They could be bathers

 

In small groups, families and couples and the occasional loner absorbed in a book on a summer’s heat-struck beach that could be Bondi or Ipanema or la Paloma, perhaps North Avenue or Brighton, vacationers captured from a hotel balcony in black-and-white by a street photographer hoping for a sale to a wealthy patron of the arts, and you wish you had the day off to join them until you look closer at what you thought were stains or smudges and realize these folks will never feel the sun again, never half-watch their children while eyeing a nearby stranger’s sculpted body, and understand the setting is a street in Barcelona or Nanking or Odessa, perhaps some soon Chicago or New York, on a day when somewhere else, some place far away from people and bombs and guns, would have been the best place.