“The street paused.” Only metaphorically would a street pause because only metaphorically could a street move. Yet where this sentence appears in the penultimate chapter of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934), a chapter famous for its Joycean lyricism, the effect is more realistic than lyrical. In invoking the street Roth quite clearly refers to the people in the street who do indeed pause – and moments later form a crowd – when David the boy-protagonist short circuits the trolley line's third rail. However, most of the people who pause are not in the street per se, but rather indoors where they are distracted by the incident from “their tasks, their play, from faces, newspapers, dishes, cards, seidels, valves, [and] sewing machines.” Still, as a literary conceit the pausing street draws little attention; it pales in comparison to the synaesthetic phantasm appearing a few lines later in which Roth depicts the short circuit incident itself: “a quaking splendor dissolved the cobbles, the grimy structures, bleary stables, the dump-heap, river and sky into a single cymbal-clash of light. Between the livid jaws of the rail, the dipper twisted and bounced, consumed in roaring radiance, candescent –” (CS 419). Next to such verbal turbulence, the pausing street looks veritably like terra firma.