Three Days Before the Shooting by Ralph Ellison

I STUMBLED THROUGH THE snow-curtained streets like a man carving a snowbank with a white-hot iron attached to his brow. Everything I thought I had known melted into a hot, scalding contradiction that froze immediately into a chiller form. I walked blindly and so found myself back in her block, approaching her building again, but there I stopped. I hadn't the heart to face Mrs. Johnson again. Nor was it the shotgun which stopped me but the dread of an ever more final rejection. For a while I stood on the stoop, hoping that Laura would appear, but in vain.

Soon I began to attract attention. Dark faces appeared at the windows, peering out at me. I walked to the corner and southward, then moved east to find myself on Lenox Avenue. People hurried past bundled in their overcoats. Far ahead the streetcars clanged along on 125th Street, rocking slowly across the avenue, a mask of yellow swiftly disappearing from view. The snow fell wetly. There was a strong smell of barbecue in the air, then as I passed an apartment building a gust of wind blew a cloud of sulfurous smoke into the street, and I stood there in the slanting snow, shaken with a fit of coughing that brought tears to my eyes. I cried and cried. Finally it passed and I walked on.