by Rich Wright
His hands are filthy. He looks at them where they protrude from the frayed cuffs of his dark flannel shirt as though he’s never seen them before. Grime has insinuated itself into the creases around his knuckles. Grime is in the crevices around his gnawed short nails, with the nubs like the uneven edges of torn paper. The dirt in his wrinkles makes him look like a dull bronze statue. He can’t remember ever washing his hands. His fingers are short and round ended, and the commas of his stubby thumbs like vestigial appendages, like in two or three generations they may disappear altogether.
A hand comes up and the fingers drum on his pursed lips, on the fringe of hair that’s the uncomfortable length between stubble and mustache, on the pressure of air that’s the exhalation of a sigh. The inhale catches on a sob like your shirt snagging on a nail. Then his hands are on his lap again, and he’s studying them like he’s never seen them before.
His pants are polyester, maybe brown, once, and oil-stained, now, and the pant legs stop, where he sits on the edge of the bed, well short of the sagging white socks that gather around the doorknobs of his ankles. The band of skin between the tops of the socks and end of his pants legs is blue white with flaccid black hairs curling like tall sparse grass bending under the wind. The hairs erupt from pores like little craters, like the plucked skin of a chicken.
The heel of one sock is worn through, and the other foot is in a white fake leather sneaker with a worn sole and no laces and dirt in the creases, like his hands. The empty shoe, on the floor past his feet, flexes like it’s ready to walk, to leave the cramped dirty space that doesn’t keep the wind out, or the sounds of the street, or the cold that seeps in through the cracks around the windows with the dust carried by the perpetual wind. Cobwebs, tarred with cigarette smoke and grit, hang slack on the cracked plaster wall, and where the plaster has come off in slabs, chicken wire shows over strips of lattice. He doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting there, in the cold room with the door that won’t close because the lock has been violently violated.
He wipes a tear, and smears dirt across his cheek, pushing the stain into his thin black whiskers. The pink of the tear track links to his red rims and the delicate spider webs inside his eyes, sunk into the dark crevices of his sockets, with the bloodshot joining the crow’s feet at the corners, like tributaries flowing into rivers on a map.
Traffic outside gently grumbles, with an occasional dark clunk and sputter and the corrugated wheeze of bald tires on rough asphalt. Then sirens wail in the distance, and Doppler progressively closer till they stop, and the diesel growls through the wall, and doors slam with a solid thunk and heavy steps staccato up the stairs, and the broken door creaks open on its hinges.
The pervasive cold has bled through his windbreaker, through the dark flannel shirt, and through the two t-shirts he’s wearing till his skin is almost as cold and clammy as the skin of the dead girl lying in the bed behind him.