The Public Library

Passing Strangers: A man drives away the dark angels

Passing Strangers is a weekly series of fictional portraits— keyhole views into the lives and inner worlds of other humans. These are standalone pieces but if you look carefully, you might begin to see a how they’re all brush strokes in a broader landscape. Visit the table of contents to find all the portraits.

This morning a whole group of ladies walked along the path under the east park bridge where he slept. They wore barely anything at all– those skimpy leotard things that showed the world their business. They were carrying on like a farmyard of chickens at feeding time– woke him out of a dead sleep which is a precious thing when you sleep on concrete every night of the year. He had been having good dreams– the sunlit library in Philly where he went as a kid most days, the smell of his grandmother’s biscuits, and weirdly, the sound of crows. He loved crows.

When he sat up and looked at the women, he saw the dark angels were watching them. They perched up between the girders of the bridge in the shadows with their red eyes glowing and their hungry mouths with sharp teeth glinting in the darkness. He shouted, cursing at them to drive them away. He flapped his arms and spittle flew from his lips. The ladies got spooked and looked at him like he was some piece of no-good business when he was the one who saved them. The dark angels flew away, and the ladies went on their way, huffing and shaking their heads. He took a long piss behind one of the concrete pillars, then rolled up his blanket, and stuffed it in the garbage bag with his collection of found objects and second-hand clothes. The bag contained the sum total of his worldly possessions. He tugged his shopping cart out of the weeds where he stowed it, threw the bag in, and began to shuffle toward the park center.

A couple of cars drove slowly around him on the narrow road. He figured it must be another festival weekend because that was the only time cars could drive inside the park. Festivals were good. There was lots of food in the trash at least, and the food was good, mostly fresh. Dumb people threw out whole containers of fries and funnel cakes, lamb gyros and sometimes, if he got lucky, a frozen fruit drink. He didn’t understand these people. They were sheep, all of them, and they wouldn’t be prepared for what he knew was coming.

The place near the fountain where he liked to go and sit mid-morning would be too crowded so he headed further north where it would be quiet. On the way, he passed one of those tiny houses, like a birdhouse on a post that people leave books inside. He always stopped to see if there was anything new. For a time last summer he got lucky. Somebody had left a new novel every week. The stories took him to other places– places he had to really reach to see because they were so far away, places he might’ve imagined visiting someday when he was a boy seated at the long table by the card catalog.

There was nothing today but the same sad collection as yesterday: a faded Jane Fonda workout book, a fifth-grade science text book, a small white copy of the Bible, and a swollen, water damaged copy of Dr. Seuss’s Oh the Places You Will Go.

He closed the tiny door with the broken hinge. The sun pushed through the clouds and he could feel it like an iron pressing through his heavy coat. He coughed, spit, and pushed on.

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