The black crow flew onto the roof, presented its tail feathers, crapped a long, white stream to the ground below, and flew away.

***

“He was here before,” the barista said to explain why she let the guy jump in front of me at the coffee line. It was as if had he not had an explanation, she wouldn’t have let him do it.

“I don’t mind. Even if he wasn’t, he can still go on ahead.”

“No rush?”

“Bingo.”

***

After I finished peeing, I went to the sink to wash my hands. A bug sat near the drain, and I wasn’t sure if it was alive. I turned on the faucet. The bug, rolled in a small ball, was all legs and body. The water flooded around it, but it did not plunge into the drain. When I turned off the water, the bug, actually a spider, I realized, unrolled itself and began crawling up the sink.

I repeated this process with greater amounts of water each time, but the spider managed to hold on. It wasn’t until I opened both faucets fully that the water overcame the spider and washed it down the sink. As I began singing, “down came the rain and washed the spider out,” I saw the spider’s thread on the side of the sink, which I hadn’t noticed before. It must have used the thread to stop itself from falling down the drain. I broke the thread with my finger and turned on the water to wash it down the drain.

***

I’m like my mother in always believing that people are innocent, even when they’re clearly guilty. I was happy when the jury acquitted OJ, and I’m happy that another jury acquitted Michael Jackson. I think this is the only positive aspect of my personality: I want to believe that everyone I meet is a good person. While I haven’t met celebrities in the physical sense, I have met them through their work and, like an acquaintance; I want to believe that they are incapable of inhumane acts. I guess we all have our fantasies.