The Woodward Line

The Woodward Line pierced through the city that winter held in a grip as strong as that of a blacksmith.
Bowlers and workmen's more practical flap caps barely held in the cerebral heat until it danced down the street with ever seductive old man winter, swaggering and jingling ice cycles in his pocket like pieces of silver and wedding diamonds. Love always chases the next opportunity, just as metal razor clipping cling to the seductive magnet.
The audacity of silk top hats, dancing nervously above chattering, fluoride blazed teeth, anxious to return to their steam heated townhouses with inlaid floors built by immigrant Scandinavian hands, never to see a manicure but able to cut the perfect parquet.
These strangers shared that moment, one they saw disappearing as it happened, ice melting into mustard gas before freezing into a haze of atomic bombs that eventually warmed up as collateral damage before their memory floated away with the dust of two towers falling on the heads of their darting great-great-grandchildren who were christened with the middle names of these ancestors they had only seen in musty photo albums.

The Woodward Line disappears into the white abyss of memory from the dawn of the previous century, one of many lines slowly erased by expired hearts and unidentifiable relatives in photographs banished to the yard sale heap.