The Man Dressed As Jesus

 There is a town somewhere between Georgia and Ohio that was built unlike any other town in America. Every year, a man constructed a house on a 150 plot of land that included several wells which the man had dug. He furnished the homes and filled each with nonperishable food. He also left a note on all the tables which read:

DEAR FRIEND:

 For whatever reason that you need a home at this moment, I am sorry for your struggles. Please take this bed, food and drinkable water as a token of promise that I will return. 

 I love you,

             Jesus Christ.

 The man wasn’t Jesus. Far from it. He had taken out a loan from his Father-In-Law, promising to build an ice cream shop in Milwaukee. Instead, he left his family to build shitty houses for drug addicts, which he filled with stolen groceries. 

 Even this might seem slightly noble, but the man also built a road through the town. Once a year, he would dress up as Jesus and walk down the road, awaiting the praises of his community’s members.

 The first year when the man got to town, there was only one person living there. Another man, his name was Toby. 

 Toby suffered from schizophrenia and, up until finding the town, had thought he himself was Jesus Christ. Toby was a weird dude, but you would be too if you had schizophrenia and thought you lived in a town built by Jesus. 

 When the man dressed as Jesus started walking down the road, Toby ran up to him and began kissing his feet. 

 The man had not expected this. 

 “Aw, what the fuck dude?” The man said, he then turned back the way he came and left Toby staring into the distance. 

 The next year was a little more enjoyable. Toby had left to God-knows-where, and had been replaced by two gorgeous women. 

 The man dressed as Jesus made love to them both and then left again, promising to come back with more food and cigarettes. 

 A year passed, and the man returned. Both of the women had babies. One of them was a boy, and the other a girl. Seeing an easy way out of town and not wanting to commit to any families, the man promised to come back once a year with food as long as the children were left in charge. The women agreed and the man dressed as Jesus left. 

 The next year when he returned, the town had grown larger. Every house was occupied, and there were also huts set up in-between the houses, which were each also filled with people. 

 The man instructed everyone in town to continue to worship him, the two women and their infant children, and promised that he would return with more food. 

 The man had sex with all of the women and ate all of their Oreos. In the evenings, he would give drunken lectures to the men about why it was important to not let anyone leave the town. 

 One day a precocious young boy came up to the man dressed as Jesus in front of everybody.

 “Jesus, do you do anything other than drink alcohol and eat Oreos all day?”

 The crowd around Jesus fell silent he stared at the child.

 “Um, I built the house you live in for one thing you little assho- I mean, my child.” The man said.

 “Yeah, but that was a long time ago. What have you done for us recently?” The child asked. 

 “I bring you food! Are you not full?” The man asked, really basking in the fact that these people thought he was Jesus.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t bring food anymore. Would you like that, little boy?” The man continued.

 “NO! No!” Everyone shouted. The boys mother walked out and slapped the boy across the face. They left, and the crowd settled down.

 “I want both of them banished from here.” The man dressed as Jesus said to one of the people in charge of security. 

 The man left and promised to return with food, which was becoming more difficult with the increased amount of people. 

 Over the years, the man had come into contact with several black market grocery dealers who supplied him plenty of food in exchange for one person from the town.  Every year before he left, Jesus would take one “chosen” person with him under the guise of bringing them to heaven. Instead, the person was sold into the black market for human trafficking purposes. 

 The difficult part for the man was making eye contact with some of the smarter townspeople while he handed them brand-name foods while dressed as Jesus Christ. Eventually he realized a solution to this problem would be to sell the smartest villagers.

 But then one day the man was caught, dressed as Jesus, trying to rob a gas station on the way back from his sanctuary. The police pegged the man for several grocery robberies over the years, and threw him into prison. 

 Through hours of interrogation about where all of the food was going, the man dressed as Jesus refused to give answers. His town would stay safe, even if he could not reap the glory of being their savior. 

 Meanwhile, the people in the town were growing hungry. It had been 19 months since Jesus had last been there, and supplies were running low. The two children Jesus had put in charge were growing older, but they did not see the town the same way. 

 The girl, now a young woman named Zenith, believed that it was time to start growing food in order to prepare for the winter. The boy, now a young man named Rock, firmly disagreed. He believed his Father would be infuriated over the planting of seeds on sacred ground. In reality, the man probably wouldn’t have given a shit. 

 Eventually, war broke out. It was particularly violent, since no weapons really existed in the town. Around 17 people now lived in the town, and all but 4 of them died. Rock, Zenith and the two women. The houses and huts had been destroyed and the winter was soon approaching. It was at this point that the women told their children of the time before the town. 

 “Wait, so you’re telling me that there are other places outside of this town to get food?” Zenith asked.

“Possibly.” Zenith’s mother said sheepishly. 

 At this point, the four of them looked out at the bodies and rubble that had been created in the town’s war. They all looked back at each other and laughed. They each hugged goodbye and went their separate ways. 

 Both of the women died pretty quickly. They were both relatively old and stupid, and didn’t know how to find a local road. They both collapsed somewhere in the woods and drifted into death. 

Rock got a job as a janitor at a church 25 miles down the road. He didn’t talk much to anybody. 

 Zenith, after realizing the size of the United States and the world she lived in, began to travel. She met lots of interesting people, including an old man named Toby who sold her mescaline. 

 The man who dressed as Jesus got hit very hard in the back of his head during a prison fight, which caused him to forget about the town and his schemes. He returned home to his old wife and family, and eventually built the ice cream shop with money left-over from human trafficking. 

Ramblings of a Burnout

I got a new room in Brooklyn. It’s on the other side of my building, and it’s two floors higher so I have a beautiful view out of my window, which is next to my desk. 

 If I look closely, I can see Laguardia Airport. Sometimes I’ll just stay up until sunrise watching the planes roll in and out. 

 I loved airplanes as a kid. I would watch them and think about all the people up in the air who were either coming home or going somewhere better. I would imagine getting on a plane and flying to Los Angeles or Tokyo or Kansas City. You know, all of the tourist destinations. 

 My Grandparents lived in Kansas City, and they had a pool. My Godparents lived in Los Angeles, and they had an ocean. Tokyo just seemed liked a neat place to go to, and it also had an ocean. Maybe that’s why I always associate flying with swimming. Nothing made me happier than swimming outdoors watching airplanes fly by. 

 I want to live my life guilt-free again. I want to have strange hopes and ideals because they fill my soul with joy and not because they’re a good financial decision. 

 I don’t want to be a comedian, I don’t want to be a philosopher. I hardly want to be a writer as much as I want to be someone who writes. 

 I just want to be. I want to drive around the country and fly around the world for no reason other than to see it. I want something other than my conscious mind to be a mystery. 

 I hate knowing that nobody knows what’s going on in the world. I feel as if we’re all so distracted by the drugs and the entertainment. 

 The old world seems so much better. I suppose they’ve been saying that for centuries now, haven’t they? And it’s not true. This world is one of the best we’ve had as a society. 

 So why am I not enjoying it? The nature is dying. By the time I’m 50, there will be no more flowers or trees or mountaintops. By the time I’m 50, the world that I know now will be a cruel joke that I’ll remember as a better, simpler time. 

 I want to learn, but everything I’ve been taught has been a lie. A man who is told nothing but lies all day will learn nothing but how to be a liar. I do not care what white men think. I am a white man, I know nothing, just like every other white man does. 

 But I keep trying. I keep striving for a better tomorrow and a hope that someday our kids will be able to understand the true value of existence better than I did. 

 Maybe I should stop going to school. Maybe I should start taking different classes. Maybe I should sell some stuff down by the airport, and make money that way. Who knows, man. Who knows. 

Superman Kills Everybody At The County Clerks Office.

Note: Watch out for those pesky spelling and grammar fuck ups!

Through a thick coat of saliva, the Clerk asks me my occupation. 

“Superman.” I reply. 

Shit, did I just say that or think it? For fucks sake. News reporter. News reporter, Kent. How many times do I have to remind myself? I can’t believe this is happening again. 

“Did you just say Superman?” The clerk asks, his throat now much clearer. 

“No. What? I said, uh, news reporter.”

 Why does this guy need my occupation anyway? It’s a hunting license, I won’t even be using it in Metropolis. This guy probably just thinks he can trick me into telling him I’m Superman like all the rest of them do. Hopefully I threw him off with my quick thinking. 

“No, you definitely said Superman.”

 Well now he’s got me cornered. But I’m not gonna cave like that bitch Wonder Woman. Jesus, you make one crack about an invisible tampon and she won’t talk to you for a month. Whatever, who needs her? Lois Lane is fine. There are plenty of perks to fooling around with a woman who you could literally crush with a twitch of your finger. It’s just not as good as screwing Wonder Woman. 

“It is you!You even look like him! When you came in, I thought ‘Boy, without glasses that fella sorta looks like Superman.’ But when you got up close, all I could think about was your glasses and I sorta forgot about it ’til you said ‘Superman.’ But it is you!”

“Buddy, you’re making a mistake-” I start, but he cuts me off.

“No I’m not! It’s you!”

This guy is good. I wonder if he’s a Super-villain. Maybe a henchman undercover. I read his name-tag. “Jeff Stint.” Fake name if I’ve ever heard it. I’ll have to look into this guy when this is all over. 

“Listen, Mr.Stint. You’re making a mistake. I’m not Superman, but you’re not the first person to think that I am. I was actually attacked once because people thought I was him.”

This story usually works. 

“Wow! What happened?”

“I fought them off.”

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME? Nobody had ever asked that before. I hope he doesn’t pry. 

“You fought them off?”

“Yeah, uh, as best I could. But Superman came and helped me out.”

“Superman was there? Did you talk to him?”

“No, can we move on?” I say, hoping the conversation ends there.

“What! You didn’t talk to Superman? Why wouldn’t you want to talk to Superman?” 

“I’m sure he’s a pretty busy guy who doesn’t want to be bothered. The world isn’t the safest place, you know.”

The clerk laughs. Good, maybe now it’s over.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. But it’s all we’ve got.” He says.

“The safest place would probably be my fortress of solitude where I keep all of my secrets.” I reply.

Shit. No getting out of that one. Fuck it, this whole place has to burn.

I shoot heat vision directly into the clerk’s face. Dead. The woman behind me in line screams, I squeeze her neck until her head pops like a zit straight up to the ceiling. At this point everybody turns and runs for the exit at the same time. Rookie mistake. I sprint forward as fast as I can, spinning my arms in a circle at 115 MPH. This creates a typhoon-like effect which swirls everyone into the air and grinds them all into a red, fleshy dust. I lock the door before anybody else can enter the building and use X-ray vision to spot how many clerks are left. 

 Only two. There’s one woman cowering in the corner, and a man in the office dialing the phone. I can hear the woman praying to Jesus. I can’t imagine he’ll want to mess with me again after what happened last time. The phone call poses a greater risk. 

I literally fly through the office window and grab the man’s skull with both my hands. As I land, I rip him into two perfectly identical pieces. I would most likely feel more guilty for these grizzly murders if they weren’t each so unique to the average human death experience.

 I grab the phone. 

“Hey fella!” I say.

“Superman?” The voice says.

“Correct. Who am I speaking to?” I reply.

“This is Officer Jones of the 45th precinct. The man was just in the middle of telling me that people were being violently murdered by some man in a suit. Is this true?” 

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh yes. But I stopped him. Also everyone is still alive.” I say.

“Excellent! Also, what happened to the guy I was talking to?” Officer Jones asks.

“He went to the bathroom, but the important thing is that you don’t send any officers. I’ll take care of this one.” I say.

“Well, that’s really against protocol, but I guess I can trust you this one time.” 

God I can’t believe my luck.

“We’ll discuss this later, I have to go stop Lex Luthor.”

“Wow, that sounds hard. Good luck!” The officer says. He sounds like an excited child. I hang up the phone. Always leave them wanting more. 

 I walk back to the crying woman. Even through all of this killing, my suit is without a spot of blood on it. My hair remained perfectly combed and, guess what? My smile and baby-blue eyes still match perfectly. I look at the woman, her heart instantly melts through a combination of lust and Stockholm syndrome. 

 I give her one of those sexy smirks I used to give girls in High School before I learned that I was Superman and couldn’t use my powers for evil. She smirks back and then stops, surprised at herself. 

“ Hello, Miss. I need to get my hunting license, but nobody has been able to help me yet. Do you think you could try?” I say, knowing that she will. 

 The woman stares at me for a second before she starts to stammer. 

“Maybe I can help you help me. Where are the hunting licenses?” I ask.

 The woman raises her hand shakily at the cabinet down on the other side of the hall. I turn around and slowly walk over to it. I pull out a license. I turn around and walk back to the woman, who is still frozen in shock. 

“Now do I need anything for this? Any stamps, or anything? Do you need to sign it?” 

The woman slowly begins to pull out a pen, her hands still shaking. 

“J-j-j-just your signature and mine.” She says. 

 I gave her the license and she signed it. Her signature, impressively, was pretty legible. She handed it back to me and I signed it too, then folded it and put it in my inside-breast pocket. 

“Those people were bad, you were right to kill them. ” She blurts out. 

I stare at her.

“That doesn’t sound very Christ-like.” I say with a smile. 

“Excuse me?” She said. 

“I heard you praying to Jesus while I was killing all of those people.” I said to her, still smiling. “Do you think he saved you, today?” I asked.

“I hope so, I won’t know until you’re go-“

 Wrong answer. Heat vision to the head.

The only person who was going to save her today would have been me. That chick was a phony anyway. No real Christian would’ve signed this hunting license. There’s no room for people like her in Metropolis. 

 The building is now covered in human confetti. The only way to clean it in an amicable amount of time would be to use super speed and other abilities to rapidly remove the blood, which is exactly what I do because I’m Superman. By the time I’m finished, it looks as if there had never been a murder committed there once. Before I leave, I shoot out all of the security cameras and grab the extra video.

 I leave the building through a back exit and fly home to sit and think about what I had just done. After a bit of soul searching, I switch to some criminal searching and do a background check on Jeff Stint. Family man, no criminal record. He had worked at the clerks office for 25 years and as 3 months from retirement. I felt super sick. 

 Around 11, the police call. I tell them I had been in space all day and the person they had spoke to on the phone was an imposter. They tell me what happened at the Clerk’s office and I tell them to meet me there.

 We do a quick swoop, and the detectives tell me their theories. Nobody is making eye contact with me because they know I was the one who killed all those people. But what are they going to do about it? If they call me out on it, all of those people will have died in vein. At the end of the day, the world gets to keep their Superman. 

The next day I go hunting with Bruce Wayne. I shoot a deer and we have it for dinner before making sweet love by the fire place. 

The Dumb Adventures Of Billy

“Look, there’s no easy way to put this, Billy,” Billy’s first grade teacher, Mrs. Shelly, said. 

“But you have to stop eating crayons or else you will go to prison.”

 Billy looked up at his teacher, mouth agape. Teachers had been telling him this since he started school three years ago. And yet, still no prison. Billy was beginning to think that school was the prison. Billy laughed in the teachers face and licked a marker. He ran into the coat closet. 

“Billy, get back here!” Mrs.Shelly yelled. 

 The rest of the class went silent. They loved it when Billy went into the coat closet. So did Billy. Sometimes he would leave crayons in there to eat later. It was so quiet. So dark. Billy felt like he could stay inside the coat closet forever. The other kids wondered what he did in there. 

 Tommy had started a rumor that he kept frogs in there, but that was bullshit. It was all based on Billy bringing a frog in for show and tell on a day that Tommy was absent. Tommy just wanted to be included. Tommy liked frogs. 

Mrs.Shelly let him stay in the closet a little longer. She enjoyed the time away from him, and she knew that he just sat in there and ate crayons. Whatever, who cares. As long as she didn’t have to see it. 

 A few years later. Billy was in the fifth grade. He had quit eating crayons. In fourth grade they started using cubbies instead of closets and the allure of eating crayons in a cubby wasn’t nearly as mysterious as a coat closet. Billy wasn’t popular by any means. He might have been if he wore anything besides beige turtle necks with stains on them. He liked to dance when he got math problems right, which was frequent. 

 Billy would ask to use the bathroom and then go sit in the auditorium by himself. He would imagine giving speeches to the whole school. Lots of them. Some about eggs, others about Tony Parker, most about how bullshit class was. He didn’t have any crayons to eat, but he would chew gum and put it under the seats. The oral fixation thing would become a problem when he started smoking in several years, but at 10 it was just endearing. Sort of. It was kinda weird to the faculty, who all saw him sitting there, alone by himself. None of them bothered him. They didn’t want to get involved. 

 Billy noticed this and appreciated it. He didn’t hate any of them. Just the whole rotten system in general. He hated how they accepted that the system was broken. He hated that they refused to try and fix it themselves. 

But he didn’t hate them personally. They were pretty nice, and at least they paid him a little attention. 

 In the 5th grade, Billy started making up stories to tell at discussion times. Discussion times were when an issue in social studies or a book came up and everyone got to say what they thought. Billy would always lead the discussion away from the topic. He was very good at it. He would ask questions to the class, and clarify his question after a response was given. The questions and clarifications were relatable enough to the discussion topic not to arouse suspicion from the teacher, yet vague enough to pique the other students interests. For example, one week the class read a book about Lou Gehrig. Billy raised his had and asked if the Yankees still played in New York. When the teacher said yes, Billy replied saying that his Dad said that they had moved after 9/11. Billy didn’t have a Dad. 

 “No, they still play in New York.” Billy’s teacher replied. 

“Yeah, they’re still in New York.” a few kids echoed.

“Do they play next to all of those big buildings?” Billy would ask.

 And then the whole class had answers. Everybody was talking about different theories about where the buildings were. One kid said they played in a skyscraper. 

 By the time that the teacher got them settled and taught them about all five boroughs, 15 minutes had passed. Billy got really good at doing this about all subjects. Especially science. 

When Billy got to Eighth grade he was really bored. He had started smoking pot behind the loading dock. Sometimes the janitors would join him. They had known him for years, and they had grown quite an alliance. Billy cleaned up after himself and others, and the janitors would give him cool stuff they found. 

 There were two of them. One of them was a tall scrawny pale white guy, with long scraggly hair and thick-rimmed glasses. He was a nice-enough guy for someone who smoked pot with kids. He didn’t sell to them or anything. He kept to himself. 

 The other was a short, fat Dominican man. He was the most normal looking of the two but that wasn’t saying much. He had a lazy eye and a liver spots all over his face. He was old. Tired. He hated everyone at that school except Billy. He didn't smoke. 

 “You know kid if you keep smoking that stuff in public they’re gonna throw you in jail.” The scrawny Janitor said.

 “They’ve been telling me that since I got here. Is that what happened to you?” Billy said. 

 “Look around, man!” He replied. The three of them laughed and Billy went to class. He smoked, but Billy still showed up on time for everything, mostly. He wasn’t the best student, but he never had been. It was just the same old shit for Billy.

 High school was easier. He could leave whenever he wanted for the most part, and it was close to downtown. Billy would go into buildings and walk around telling people he had an internship. Everyone knew it was bullshit, but they weren’t going to stop him. He was harmless, even a little boring. For the most part they didn’t even notice that he was there. 

 Billy’s Junior year was a special one. He got a girlfriend and started hanging out with her a lot. Her name was Melissa. Melissa was really gorgeous. Freckled all down her face and her arms, with eyes that lit up when Billy said her name. She was into the theater scene at school and so Billy would make up characters for her and write down stuff for her to say. It was just an exercise, but Billy felt it was sort of symbolic of their relationship. 

 Billy was still going to class all of the time. He had decent enough grades to go to school. His Dad had died somewhere in Montana, but had left Billy some money. He could turn it into at least a year or two of college. He didn’t know what he wanted to study, he didn’t really care. Maybe economics or something. He liked making stuff up. 

 Billy had quit smoking pot. He was starting to get dizzy all the time and didn’t enjoy it as much. He picked up cigarettes, which were much lighter and didn’t require so much maintenance. Billy still felt sick sometimes. 

 Billy graduated on time. He broke up with Melissa after prom. He was sad afterwards, but he got over it eventually, sort of. Melissa didn’t at all, initially. She had thought that they would do long distance or something. She totally wasn’t ready for it. One night after they had broken up, Billy and Melissa drove around and got ice cream. It was the most fun they had had all through high school. They stopped by the lake and walked out to the shore. They saw the abyss of dark blue and heard the silence through the waves. It reminded Billy of the first grade, and Melissa was his crayon. 

 “I can’t do this to you, lady.” Billy said. 

“Let’s go home.” 

 Billy drove Melissa home and then went to bed. 

 College was a fun time for Billy. He sold pot to other students and totally got away with it. It was easy money, and he gave really fair prices. Everyone loved Billy. He didn’t really study anything in particular. It was still kind of bullshit to him. He kind of hated it, but he liked how much everyone liked him. He hoped the real world would be just as kind. 

 It was, sort of. Billy got a job tending bar at some building downtown. He had met the owner in High School, and they had stayed in mild contact. After Billy graduated, he was offered a job immediately. The bar was nice. It was for the business type who didn’t want to be forced into politeness with a soft spoken decor. It was wood chair and a wood bar with hard liquor. These guys got piss-drunk and tipped like there was a currency collapse incoming. 

 Billy didn’t drink much, which was strange. Everybody was sort of bracing for him to overdo it and lose his job. But he didn’t. He would wait for everybody to leave and then go out for a smoke. One day the owner came out and talked to Billy. 

He was thin lipped with slicked-back brown hair. 

“You know, if you keep smoking you’re gonna die.” The owner said.

“They keep telling me that, but I’m still here.” Billy replied. 

 The owner laughed, but he was sort of just being polite. He had heard that retort a million times. “Then why do I keep saying that?” The owner wondered to himself. Billy sat next to his boss for a minute and then went inside. 

 Billy started going to plays on his nights off. He would never admit it, but a part of him wanted to see Melissa on stage. He didn’t expect to, she wasn’t a particularly good actress. But it would’ve made him happy. He never saw her.  

He was better off that way, probably. 

 Then one day Billy drove his car down to San Francisco and jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, because sometimes life just goes that way.

 A lot of people were sad. But they all moved on, and so will you. 

The Sad Old Man

There was a sad old man who lived across the street from me while I was growing up. Honestly, I don’t know if he was all that sad. We never spoke. But he looked sad. Like he was ready to die. 

 His daughter lived with him. She was probably in her 40’s. She was nice, but also sad. I don’t think she had many friends outside of her Dad.I remember thinking that if I was that old man, I would feel very guilty about wasting my Daughter’s life like that. She was so profoundly lonely. Any time that somebody smiled or waved at her, she would run up to them and start talking. She turned any interaction into a 15 minute conversation about the weather or local politics, as that and her Father is all she knew.

 On TV and in Movies, old men who live across the street are mysterious. They have dark secrets or mystic powers, and it’s always the kid’s job to find out what they were. It was painfully obvious to me that this old man had no mystery about him. His daughter told everybody about his ailments and medical short comings. There was no mystery there. I knew he was weak. 

 I remember one day, I woke up early and went outside. The old man was lying down on his lawn. I went up to him. He didn’t smell very good. There was a bag of bird seed spilled next to him, but no birds. 

“What are you doing out here?” I asked him. 

“That’s a good question.” He said with a chuckle. 

His voice was soft, but deep. He sounded as if he were struggling not to whisper. It was the first time I had seen him smile. I smiled too. He suddenly felt more human.

 “I think I’ve broken my leg. Would you go inside and get my    daughter?”  He asked.

I looked down at his leg. He had rolled his pant up to his knee. His shin was all swollen and purple, and it looked bent in the middle. 

I didn’t want to go get her, but I didn’t know what else to do. I especially didn’t want to keep staring at his leg. Maybe he’s dead, I thought. Maybe I’m imagining this whole conversation. I went up the stairs and knocked on the door. I turned around and looked at the old man. He smiled again. I hoped he wasn’t dead. 

“If she doesn’t answer right away, you can go inside.” He said. 

I waited a minute, then did as he said. 

 Their house felt stale. It was a struggle just to breath the air. There was a stack of old newspapers by the TV, and a bag of medical equipment on the couch. Other than that, it was pretty clean. 

“Is anybody home?” I shouted.

“Who is it?” A plain voice said from the kitchen. I followed it. 

It was the daughter. She was slumped over a sink of dirty dishes. I wondered for a second how a sad old man and his daughter could have so many dishes. Maybe they had a party, or maybe she had put them off for a few days. I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject of what was going on outside. I felt sorry for her, but I also didn’t want to get in trouble.

“Your Dad is outside. I think he broke his leg.” That seemed as good a way as any to tell her. 

“Ah, shit.” She said as she threw her sponge in the sink and ran outside. I followed her.

 When we got outside, a few other neighbors had come out to check on him. They and the old man were all smiling and laughing. The old man now had the bird seed in his hand. A few cardinals were in the yard, too. They didn’t seem to mind the crowd.

“You old fool! What were you doing outside without me? Aren’t you sick enough?”

 Nobody said anything, but I could feel how uncomfortable her anger made everyone. Except for the sad old man, he seemed used to it. 

“I’m sorry, Martha.” The old man said. “I wanted to feed the birds, and you were still asleep. I didn’t want to wake you.”

Martha sighed. She knelt down and kissed her father on the forehead. I couldn’t tell if she was appearing less angry for the crowd’s sake, or if her Father had won her over again.

“Well, I hope you enjoyed yourself. Look at your leg. This will be the last time you’re able to leave the house for a while.”

 The other neighbors and I helped Martha get the old man into their car. When she and her father left, they all turned and congratulated me on doing the right thing. 

“You’re a hero.” One of them said. 

 I didn’t feel like a hero. I felt like a stranger who was intruding on someone’s life. I looked over at where the sad old man had been lying. The birds were still there. They didn’t give a shit about the sad old man. They just liked their seed. 

 I told my parents what happened. They said that we should all go visit the sad old man in the hospital. I found that to be strange. We never spoke to him much while he lived across the street from us, why would we travel to the hospital to do so?

 My Dad said it was so he knew that somebody cared. I thought about the birds.

I had never been to a hospital before, even when I was born. My Mom had me in a taxi cab in Philadelphia. It felt stale, like the old man’s house. It was much more chaotic, though. There were people in different colored uniforms, running around taking sick and injured people to different colored rooms. I wondered if any of them cared about the sad old man. Probably not. But that was understandable. They all looked pretty busy.

 When we got to the old man’s room, I felt out of place. Like I had on his front lawn. There were balloons and flowers at the table. Why couldn’t we have just sent those? What were we going to talk about with this sad old man? I wanted to go home, but I was also curious about how the old man was doing for some reason.

 The old man looked at me and smiled. He didn’t say anything. My parents and Martha talked for a bit about how warm it had been recently, and the new city councilman. I sat by the window with the old man. We sat and watched the birds outside. Neither of us said anything. It was nice, but he still seemed sad.

 The man died a few months later, and Martha moved away. I went over to their house from time to time to feed the birds, but they rarely ever showed up.

Patience.

Journey

 I’ve been taking walks for as long as I can remember. It started when I was around 7 or 8, and I would take walks to sneak out of my Grandparent’s dinners. This year, I took a walk during thanksgiving dinner. Nobody noticed. The great thing about living in a city is that there aren’t a lot of places you can’t walk. And when you designate that time to thinking, you get a lot of it done. 

 Whatever has been going on in my life, I’ve been able to walk away from it for about an hour and consider it. Failures, successes, deaths, breakups. It’s all relative. I can think about it and process it and make myself believe that I’m better because of it.

 It wasn’t until we said goodbye one last time that I realized how her nose wrinkled when she cried. I had seen it happen dozens of times over the years, but nothing helps you gain an appreciation for something like watching it disappear as you sit underneath a motel awning. 

 Our relationship wasn’t sexual. It was a true friendship. But neither of us could appreciate that. We outgrew each other like a kid outgrows their favorite shirt: quickly and unwillingly. We didn’t want to get rid of what we had built, but it was collapsing on itself and if we didn’t get out soon we would be crushed by its sheer weight. If only the base hadn’t been playing cards. 

 To be honest, I only left because she left. I yelled her name a few times, and I cried for a few hours when I knew it was over, but I accepted the fact that I had to leave. Even then, though, I tried to get her to come back to look at what we had built, but she wanted nothing to do with me.

  It wasn’t until we said goodbye one last time that I realized how her nose wrinkled when she cried. I had seen it happen dozens of times over the years, but nothing helps you gain an appreciation for something like watching it disappear as you sit underneath a motel awning. 

 Our relationship wasn’t sexual. It was a true friendship. But neither of us could appreciate that. We outgrew each other like a kid outgrows their favorite shirt: quickly and unwillingly. We didn’t want to get rid of what we had built, but it was collapsing on itself and if we didn’t get out soon we would be crushed by its sheer weight.
 To be honest, I only left because she left. I yelled her name a few times, and I cried for a few hours when I knew it was over. But I accepted the fact that I had to leave. Even then, though, I tried to get her to come back to look at what we had built. She wanted nothing to do with me.

 It took me a little while before I started going on my walks again. I found myself unable to do it, though, without some sort of inanimate companion. I was getting too distracted by my thoughts and  surroundings. I’ve always prided myself as being comfortable in my own skin, but for the first time I was itching to get out of it. My thought process is very forward. That’s why the walk is so beloved. If my body was moving onward, so was my mind. In my walks, I was usually able to maintain internal sidebars without letting them derail me, but now this was not so. I would try to think and my stomach would possess an empty feeling that could not be filled with food. So I just wouldn’t think. And eventually my brain would fill with thoughts that were supposed to be had, and I would feel the need to light a cigarette or listen to a song just so that I wouldn’t have to be by myself. 

It wasn’t just my internal watch that noticed a change, though. It was the physical world around me. The trees seemed to be thinning, and the sky was further away. The river didn’t meander the same way that it did before. I was not naive enough at the time to think that I was changing nature, though I was not sure of what was happening. It scared me, certainly. But I kept walking.

 I kept walking until I couldn’t recognize the buildings. This bothered me more than it probably should have. It’s obtuse to think that one could know all of the buildings in an international city. Still, this new territory did not jive with the theme of my walks. I stopped in a diner and got a very angry cup of coffee from an impatient waitress. It was like she knew that I didn’t belong there. Like I was disease. A vagrant. A stowaway.

 There was a point, though, where we made eye contact. I want to believe that she saw the fear and confusion in me, because her face softened for a second. I know she felt a connection, because she turned around almost immediately and returned with my change. I left a tip, but I don’t know why.

 The wind began to nip. I zipped up my jacket and kept walking until there weren’t any more buildings. It was just houses. This made me feel a little better. It’s not strange for houses not to be familiar. It doesn’t matter much though, because soon the houses were gone too.

And then nothing was around me anymore.

  I looked down at the road that had been supporting me and found that it was there no more. I looked back to see when it had left me, but could not see that far. There’s comfort to know that one does not always need a road to walk on, but it’s difficult to come to terms with the fact that the road eventually stops serving a purpose. 

I got home eventually. My legs were cold and I wanted to got to bed. The walk had fixed me, for I had not felt tired in days. Although one thing that perplexes me to this day is that there was no point in the walk that I remember turning around. I’m still not sure whether or not I turned around at the point in which nothing was around me, or if I just kept going forward.