Bullets
Pass Through
It’s the coat I
remember. The flapping tails proclaimed
him, splayed hood the filthy halo of a holy fool. Zipper-shot, the color of
tinned meat, his name written around the collar in Sharpie. Collis Flowers. My hand closed on it in the split second
before I pulled him out of traffic on Eureka Avenue.
It was easy to spot in the backlit
elbows at the ends of the long hallways of the skills center. Shapeless in the way an abandoned tarpaulin
on a windy job site always seems to be floating aimless out of your field of
vision, the building hardly up to the task of confining it. In fact, there wasn’t a classroom that could
hold him in that coat. Collis wandered
restlessly, flashing everyone he met a Steinway grand of pearly white
teeth.
He spent crowded days sparring with
the voices in his head, a grandee greeting people up and down the hall, cadging black
coffee in a styrofoam cup. The torn pockets
of the coat, in an alternate life, would have contained a dog-eared passport or
a nickel-plated revolver or a diamond ring in a small hinged box. Instead, they concealed twists of paper,
unremarkable stones, packets of Domino sugar, some Heinz catsup, and dried shit
fashioned into fussy little beads. Only
a few of us knew about these curated treasures.
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