The Bureau of Inappropriate Response

Chloe didn't really notice the garbage in the street when she walked. It was a beautiful summer day anyway, and her attention usually was diverted towards other things ---- flowers, flowers are so different, one from another, and each with a distinctive pure color; she liked flowers a lot. And trees, and shrubs... hell, everything in nature. If you paid attention, there was a multitude of living things besides people and vermin, even in Oakland. This time of year, many birds sang, starting with The 4 AM Bird before dawn and working up to moments in the daytime where if you were listening it really sounded like the Garden of Eden or something. Cheep, twitter, fluttering of wings. Bird squabble and then all of them fly off together somewhere, to return shortly and begin cheeping again.

She turned a corner and spied, through the mesh of a chainlink fence, one of those narrow urban grottoes where it's cool and shadowed; where ivy climbs the relentless cement construction surrounding everything, and maybe a few fillarees or cockleburrs have pushed up with some meager but lusty species of grass through the inevitable chinks in the concrete. Maybe there was a flowering weed, or a butterfly. Something; and whatever it was, it made her smile. The whole sunlit/ shady nature thing. And she walked on, seeing but not really registering the McDonald's wrappers in the gutter someone had shoved out of their car window in the stupor that follows sugars and fats consumed in the absence of nutrients.

Chloe walked a bit further. When she got to the next intersection, two people sort of melted out of a doorway where they may or may not have been standing, and seized Chloe by the shoulders. A few steps away was a dark sedan parked along Broadway, among the car dealerships by the hospital. In a moment the car pulled out and away, without any flap or ruffle and Chloe wasn't walking down the street.

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