Somewhere on a city street | Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction

three pink roses sit out on a peeling window sill. No bigger than the tip of my thumb, they’re tucked in tiny thimbles of water. It’s a day when we walk back slowly from the community center, late summer heat, a strange, sticky silence on the streets. It starts to rain, not quite drops, but the air’s so humid something has to fall. My little sobrina—who’s not really, but she calls me tiá because, she says, “estás aqui”—sniffs the petals, just at her eye level. She touches each one with curious 4

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