Sidewalk Saints

New York. San Francisco. Miami. March 1997. Three cities. Three ordinary people. One week that will change nothing — and everything. Eddie Palowski runs a liquor store on Ludlow Street, Lower Manhattan. Behind his plexiglass counter, he watches the city shake. When a brick crashes through his window with a single word in Italian — CHIUDI. Close. — he does not close. Meilin Chen is twenty-two. She runs her grandmother's dim sum restaurant on Grant Avenue, San Francisco. At night, the walls vibrate. Voices speak Cantonese beneath the foundations. Someone is moving processors through the tunnels of Chinatown. Dwayne Moses has driven a cab in Liberty City, Miami, for twenty-six years. He knows which fares to take. He knows which ones to refuse. One refusal will save his life. Three Sidewalk Saints. Three people the city forgets to name. Somewhere between New York, San Francisco, and Miami, a tall Eurasian man moves through the margins of the story. He buys water. He drinks tea. He leaves crisp bills and a look that says: I saw you. You exist. No one photographs him. No one stops him. He is always already gone. Sidewalk Saints is the first volume of Sovereign Streets, a literary collection that gives a voice to the invisible figures who hold cities together — the people behind the counter, behind the wheel, behind the wok — while the world burns around them. Noir fiction. Urban sociology. Three cities. One week. The real story is always the one no one reports. Sovereign Streets — Volume 1 Ludic Literature founded by William Kergroach