Shimmer

One Sunday, A and I were walking and it seemed there was an unusual amount of broken glass on the pavement on the corner we live next to.  "Where do you think all the glass goes?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Every weekend everywhere you go there's broken glass left by the drunks.  But you don't see piles of it anywhere.  I wonder where it all goes."

A thought for a moment.  "It takes hundreds of years to decompose."

"There's a Scandinavian town a friend of mine told me about," I remembered.  "Tradition is that everyone gathers in the central square and at the end of the night, when everyone's done drinking, they smash the bottles.  City authorities are so good at clean up that there's not a single shard left the next day."

A looked at the ground.  "The rain washes it into the soil.  Then it's probably ground to dust."

"The dirt's made of broken glass in Iowa City," I concurred.  Followed her gaze and imagined light gleaming off the black.  I resolved never to walk barefoot in the grass ever again.