The Stoop

[Administrator]

The front step of the Harlem Apartments

[Alice Byrne]

(New Day)

By all accounts it was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, school was out and the streets of Harlem were filled with the sound of people bustling cheerfully about and children frolicking through the streets, enjoying their temporary freedom. But, as usual, despite all this, Alice was in an absolutely horrible mood. Because, unlike many of the other neighborhood kids, she had spent almost all of this lovely day stuck inside, helping out elderly tenants, collecting rent from some of the tenants who her father had let slide for a couple of weeks again and helping fix up a vacant apartment to try to draw in a new tenant. Needless to say, she was a bit bitter. Even now that she was finally out on the front stoop, in the sun and the excitement, she really didn’t feel like putting up with people long enough to actually go off and play.

But it wasn’t as if she was just sitting around and doing nothing. No, then, she would only have succeeded in making the entire day a waste rather than just the great majority of it. For the past ten minutes or so, she’d been occupying herself with a little target practice with some stones that she’d picked up on and around the stoop. Normally, she would have picked rather difficult but rather unremarkable targets like a windowpane across the street or a certain letter on the side of a carriage standing nearby but today she was much more interested in moving targets, namely: the all too upbeat people filling the street in front of her.

In her mind, they deserved it for looking like they were having such good days when she was having such a lousy one. It just wasn’t fair and Alice was really beginning to enjoy evening the stakes a bit. In fact, as she picked up another little stone off of the small pile behind her and lobbed it across the street at yet another hapless passerby, a ghost of a smile played at the corner of her mouth and it only fixed itself more firmly onto her features when she hit her target square on the side of the head with a titter and a whispered “bullseye!”

[Jimmy Bronck]

--New Day--

Jimmy Bronck's been looking bad lately.

He's been smoking a lot lately, too. Not that he hadn't smoked before. He enjoyed a good smoke every once and a while, but now its as if he'd become addicted. Looking at him, you might think there was something wrong -- the way his dirt-stained hands slightly shook as he placed cigarette after cigarette between his lips. Maybe someone was after him. Maybe he was after someone. Or maybe he was having one of his blackouts.

There were times where he would sit, motionless, with a blank look on his face. He wouldn't say anything unless you said something first, but even then he would only mutter nonsense. He'd snap out of it and would go back to being his old self. But this had been going on for days, weeks even. He hadn't been into work, he ate less, hardly slept, and was keeping mostly to himself.

Jimmy took a long drag off his cigarette, the smoke escaping his lips as he sighed, and leaned against the railing that ran along the side of the steps. He had definitely seen better days.

[Karl Gloeckner]

As a driver, a large part of Karl’s job was really waiting. Be it waiting for Mrs. Noble outside of the stores when she went shopping, waiting for Mr. Noble outside of a restaurant when he had a business lunch or waiting for Bert or (much more often) Thera when he or she met with friends (and couldn’t wriggle out of being driven there, in Bert’s case), he always had to wait outside while they finished whatever it was that they needed to finish and he was almost always prepared with a book or a newspaper, but at the moment, that wasn’t the case. Somehow, on his way out the door, he had left his book behind and was now left sitting on the seat of the carriage in front of the building where one of Bert’s friends lived, contemplating whether or not it would be safe to leave the horses alone for just a few minutes so that he could go find a newsboy nearby.

As his eyes scanned the street for…well, he wasn’t entirely sure what he was looking for. Either a newsboy close enough to call over, someone that he knew well enough to entrust the horses with while he went in search of one or, perhaps a shady enough person to inspire him not to leave the horses at all, but rather take his boredom as his just deserts for his lack of foresight that morning. Regardless of what he’d been looking for, though, what he had ended up noticing was a young boy on the steps of the apartment building, looking rather badly off. Ill perhaps. He looked to be about Bert’s age, maybe a bit younger.

Well, Karl supposed, as long as he was stuck here with nothing else to do, he might as well check to make sure the boy was alright. He was, after all, a child and, as a parent, Karl felt obligated to at least offer a helping hand or a caring ear.

Slowly he climbed down from the seat of the carriage and strolled over the few meters that separated it from the boy. “Hello, young man” he greeted in an even tone. “Are you quite alright? You seem rather unwell.”

[Jimmy Bronck]

Jimmy looked up to see an older, nicely dressed gentleman. His initial thought was the question of why someone like him would be in a place such as this. But then the man spoke, his voice breaking through Jimmy's thoughts.

Are you quite alright?

Was he alright? He didn't know. There was no way he could have looked worse than he felt, and that wasn't altogether horrible. He hadn't looked in a mirror in a few days, though. He turned to the door, straining to see his reflection in the window. From what he could see, he didn't look too bad, though not all that great either. Still, Jimmy was never the type to welcome pity on his behalf.

Taking another puff from his cigarette, he decided to give the general answer of: "I'm fine."

[Karl Gloeckner]

Karl gave a little chuckle and replied “Ja…perhaps I must say this differently. What I had meant to ask is ‘What is wrong?’” It was his experience (largely from his own teenage years) that boys of this age were far from forthcoming, especially with adults, but that didn’t mean that he was going to give up straightaway. He would just have to convince the boy that lies would be ineffective.

“You see, my English is not perfect, but my sight is very nearly so and it is clear to me that you look unwell.” He took a seat on the side of the stoop to get down to the boy’s level. While the boy wasn’t young enough to be remarkably short, he was still a good bit shorter than Karl and he thought that seeing eye-to-eye, if only in a physical sense, may aid in their communication. “And I believe you may feel so also seeing that you must check this” he gestured at the window behind them “before answering my previous question”.