My friends and I are in an on-again/off-again writing club where the rules are simple. Every two weeks you have to submit three short stories that it took you 20 minutes or less to write. These are the results.

Jersey City

Condos going up on every other corner, but if you rode your bike three blocks you saw weird untouched pockets retained in the folds of the neighborhood.  Sometimes you got pieces of present and past in the same place, like this group of indian men playing cricket in an abandoned parking lot next to the crumbling brick of an old pencil factory.

They used a tennis ball, traffic cones for wickets, a real cricket bat.  They were all in their twenties or thirties, with a few tiny kids sprinting around the outside of the parking lot like uncoordinated rabbits.

Down the street and around the corner was a squat Mexican man in the widest lawn chair you’ve ever seen, pretending to read the paper.  He looked like the front of a rusted pickup, and with his build you couldn’t tell if he was sitting down or just actually looked like that and was four feet tall.  As women pass, he examined their asses as if searching for clues.

There’s an old Italian woman who fans herself on her stoop twelve hours a day.  She doesn’t crotchet, read, fidget, or drink.  She just sits in her pink and purple housedress and swivels her neck back and forth.  Her eyeballs seem to function more like motion-detectors than anything, tracking nondescript blurs across her field of vision.

Then you sit on your bike at a stop light, waiting for traffic to pass, and see the point of it all as you shake hands with the man dragging a cart full of still sizzling kebabs up the street.