Jump

I was walking down the sidewalk behind my group of friends. We were wandering around Broadway after dark and all the shops were closed. I saw a photo in a store front window and stopped.

The man in the photo was wearing a three piece suit. He was falling from a skyscraper's window in haunting black and white. I was transfixed and drowning in morbid curiosity instantly. Why did he jump? Did he have to break the window? What did he think of as he was falling? Did he think of anyone before he met the ground? 

What did the photographer think? He had to have known there was nothing he could do... His muse was destined to fall. Perhaps the realization came to the photographer suddenly? He somehow thought, with just a quick reach for the camera, a man's life is...suspended, forever frozen in wondrous, weightless flight. And not...death.   

Eventually my friends noticed I wasn't laughing alongside them and they came back to pull me from the window. I never saw the photo again.  I looked for it every time I was on Broadway and that was a lot when I was seventeen and coffee at midnight was cool.

I wonder who bought it.