OCTOBER 9

TITLE: none
CLASS: Intro to Fiction.
ASSIGNMENT: Write the first page of a short story.

-----

The hobo was yelling again.

From his spot in the cherry-colored shadows, Johan wrung his hands. They were spindly hands, like spiderwebs with brown beneath the bitten-down nails. Hands that had been made for ivory keys and Eighteenth-Century drawing rooms, not Twenty-First Century brownstones with peculiar smells escaping through every fissure out to the waking world. Johan did his best to keep the aroma contained behind slipshod chinking of doorjambs and windowsills—just like he’d spent a week on his hands and knees with a chisel and a hammer, etching an army of bloodgutters into the floor. There was passion in every dark drip sinking past the wood grain, every sticky emulsion catching on the bottoms of his socks.

His apples.

Johan cringed where he stood, recoiling behind the gingham curtains. It was the same thing every day: the hobo would cry for handouts and Johan would hide, flattening himself against the wall until the concavity of his body formed a breathing alcove ‘No, you can’t have any; they’re mine; none can be spared; I need them.’

“Come on,” the hobo yelled, waving his arms like the madman he was, “you don’t need them all.”

Johan peeked out from his hiding place and past the dirty windowpane to the street and the demon standing in the middle of it. “Yes, I do,” he replied. His attempts to keep his voice from jumping up a decibel failed, and an apple-colored flush crept up his neck to burn his cheeks and ears.

The hobo couldn’t hear the decline(word choice?), but he could feel it, and was injured accordingly. Indignation registering on his grimy face, he sneered and tossed Johan a carefully-chosen finger before saying, “Fine, you freak. But don’t think I can’t see all them apples in there. Like the ones right behind you.”

Following the accusatory path of the hobo’s pointed finger, Johan turned to the curio cabinet behind him: hundreds of mummified faces peered back at him from behind curved doors that used to have glass. Those were decades-old apples, his favorites, and the hobo had seen them. Feeling like his feet were mired in bear traps, Johan dropped to his hands and knees beneath the windowsill, and crawled out of the fray and into the relative safety of the bathroom, rolling apples gently out of his way as he did so.