Hard Knocks

A man sits disheveledly on the sidewalk, back pressed up against the hard plastic of the bench bolted to the concrete.  He stares angrily at his feet, cursing the slippers that have abandoned them.  His toes are gnarled and his soles whitened with callouses earned step by step as he wandered the city streets, shuffling between sky-kissed monoliths, in search for a quiet corner of rest.

His eyes are unfocused and dry from lack of moisture; he can’t remember why.  If he could recollect, he would ponder on the last time he had encountered clean water, the last time he could remember eating food that didn’t come from the trash pit of a restaurant littered with pale-skinned and shiny tourists.

He looks down at the sidewalk again, barely making out the line of a sandal, dark against the light-colored cement.  Suddenly overcome with a despairing anger, he picks up the first object his hands find and begins to beat the shoe mercilessly.  If he could construct a reasoning within a public court of appeal, he might claim that exhaustion drove him to a kind of madness to lash out at the object whose absence had caused him so much pain and grief.  He might claim the shoe was society and had abandoned him to live in the grime and oil of society’s modern runoff. 

But he could not explain his motions, only continually attack the object within his sight, within his control, within his cathartic reach for release.  The sound of the beating echoed off the glass and metal giants standing quietly in reproach, ignorant of their inner complicity.