human voices babbled above the noises of the traffic. Moisse watched the lively scene.
“Every day it’s the same,” he thought; “the same smells, the same noise and people swarming over the pavements. I am the only one in the street whose soul is awake. There’s a pretty girl looking at me. She suspects the condition of my soul. Her fingers are dirty. Why doesn’t she buy different shoes? She thinks I am lost. In five years she will be fat. In ten years she will waddle with a shawl over her head.”