There is an intersection. A maroon Buick LeSabre with a cracked windshield pulls up to a stop. A man named Herman crosses the street in front of the car wearing a full-length London Fog raincoat. He walks with a lion-headed cane but no limp. There are two helicopter seeds in his shirt pocket for luck and he's lost in a daydream about being a tightrope walker. Herman has a phobia of ice sculptures, especially when in the shape of swans and he believes he was ivy in a past life.

Herman lives as a tendril of the idiosyncratic world. From here this moment goes. Shoots out.

As Herman walks past the Buick, he hears the Miles Davis song "Saeta" from Sketches of Spain playing on the car's stereo. He pauses to listen, then taps his cane on the street at an angle—the angle the earth tilts, 23.44 degrees.

On another side of the world, at that exact moment, a music teacher in Seville, Spain is charting notes to the very same Miles Davis piece. A mailman knocks on her door with a package. She opens the door, they exchange smiles, and in his teeth she sees the keys of the piano she learned to play on, chipped identically. Her name is Esmeralda, and the package is from a cello student who won't leave her alone. It's the third vase he's given her this week.

The collection of these vases on the 11th floor sill makes her uneasy, so Esmeralda throws them out the window. She looks off toward the Ferris wheel at a fair in the distance.

As the vases crash on the sidewalk, the far-off sound of the Ferris wheel calliope stirs "Saeta" notes around her head, and the spinning carnival ride churns a peristalsis of the scene.

It's late afternoon. Her stare shifts to the street below, to the shadows beginning to grow long across the cement. One is in the shape of a swan. Another, a trumpet, then ivy.

Esmeralda is thinking about jumping out the window. Thinking about aiming herself at the ground, toward the ivy shadows. The ivy would catch her. She thinks about her husband. He jumped from the World Trade Center's North Tower at 9:41 a.m. on 9/11 after being trapped on a floor above the plane's impact zone. He chose falling instead of smoke and fire.

It should have been Esmeralda in the North Tower that day. He was covering her shift. They both worked at the 107th floor Windows on the World restaurant. She had morning sickness that day in September because she was pregnant with their baby boy. Now almost 10 years old, the boy walks into the room and takes her hand. He closes the window and asks if they can play checkers.

Checkers sounds good to Esmeralda, glancing one last time toward the top of the Ferris wheel, where a tiny movement unfolds. Seated in car 17 of the huge oval ride, a boy named Esto has eaten too much strawberry cotton candy. He’s vomits, and it splatters past the hand of a nun in car 3 below.

Exiting the ride, the nun looks to the ground and sees the face of the Virgin Mary in the puddle of the boy's pink foamy throw-up. News of the sighting spreads. The pink-ish spot is soon a massive center of worship and the destination of holy pilgrimage.

Esto becomes a relic. He is quoted in the paper saying, "I could tell it was something special when it was coming up."

There are pink mouse pads for sale, pink coffee cups, and pink napkin sets with pink leaf print, displaying the quote in multiple languages. Strawberry cotton candy is served. 

The pink-ish spot is covered with protective glass. Car 17 is bronzed. You can climb in and get a picture of yourself.

And if you hesitate there for a second and listen to the breeze, you can hear Miles Davis playing his trumpet in long drifted notes. You can hear someone tapping a cane. Shadows in the periphery are ivy and swans. You can feel the spin of the earth.

It's slight, the spinning, but it's there. Like you.