a few nights ago it was raining. i went out to get a snack. the solo market has small chocolate cakes, they are the size of large muffins and they are eighty-five cents. they don't seem to have any petroleum products in them, but they are always very moist and tasty. it makes me wonder, how they stay so moist all the time, but not enough to ask for the ingredients.

so that night it was raining and out i go, bundled up. a baseball cap and my hoody covering that, with my red raincoat covering that. and i know spring is coming because you can smell the worms. every year around this time you can start smelling the worms. they come out on the sidewalks to dry out a little because the ground is drowning them, but they get stepped on and i don't know if it is the living ones or the dead ones i am smelling, but they are the smell of worms. i remember it was purim one year and i got out of my friend sarah's car. "that's the smell of worms," i said. she said she had another friend who could smell worms during the rain. i thought everyone could.

i am looking at the sidewalk, because tonight it is worth it. there aren't so many worms that you can't avoid stepping on them. and though it is dark, the street lamps light up the pebbles inlayed in the concrete. of course they aren't inlayed, nothing so purposeful as that, but their round surfaces break the rough surface of the concrete and you can know that these pebbles have been made shiney and have emerged from the eroded concrete through the wear of thousands of steps and millions of raindrops. i don't know why tonight i am noticing them for the first time. they are really quite small.

so i walk to the market. it is just before closing, somewhere around quarter after ten. i haven't thought what i will do if they are out of their little chocolate cakes. i walk in past the scaffolding they use for vegetable stands and past the flowers both cut and potted and the steps they stand on that stay out at night, covered with astroturf that collect just a little bit of garbage at night, usually no more than a coffee cup and a plastic bag that might have even been blown in there by the wind. inside it is light. not too warm: the woman wears gloves with the fingers cut out. i look in the case where they keep the cakes as well as the bacon, the ham, the chicken weiners, the butter, the margerine, the eggs, the samosas, the beef and vegetable patties, and sometimes the tupperwear containers of the food they have brought from their home to heat in the microwave and eat. i can't see the cakes and i wonder what i will do if they aren't there, but i am just not looking in exactly the right place and i see them there beside the lemon blueberry cakes. i say hi and ask for the cake, she goes behind the case and takes one out and puts it in a wax paper bag. "eighty-five cents." i don't have the right change and give her a toonie. she gives me an extra dime, a dollar twenty-five and i give her back the dime. i ask if i can get quarters from my loonie, but she is low and wasn't able to get to the bank earlier today, she complains about the husband, nothing serious, he just didn't get back in time for her to get to the bank.

so i leave the solo market. and just as i'm walking past the scaffolding that holds the oranges and apples outside there is this guy walking toward me. he is wearing a leather jacket and has dyed hair, blonde. it's short and it sticks up and he is looking over his shoulder, back at someone or something and i can't tell what it is, because there doesn't seem to be anything in particular to be looking back at. he seems to be looking in the general direction of the silvertone, but there is no one outside of there that i can see. anyway, like i said he is walking toward me and looking the other way and he is going to be walking into me in less than a second and very often i don't feel like saying, "hey! watch it!" except when i'm on my bike, in which case i am obnoxiously verbal. two things i learned in school were how to be invisible and how to be small. invisible won't work because he's not looking and he's going to be bumping into me. i never learned to disappear entirely. so i get small and smush myself up against the scaffolding. it's not even as arduous as the verb smush or the preposition against makes it sound. i just shrink. and he passes me, nearly bumping into the scaffolding itself, without even touching me. he is alarmed, but i have already slipped by him and put steps between us.

i am not small. even if i didn't eat chocolate cakes late at night i wouldn't be small. i think about a friend of mine i was visiting recently. she was in pain with her back and when i went in she was curled on her bed with a cover over her and a heating pad behind her. she looked like i could put her in my hand. "you look so small," i said. and i squatted on the floor so i wouldn't feel like i was looming over her. the cake is getting drops of water on it as i rip pieces off and put them in my mouth. sometimes when i have my shoes off and my sweety doesn't and she is holding me she starts to smile like she's going to make fun of me. once i said, "why are you looking at me like that?" we had been through this before. "you know. you're just in one of those moods." "what mood?" she pauses, not like she's deciding what to say, she already knows it, she's just wondering how long she can hold off saying it. "one of those short moods," and she bursts out laughing and, after failing at pouting, so do i. but i'm not small.

so i am nearly home, having forgotten about the worms for the most part, having eaten the cake and having to walk around the big puddle in front of my house that takes up the whole sidewalk. a branch from the spruce tree outside lies on the ground. i walk in and up the steps and wonder when i am going to hammer in that protruding nail on the steps that always catches on the mop when i am taking the slippery mould off the stairs.