Aries
There's a little store across the street from my office building - the ghetto deli, everyone calls it. It's all 1998 lettering and questionable choices behind the counter, next to my black glass skyscraper late night abode. I am early one morning, beelining from the subway exit inside its clear doors for yogurt parfait before tackling my inbox of requests and persistent callers. As I'm handing over my ATM-fresh twenty, and the morning ladies are making change, they rattle off in Spanish about Zodiac signs. "My brother's a Cancer, so gentle..." "His wife, she Pisces..." More like a stream than a rapport. They're looking at me enough as though I'm one of them that I put in, "I'm an Aries." And the one woman turns to me fully and says, "My mother an Aries, so strong," making a fist and holding it out for me. The mother is fierce, she says, and I have no trouble understanding sentiment without exact lexicon, and "she always up and up." Ambition, the woman means, and she may be a Cancer, but she's got hers pointed in the right direction.