Not in Kansas Anymore

"BADATZ! BADATZ!!" The cry frantic as a plea for life. Crush of voices and feet and plastic bags, hemmers and hawkers swirling in the whirlpool's dance. Beggars wedged in sunken lives, bleating pleas for... their hands asking for money, their eyes begging for... other things. Light leaking sullen through the canvas tarp, not bothering to illuminate. Rain pecking and preying on the feeble and the frantic, fraying patience like thread. Poultry flesh, meat and fish lie strewn about their butcher's stands, their ripe sour reek seeping into living skin, into hair and cloth and vision, mingling with the rain and the rats. Then sweetness like Eden, sweetness of nuts melting in their shells, of dazzling fruit swathed in sugar, of pita so fresh it evaporates in your mouth. And light, not from above but from mountains of tomatoes glowing faintly through the dim, and from the shimmering heat rising from immaculate lines of sticky cakes. And the noise folding over it all, wreathing the scene... the screams of the vendors, chatter of coins, crackle of packaging, slither of a thousand feet on dewy concrete. The barks from haggling passerby, crunch of vegetables pulled from vines, flapping of breathing produce, the buzz of Hebrew and Yiddish and English and Arabic and French and Japanese, all sucked and twined into one bellowing, seething mass of staccato communication swelling like a wave brought up from the ocean depths, and crashing so as to eradicate thought-

 

 

"So that's the shuk."

 

"Yup."