by Geoff Peck

Ethan stared at the Wall Street Bull’s testicles. Stuck on the island between Broadway and Whitehall, he held a folding chair in one hand and his Blackberry in the other. He wasn’t sure what happened to his briefcase.

A man dropped to one knee in front of the bull and rubbed its balls while his wife took his picture. There were hundreds more. A maelstrom of tourism and capitalism. The faces he saw were either oblivious vacationers awed by all the things money had built, or New Yorkers, like him, who appeared angry, broken.

His arm began to ache but it didn’t occur to him to set the chair down. The Blackberry in his other hand occupied his thoughts. It had hardly left his palm during the previous week. Emails, texts, and calls from coworkers, clients, bosses. All formers now. What stuck with him was the text he just received from his wife. She punctuated every sentence with three exclamation marks, stressing the importance of making a decision on the tile for the remodeled bathroom. Did she ever turn on the news?

An Asian man, who had previously been taking pictures of the bull, took one of Ethan, and didn’t look embarrassed when they made eye contact. I’m a part of it, Ethan thought. Whatever it may be, I’m included. He turned and looked at the Bowling Green Station, wondering what happened when you stepped in front of a train.

Geoff Peck recently received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh where he served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Hot Metal Bridge. He went on to found the The College Rag, an online college sports magazine. He lives in New York with his wife Meredith.