By Benjamin De Casseres

I. Economics

A SOCIALIST and an Individualist sit late into the night in a Fourteenth street restaurant arguing excitedly.

The Socialist has his mouth full of mush and the Individualist has a pickle in his mouth.

A man rises lightly from a table in back of them and pinches both of their overcoats.

II. Government

The Board of Aldermen is in a solemn discussion over changing the license fee to carry a pistol from $2.00 to $2.25.

The Board of Estimate in the next room is voting $400,000,000 in new building contracts.

The Mayor sits in his private office between the two dictating a letter to the Commissioner of Licenses on the rights of peanut vendors.

III. God

She trips along on French heels.

A man passes her with waterlogged, heelless shoes.

The pavement remains impersonal, neutral.

IV. The Onlooker

His soul bubbled in the champagne of her beauty.

Her soul aviated with him to the heights of his Olympian intellect.

The teeth of their ten-year-old are in a hideous condition.

V. Crowds

A great crowd of stars swarms through the streets of Space.

A great crowd of people swarms the streets of Paris, London and New York.

A great crowd of cells swarm through the brain of a poet looking at the other swarms and gives them meaning and beauty.

VI. Strata

At the top of the Woolworth Tower stands the Prince looking at the greater city.

At the base of the Tower, in Broadway, a panhandler is plying his trade.

Between the two, in the eighteenth story, a man sits at his desk and writes an advertisement about his New Hampshire diamond mine.

VII. Peace

He lounges in her luxurious boudoir and yawns about the inroads of Bolshevism over a fifty-cent cigarette.

She is lacing her scented body for the evening in the Diamond Horseshoe.

Under their window a boy yelps an extra about five deputy sheriffs and eight strikers dead in a riot.

Original publication
Benjamin De Casseres, “Little Scenarios,” The Smart Set 61, no. 3 (March 1920), pp. 65–66.