Downtown sidewalks in disbelief littered her stare with a snowfall of shattered glass. Last night's clouds had finally broken — for good. The closeted morning heat was just coming out, shimmering the laddered streets into a Florida nativity scene; snow flung out by believers bereft of earthly anchor. Only a slight breeze stirred fumes and sulfur in steam up from the crunched wreckage, against an overturned police cruiser's lonely remaining tire desperately spinning smoke to the rhythm of a looping APB. Others were emerging slowly but exponentially. They came from cars, basement stairways, dumpsters, subway entrances and exits. Everyone meanwhile clung to something, holding steady while the ground beneath shifted and dug brokenly into the soles of their work shoes and high heels. Trained eyes tried to discern who could be said to have won something, when what they had heard all night was everyone losing everything.
Eyes angled upward, first from aversion, second from hope, third to focus the sound of rotors descending. With no clouds left, she could easily see the copters. Everything had settled so heavily that all movement sank when they came down. She knew that something must happen soon, but for now, there was just nothing left. She turned away from the landing and its megaphones, spinning faster and faster, around but not away.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a
creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely
a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the
bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.
Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact
that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth
to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the
very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more
afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by
an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam
as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and
put him at the head of the procession.
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
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