Image from WikiCommons, taken by Elia Biraschi and used under the Creative Commons Agreement

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does. ~Jorge Luis Borges

After finding refuge under a tree… though it’s roots make my lawned mattress a lumpy bed… where I slept away the daylight hours… with one eye open… and my wrist twists through the handles of my satchel to avoid it being lifted… to the sound of someones small children playing on the playground littered with broken glass and sharps of all variety… Knowing that people stared… pitied… loathed me… crossed the way to avoid me… patrol cars counting the hours before they can tell me to move… I did move finally.

I pass the homes… still some windows lit even at this late hour… my mouth is dry… I have no water… my stomach is angry that I have no food… my skin crusted with a salty layer of dried perspiration… the summer heat is not too far off… but here in the night it has not found me yet… Soon it will hunt me and haunt me even in the night… though I just barely have recovered from the last attack… a bitter winter war hunt that many of my tribe elders did not survive…

My shoes are so thin that I feel each crevice in the walk way… each piece of gravel beneath the parchment thin sole between my foot and the road.

My legs ache and knees stiffen giving my walk a quirky swing that will soon cause my hips and lower back to beg me to rest…

There is no rest for me… No where to sit… So I continue to shuffle along both longing and fearing the suns return

At every bench… and every bowery… there is the mark against me… the unwelcome sign.

“No Loitering”

and so I walk.

This is a work of fiction.

I see this each night in my city.

Do not cross the street from them.

Do not lend to their belief that they do not matter.

They are not invisible.

Every Life Matters.

Brought to you by…

The Light and Shade Challenge