Few NOTE: This piece is a study in surrealism and personfication, and will be posted in installments. It started from a simple paragraph, but has bothered me enough to build a progressive plot . I am posting just the opening paragraph, and will add to it what I’ve written lately after some polishing. So…
He was born behind Mendocino’s, from the heat of the sun filtering down between the five-story brick buildings and the steam rising from the grates in the alley. An assortment of food scraps, weathered cardboard boxes and cigarette butts, and without benefit of a mother’s forethought, he called himself by the first word he heard and became “Phew!” He was swept from storefronts by angry balding, mustachioed men and soon branded as a troublemaker just for trying to find comfort on the sidewalks warmed by the day’s sun. He was different and so he was unwanted. He was rejected simply for his protesting presence in their world, and they never stopped long enough to hear what he might say, avoiding him in large circling paths wherever he stood. But he learned much from listening to the noises of the people around him, and quickly chose to call himself “Few,” in deference to the many whom he annoyed.
Even life’s outcasts find each other somehow in this hurry-up, don’t-look-anyone-in-the-eye society. Few met Raggyman one morning when he awoke in his spot in the alley to find that Raggyman had literally fallen into his lap. For an hour he studied the man as he slept, unwilling to wake him. The man’s head was very close to a broken bottle that had been thrown at Few some time ago and had stuck in his midriff. The sleeper was young,
(To be continued.)
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology