Bronze Fingerprints on Ferry Street

Author: Martin

In 1999, the Brooklyn Bridge still had the shadows of the Twin Towers. I first met Rosa at the door of a Polish bakery in the Dumbo District. She wore a faded motorcycle jacket, and three silver rings on her right ear swayed as she chewed gum. Half of the tattoo on her neck was exposed - a crossed-out Russian proverb. "Professional tour guide?" I handed her the bills tucked in the travel brochure. She suddenly used her fingernails to pick up the dried cherry blossom specimens between the pages: "Left by Japanese guests?" Under the red fingernails, there were still black oil stains left by repairing the motorcycle in the morning.

As we walked along the rusty East River Trail, Rosa always stopped at strange places: a heart painted with lipstick on a fire hydrant, a half-melted tin soldier toy in the gutter, and a cat's paw print on the fourth brick of the porch of a brownstone building. "This is a mark used by gangs for transactions in the 1990s." She kicked away a loose slab, and underneath it were several copper coins with bear patterns. Under the cherry blossoms in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, she suddenly pulled out a rusty lunch box from her backpack, in which coins from twenty-three different countries were neatly arranged: "Every guest leaves one when they leave."

At dusk, Coney Island was filled with the smell of cotton candy and anti-rust paint. Rosa took me through the back door to sneak into the closed Cyclone roller coaster. In the twelfth row of seats, she pointed out a deep scratch: "On the morning of September 11, 2001, a firefighter carved his girlfriend's name here." Her leather boots were stuck between the rotten wooden boards, revealing the medical tape wrapped around her ankles - she fell when she took guests to visit the rooftop party last week. When the Ferris wheel was suddenly lit up by a searchlight, I saw the lights of Queens in the distance reflected in her pupils, like two embers that refused to go out.

When we parted, she handed me half a postcard that was wrinkled by the sea water, with a pencil sketch of Brighton Beach on the back. "My father drew this," she said, getting on the Kawasaki motorcycle that was always leaking oil. "He always said that immigrants were like footprints on the beach. When the tide came, they pretended they never existed." Three months later, I found the Ukrainian grocery store by address, and the old man behind the counter handed me a coin with a bullet hole in it: "Rosa went to Kiev and said she wanted to see the real Dnieper River.