lights and sounds.

They huddled together, crowds of them battling the intense cold. In spite of warm jackets, scarves, mittens, subconsciously they knew that the warmest they would get was when surrounded by other people. Puffs of warm air streaming out with every gasping breath, their bodies pressed closer to one another for warmth, while their pride kept them from it.
 
The stairs leading up to an office building were covered with a thick blanket of groups and individuals. The groups were much snugger, friendships and family ties ensuring they would last the night without too much shivering; the individuals fit themselves in between the groups, breathing into their hands, shoving them back under their arms. Every one of them was waited, knees knocking, teeth chattering, feet stamping.
 
It was Chinese New Year. Looking out among the hundreds of people crowded around the square, black iron fence surrounding the grass and ancient trees, the crowd couldn’t have been more than twenty percent Asian, let alone Chinese. It was London, and here was an excuse to race to the Tube Stations towards China Town, fill the streets and restaurants and, especially, the supermarkets; as if the supermarkets were closed every other day of the year. That night was a night for foreign food, far eastern ethnicity, and, most of all, fireworks.
 
Underneath the overhang which protected the people on the stairs from the buffeting, frigid wind, two policewomen stood, presumably warm in the centre of the crowd and neon yellow vests.
 
The fireworks began abruptly at six p.m., and although everyone had been waiting for it, no one had really expected the intensity of the lights and sounds. They commenced with the launching of small, bright rockets which cracked like whips fifty feet above their freezing audience. Pinwheels high up on wooden poles had fireworks which trailed sparks and spun them around, turning them into white hot circles of light.
 
About five minutes through the excitement a line hanging between two trees burst into a shower of sparks, the individual fireworks igniting from one end to the other. They shockingly bright illumination fell upon the crowd like a floodlight, and everyone in front of another person became just a dark silhouette. It was like a waterfall of lights, pouring down on the grass, turning the world into bright and shadow.
 
It was after this that the large firecrackers began. Strings of them hanging down from poles went off like machinegun fire. To the Chinese there not London born and bred they were reminiscent of funerals, the sound never quite loud enough to raise the dead. Somewhere in the masses an old man heard the noise and watched the flashes of light and remembered.
 
They continued to go off, thunderous like the games of ninepins Rip van Winkle heard, bright like Hephaestus striking Zeus’ lightning bolts on his forge. A thick smoke, red and orange and brown began to billow out from the square, muffling the flashes. The bursts of light were like the flash from a dozen muzzles, the dissonant sound like modern warfare. Dozens of minds imagined that this was the closest they would ever get to an actual battle.
 
An eye twitched, and amid the booming like giants’ footfalls a heart beat in unison with the staccato discharge of the firecrackers and stopped. A man’s wrinkled face relaxed from the panic that had so gripped it moments before, and the mouth parted slowly to release a final breath, barely visible in the wintry air.
 
After the final two, a grand finale that forced glittering light from the ground up into the heavens, the crowds began to loosen. Blood was forced back into extremities and hundreds of minds, slowly draining awe, remembered how cold it was. They left the square in droves, pressed up against each other like salmon spawning. The crowds whose path took them in the direction of the old man flowed around and onwards, water against an obstacle it could not go over.

Purpose in every step they left for their homes, to be satiated at a restaurant which served £4.95 buffet, for a few warm, smoky hours in a pub, to go on with their lives.

just passing through-

She looked too young to be riding on a streetcar alone. Sitting there at the window seat in her blue-green dress, her soft brown eyes watched as she, along with the rest of the passengers, were rushed on into the city, immense office buildings looming overhead.
 
It was obvious that she wasn’t accustomed to riding on public transit. Veteran passengers who needed to get off at the next one to five stops never sat down- especially not next to the window; the momentary rest wasn’t worth the hassle of getting up and shuffling past the stationary wall of bodies.
 
Her fingers loosely held onto the neck of a guitar, slightly larger in its thick, black case. One hand traveled over to the other and pulled at the sleeve of a light sweater, stretching it over her wrist. Pale brown hair and freckles stole years from her face; she couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen years old.
 
The streetcar screeched to a halt in front of a subway entrance, a set of stairs leading down into the concrete sidewalk. She stood up awkwardly and did her best to squeeze past the woman on her left, gently lifting her guitar behind her. Hanging down past her back was a bag that matched her dress, begging for wayward fingers to reach down and shuffle through her belongings.
 
The last one to step off she heard the hydraulic doors close behind her. Behind the subway entrance a skyscraper towered above the sidewalk and the single-minded individuals that hurried over it. The buildings hemmed in the streets and made you smaller.
 
Something in those soft brown eyes hardened, and she strode down the tiled steps, into the bowels of the city.
 
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He took the steps two at a time, just making it to the streetcar as the last passenger got off. He caught a flash of blue-green in his peripheral vision, and his mind wondered at the hue marching along past the grey, city streets. He turned his head, but the streetcar doors closed and the colour was gone.
 
Over half of the passengers had gotten off to take the subway, and he strode down the aisle to the rear to take a seat. Looking to the left and right sides of the streetcar he saw that every seat available had someone at the window. A little early in the day to be tired, he thought, noticing the expressions and, more often, the closed eyes.
 
He made a snap decision and sat down next to a black man on the left of the aisle, his body falling a little too swiftly into the seat as the streetcar lurched forward. The man grunted, moved closer to the window, and stared down at his watch. A streetcar was not a place for conversation, though for another boy who sat next to that same man that afternoon there would be a chance to hear a fascinating tale.

Staring straight ahead at the backs of people’s heads, he wondered idly about what the day would hold for him. He gazed from head to head as he thought, a balding spot already dealt with pre-emptively with the magic of the comb over, and garish red hair dye on the woman two seats in front. It was just another day of work, just a little money into his bank account, just a bit more purpose to the last remaining month before college.