For six months I watched him during the far too short hours between the end of my shift and my wife’s exit time from her dead-end job.  Each night, between the hours of 5:30pm and 9:00pm I watched him walk up past the cupcake shop at the corner of the closed off street, ignoring the every passerby, move slightly down the excessively paved faux park and stand, facing the dueling onramps which completely obstructed the endless stretch of bay beyond.

There he would stand in his filthy camouflaged clothing, tracks of sweat beading through the well worn grooves that routed through his face, which itself spoke of an age or horrors that could not be translated or spoken of.  Regardless which it was, he appeared every day, walking steadily, unhurriedly with the same clothes, the sweet scent of rot and fabric over-saturated with human waste and sweat hanging like a thick ball of gas around him.

As time went on, I examined him slyly, trying to read the faded tag on his decomposing jacket, failing, and moving on to some other portion of his clothing.  Surprisingly, it took me nearly a month to acknowledge that he was in all likelihood Native American.  For the longest time I had taken him to be Mexican, though in hindsight I cannot determine an actual reason for that besides a somewhat racist categorization based on the population density of Hispanic people in the area.  Regardless, once identifying him as Native American I found myself, to my disgust, taking more of an interest in his story.

I would sit in the small plaza most nights, light techno beating through the hidden speakers in the plants, writing on my laptop imaginative stories of how he happened into this perpetual staring ritual.  I wrote useless tidbits about a proud man reduced to begging after his unceremonious discharge from the army and, thus, loss of medical care for the mental issues he had accrued during his tours in duty.  I found out later that this is not true and that veterans maintain these services, albeit with extensive paperwork, beyond their discharge date.

After that I wrote of the ghost of a man lost in Vietnam who wandered back to his homeland every night in order to see the sun fall across the bay which had breathed life into his people, only to find his view constantly obstructed by the structures built during his absence.  Because of this he found himself damned to an eternity of loss, while he watched the evening commute from San Francisco stall across his ancient landscape.

This one seemed rather interesting so I embellished it a bit, spent a few weeks polishing the word play and submitted it to a small sci-fi publishing company.  Twelve weeks later, I received a nice little “No thank you,” email.  C’est la vie.

© Michael J. Wyant, Jr.