Slimmy J awoke from a dream of a time when he was a boy, sitting on the green sofa with his momma, watching the rain fall onto the city. It was the first time he remembered seeing rain and it was like magic, water falling from the sky. It was supposed to be sitting in the tub or sink, the toilet. Ever since that afternoon, he'd been fascinated with water. Walking home from school in the early spring, following rushing streams of melting snow. He liked to put bottle caps or anything else that would float in the streams and follow their path with the water.

As consciousness slowly dissolved into him like a stubborn chunk of snow overcome with water, he realized he was damp. It had probably rained overnight, and that's what caused his dream, he thought. His eyes were still closed, glued shut by discharge. He barely had the strength to get them open. He was starving and his body ached as it consumed itself to provide the energy for him to lift his head a few inches and look around. The alley was dry, he had pissed himself in his sleep again.

He knew he needed food badly, but there was no way he could summon the strength or the will to get it. He'd been in that alley for months, crawling around like a dog crippled by a car. He may not be able to feed his body, but he could still feed his habit. Weakly, he reached into his damp pocket and retrieved his lighter and a small piece of cellophane wrapped around a small rock. He put the rock into a broken light bulb lying in front of him and paused to summon the strength to hold it to his mouth long enough to smoke it. When he finished, what was left of the muscle in his arms gave out and they fell in front of him. As the euphoria took hold of him, tears streamed from his eyes, carrying away the crusted discharge like tiny bottle caps in a snowstream.

He heard footsteps approaching from the distance. It wasn't the crisp tap he associated with cops, cocky and purposeful. It was the slurred crunch of someone dragging the weight of life behind them like a shackled prisoner. Slimmy J tried to moisten his cracked lips, but his tongue was just as dry as they were, "Professor, that you?" He croaked.

"Mornin' Slimmy J. How you doin?"

"Oh, jus' fine. Jus' fine."

Slimmy J always said that. Leonard knew better.

"Wach' you philsophizin' about this mornin' professor?"

Leonard sat down a foot or so away from Slimmy J, where he could see him without having to move his head, "Aww I don't know. I gotta wonder about people. I think they're all goin' crazy." He opened a plastic bag with cut meat in it, "I got some food here. You hungry?"

"Say, that sure is nice, professor. I'm in bad shape here though. You think you could tear that up into small bits for me?"

Leonard tore the meat with his ashen fingers and fed it to Slimmy J, keeping none for himself. When it was gone, Slimmy J raised a shaking, ebony finger and scraped a bit of meat from his chin into his mouth with a yellowed fingernail.

"I know what you mean, professor. Peoples today walkin' around with bad feelin'. I got bad feelin' myself. I guess that why I'm here. But ain't none of them gonna be layin' in the alley pissin' theyself. They's lucky they got peoples carin' 'bout them. My only frien's you an' the rats."

"I s'pose you're right, Slimmy J."

"Peoples today don' care 'bout nothin' but theys televisions and telephones and telewhores."

Leonard tried to imagine what that last one could possibly be. As enticing as it sounded, he could make no sense of it. He sat quietly, watching Slimmy J as his speech trailed off and he fell asleep. His breathing was slow and shallow, his hair matted and graying. Even through the thick stench of urine, feces and wasting mucle, Leonard could detect a sickening musty sweet scent coming from the bone and sunken skin.

He recognized the smell. He recognized the appearance of a body being converted into cancer food. He watched his own mother die that way. At least she had a bed. But, like Slimmy J, she was so drugged at the end, it wouldn't have made a difference. Sitting there a foot away from this dying man, Leonard was taken back against his will to the moment of his mother's death. He sat on the edge of the bed next to her that warm spring day with rays of morning sunlight beaming through the open windows. The new air did nothing to remove the musty stench of cancer.

His mother had no final words of wisdom for him upon her death. She lay quietly in bed, her breathing growing increasingly laborious as if the tumors were growing in weight exponentially by the second. Each release of breath was trailed by a muffled gurgle bubbling from somewhere deep in her chest. Her eyes were open but Leonard didn't know what they were seeing. They stared into a place that could only exist in a cloud of morphine, casting a shadow somewhere in the twilight of death.

He watched her like that for several minutes until, finally, she took half a breath and managed a subtle gasp as if startled, but too weak to respond. She completed her breath and slowly it leaked away from her soggy, inflamed lungs, taking with it her life.

Leonard wanted to cry. He knew he should... everyone else in the room was. But he couldn't. All he could do was sit there, numb, holding his mother's cold, limp hand and looking at her sunken face. One eye was open, the other half so. Her mouth hung open. He wanted to reach into the air and grab whatever had left her and put it back in. But even if he could have done that, it was too late. Whatever it was had floated out the open windows with her final breath mixed with the new spring air.

Leonard patted Slimmy J on the shoulder, before shuffling off to let him rest, maybe forever. A tear trickled down the side of his face into his matted beard, clearing a path through the ash of street life to reveal a streak of pale skin, white as a new snow.

Posted by Warren Mann at 1:04 PM

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