The insole of my city really does smell like feet. It toes the line reading sanitary and pleasant, and yet thousands pervade its dirt-dipped brick streets.

Every day I peer out windows grimy and slimy with algae at the people marveling across the Rialto Bridge. They are agape—at the dirt and the cold and the beggars, the uncouth way the restaurants and street performers unhook their jaws so they can pour more money in. Some of the tourists will stop and listen to the canals, the way they speak in acidic hisses, like hysterical pancreatic juice. They’ll press their faces against my water-stained window and expect to see a face—and they should; I’m right here, my nose smushed against theirs, this muck preventing any one-sided serendipitous meeting. But they all pull away, a smudge of mud on their noses the only reminder that they haven’t rung my doorbell.

I’ll feel them zero in on the truth. It’s like an electric church bell wired in my head, beating against the fracturing walls of my skull, gonging until the hairline splinters become gaping mouths and ears and eyes wide to my façade of a city. And me and the tourist look at each other. He sees an embittered old woman, modern in a fossilized-in-tar age, and I see a young college student who wants to be Picasso or actually just wants the recognition and will never get either because he just plain isn’t good enough. It’s not mean, or petty, or even a perception biased by my wrinkles or his new set of Prisma Color pencils and the Musee du Louvre guidebook tucked in his armpit—it’s truth. We’re both secretly rotting in this city, between the painted-statue-men and the one-of-a-kind masks mass-produced in China. Our lungs are caseating and we’re not even ill, we’re just sick. He should’ve stayed at Georgetown, the wannabe, and I, the nobody, should slowly retreat inside, sorry to have dared show anything but a gondola-worthy smile to the City of Water.