Keeping the Streets Clean, by Jennifer Weigel

Coming at’cha every Sunday at noon Eastern Standard Time EST – here’s more creative content craziness from Jennifer Weigel…

A single standard gray pigeon perched upon a fluorescent streetlamp, watching a scene unfold in the alley caught within the diffuse glow as a mechanized police officer called out to something or someone caught behind a dumpster, a break in the monotonous static of the typically empty and well kempt city streets.

“You aren’t supposed to be here,” the automated voice chimed in a tinny drone with a slightly authoritative edge.  “You know about the regulations and the curfew.  No loitering within city limits.  You need to leave this place.”

The officer stood unmoving, his crisp dark blue uniform hanging perfectly over his agile limbs, their metal joints ready to spring into action at the slightest provocation.  The cop-bot addressed a vagrant mostly hidden behind the dumpster, huddled under a worn wool blanket so as to make his stature and form nigh indiscernible.

“You need to leave this place,” the officer repeated.

The transient just sat there, bundled in his scant possessions, the tattered wool blanket and a thick winter coat, both an unassuming gray color stained with dirt.  He was scarcely visible from beyond the reach of the dumpster, hyper-fixated on the alleyway from which he was well-concealed.  The gathered hood of the coat pulled taut around his unblinking eyes, staring ahead at nothing.  He was eerily static, as if frozen in place.  The sub-zero temperatures attested that perhaps such had been his fate, having been discovered too late.

“Are you listening?  Move along now,” the mechanical voice raised in tone as the cop-bot loomed over the figure.  “I’m going to have to file a report.”

The officer bent over to study the homeless man’s face — the lens aperture hidden within the recesses of his dark eyes adjusting to get a better image of the drifter for identification purposes.  The camera eye met another of its kind, peering out from the void of the hood in fish-eye focus, capturing the whole of the alleyway and the dumpster caught in the flickering fluorescent light of the streetlamp, which was now dimming with the emergence of the morning sun.

“I guess I’ll leave you to it then,” the cop-bot addressed the camera eye, giving his fellow robot a slight nod in acknowledgment of their unified purpose, both part of the larger initiative to reduce crime and keep the streets clean.

As the mechanized police officer withdrew to return to his rounds, the robotic bird flew from its streetlamp perch to seek out some other action to spy upon.

(Image features photograph of print on police van from more than a decade ago.)