Listening to the giants

The inside light of the taxi cab was yellow like an orange cat's eyes, and we were four shadows in a hurry in the dark of Broadway, the fleet of us and Miles, Charlie, Budd and Dizzie blinking at the lasting sound of bass. The cab driver was ebony steel, hands frozen around the steering wheel but barely steering as he stared at unpossessed space, and drove us very fast very tight side by side, autos in a flash, evaporated. Someone in the back seat offered, ``We're really not in that much of a hurry'' but he didn't hear, the music was loud, clean like a toweled jewel, and it was midnight and the crescent sky stopped at the top of buildings, where the moon's aureola, a blurry pearl, dangled by accident, as though it, too, was a strand of jazz. Elizabeth Rees

--30--{et