Snooky's Twin Troubles

In a monochrome city where streetlights hum like tired metronomes, Snooky—part tramp, part guardian angel—drifts toward a tenement stoop where mirror-image toddlers, rosy as dawn’s first apples, giggle over tin pails of chalk. The twins, progeny of a flat-footed patrolman who still polishes his badge on sleepless 3 a.m. shifts, clutch his frayed coat like it’s velvet; he answers by conjuring silver nickels for popcorn sacks that balloon like cumulus. A thousand-dollar baby-pageant jackpot glints brighter than matrimonial hope for the copper’s weary spouse, so a dandy villain—mustache waxed to obsidian daggers—pilfers the girls beneath confetti of startled pigeons, intending to parade them as his porcelain dolls. What follows is a harum-scarum kaleidoscope: alleyway labyrinth, elevated-train thunder, river fog that tastes of copper pennies, every footfall scored by the syncopated heartbeat of a city that refuses to sleep until innocence is returned to its rightful cracked-crystal cradle.