Birthday girl

It was her birthday. She had bought herself purple silk panties, and she was wearing them under her lime-green slacks walking to work. She rubbed her thighs together and moved her hips to run the silk up and down her stomach. It was starting to get colder out in the early morning, but the bus never came and she could save time having one more cigarette while walking the seven blocks along Delaware, then the long hill down beside Lincoln Park, past the empty playgrounds and the dying public vegetable gardens, the yellowed cement low-rent high rise,  the pre-washed streets half-deserted but bright-lit by the rising sun above the east side of the river, at this time a wealth of rich color and shadowy opportunity. But the day was typical, she passed nobody she knew for she knew nobody, her usual invisible self only more so since it was her birthday and to everyone else down here—the bored crossing guard on his metal stool, the cop smoking on the station steps, the frantic blond, her dress and costume necklaces flying, carrying her small sick white dog into the animal hospital, the school children in brown uniform crossing against the guard’s direction, the grocery shop owner with heavy lids, rolling up the security gate, exposing his sad old produce in the window, it was just another day, she was  just another semi-familiar nonentity from the neighborhood who for them was not celebrating a another year on earth in her purple silk panties, just  simply a day older than she was yesterday.