I found a sweater on the sidewalk. I normally don’t pick up articles of clothing I find on the ground, but it was a perfect white, the purest, cleanest shade of eggshell I’ve seen. I grabbed it and shook it out once, twice, and then held it in front of me. As I looked at it, a woman ran out of the apartment next to me. She was pretty, but lanky, obviously damaged and too much of one emotion or the other, depending on how she felt at the moment. She’d make a great ex-wife.

“That’s my sweater,” she said.

“I just,” I started and trailed off.

“That’s fine.” She was blocking the sun from my eyes. The sweater couldn’t fit her frame, as elongated as she was in the mid-section. “May I have it back?”

“Oh. Right. Sure.” I handed the sweater back to her with both hands, like an offering. She grabbed it with less subtlety, balling it up in one fist and then dropping her arm to her side.

Neither of us moved. There were other conversations happening around us: plans for a party later on tonight, a band discussing their setlist, everyone buzzing about what was going to be going on once the sun went down and the bottles came up.

“It doesn’t quite fit, does it?” she asked me.

“Well,” I again started and lost my train of thought. Maybe this was her sweater, from when she was a girl. Maybe it’s hers by inheritance, an old belonging of a long dead sister or grandmother. Maybe it’s nothing. Regardless, I couldn’t tell her it didn’t fit, so instead I reached out and tugged at the bottom of one of the sleeves, gingerly, non-threatening.

“Perfect,” I said.

The crowd was beginning to get thick. It was a little after noon and the lunch rush was hustling by us, almost through us. She walked up closer to me and pulled a loose thread I hadn’t noticed from the base of the sweater. She pulled out a dozen or so inches of it and then another dozen or so. She held out a finger and motioned for me to do the same. I stuck my hand up and my index finger out. She tied the end of the string into a loose knot below my first knuckle and closed it into my fist. As she backed up through the crowd, away from me and her apartment, the sweater began to unravel, the woman covered by threads before she got too far away, receding into the crowd and then, further.

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