I'm Usually Not So Perturbed

There was a shrieking woman on the street today outside my office window, seven floors down. My office is in the floral district of north-east Chelsea, where shrubbery and pseudo-palm trees line the streets in the spring like today. She shrieked among the plant-life in regular intervals much like an animal, an owl maybe, but hoarse and panicked. She went on for maybe twenty seconds before I looked out my window and identified her by her shoulders rising and falling. The continued with energetic shrieks of desperation. It was the reaction of someone who had lost something very important. She had straight black hair and wore a green dress and continued her barks, aimed them at a guy wearing work gloves who stood against the walls shrugging in a way that justified him moving down the block away from the hysterics. I would wager they did not know each other. She paused once as he walked away, but began again while walking at a normal pace down 28th street, then stopping again behind a few large plants in the deeper into the lushest block in Manhattan. People passed holding their exposed ear closed with a finger to the shrieking, the shrieking echoing between the buildings and into windows. Calls of emergency fade quickly in this city by the taciturn and opportunistic. Eventually the man with the work gloves came back to her and pointed the woman back to seventh ave, back onto the avenue and he found a way to stop her with his pointing words, his gloved hand on her shoulder. He walked her in her green dress behind the taller potted trees and down into the subway/