The twins, one wearing a rust black broken bowler hat fished from some storm drain and the other hatless, took to the roads late at night, their scuttling heard by only insomniacs and the fretful dreamers. They rustled when they walked for they wore black plastic bags over their wool slacks and taped up their ankles and wrists over heavy boots and thick gardener’s gloves. They wore cloth masks with the mouths cut out – the closeness of canvas frightened them so they could not stand fully closed masks – and they wore dark glasses stuck with silver tape to their faces. They oozed sweat and strange thoughts and the goat smell of madness was on them thick and ringingly clear.

The scuttled down Sixth Avenue for a long time, heading south, towards the water. Their cart full of cans rumbled behind them, one wheel nearly off, the metal sometimes scraping on the sidewalk. The other pickers avoided them. The old Chinese men and women stayed off their route and a woman, probably Polish, who smoked and spoke to the dark sky at Union Street, hissed as they passed.

Demony. Jaroszki.

They turned towards the Canal and stopped at St. Thomas Aquinas Church on 9th Street where they sorted their cans under a street light next to the subway stop. They liked to complete their work behind the wrought iron fence surrounding the old brick church and at 2am no one bothered them, not even the priest who later found hundreds of plastic bottle tops and cigarette butts in his perfectly pruned azalea bushes. They spoke their own language, their hunched shoulders bouncing as they coughed and hacked, their fingers buzzing through dark plastic bags, categorizing the cans, segregating them, sniffing them sometimes for a whiff of beer or the sweet tang of cola. The King loved aluminum and steel most of all, but steel, these days, was hard to come by. That night they had found and destroyed an old television and now they dug through an old computer monitor, discharging it with a zap using the fence as a ground, then digging through the electronics for copper scrap. The air around them smelled of ozone and their breath grew hitched, quick. They were excited. This was their last stop before their offering.