Dusk at my grandmother's house once sounded like sirens – like the wailing truck that circled town, spraying pesticides children used to chase. After dark, I would lay in bed listening to my grandparents' voices echo through the vents, their words blurring together like I was already half asleep.
Below my old apartment in Koreatown, an ice cream truck stopped like clockwork, a rolling music box whose looping tune floated up three stories, penetrating my windows, lingering until the enchantment dulled. Happy kids scurried home with sticky fingers. The sky was bright and clear with California winter the day my upstairs neighbor exclaimed that Kobe died. He told me through the floorboards, and I didn't believe him.
Today I heard the motor of a hummingbird that nearly flew through the open door, and I thought of its heart, a closed bud, its skin petal thin, on the brink of bursting, someone I almost loved once told me. Next door, a rolling gate opens each morning and closes before I fall asleep: a different kind of clockwork without kids or sticky fingers, but an engine all the same.
