The sea is calm tonight.

When I got to The Corner, an angry man was already beginning to yell in Thai at the women.  After he'd left, I asked the woman running things what about.

"My sister," she shrugged.

Twenty minutes later, a motorcyclist tipped over in the middle of the intersection.  Standers on the corner pointed and speculated.  Passersby hurried out to help him wheel his machine back to the corner to reorient, possibly to recommend he find a parking spot and a taxi. 

I thought back months to another motorcyclist who didn't think better, who ran the end of the yellow light, who ran or was run into by another who jumped the beginning of the green and who laid them both out in the same intersection, into a tangle of more helpful passersby.  That time, they awaited the ambulance.  That time, the one who laid longer on the pavement eventually showed signs of movement before he was loaded onto the stretcher, his neck clamped. 

I thought back a few months after, the sound of a screech.  A car or a truck, its heaviness and nearness immediate by the sound.  I never heard the thud.

When I turned back, I couldn't right away see the dark shape in the gloom reflected off of blacktop.  I still think it was a dog.  The words leap unbidden:  Isn't it lovely to think so.  But that street, that time of night---I still think so.  I saw a dog there tonight, walking my own bicycle after it had sprung a flat.  That one panted happily at the sight of me and then turned back into its soi. 

When I left, the staff were typically cheerful, the sturm and drang lost in the rest of the evening.  A tuk-tuk pulled up alongside me and asked to take me to girls, boys, what else I wanted.  I ignored him and kept on walking.  The driver didn't take the hint.  I gave him the finger.

The next intersection, he was waiting for me.

At the last turn before my street, my taxi driver had to make an extra turn and then double back on account of another cab stranded in the intersection.  Its driver seat empty, two men in black on the corner, faces lit dimly in the glint of their phones.  The hood, I saw at last as we turned, buckled by some indifferent force of the universe---the thumbprint of an absentee watchmaker. 

"Accident," the driver chuckled.  Chai, I agreed. 

He missed my directions and drove past my soi.  No matter; it's a short walk.

The sea, I think, is calm tonight. The sea in the streets of this city, not so much.