TRIBULATION UNDERGROUND

By
John Freeman

(written in a NYC residential drug treatment center between groups...no lie!)

Jack pulled his 1976 Buick Skylark up to the curb in front of the Dominican Deli. It was around 7:30 pm and the sky looked like burnt bread pudding as the sun squirmed its way behind the concrete horizon. He had been letting the lit cigarette dangle from his lower lip for a few minutes. It hung there by the sticky remnants of dried up spit and coffee. His lips curled as the sickly sweet smell of burning filter crept up his nostrils. “God damn!” he croaked as he plucked it from his mouth and flung it out the window. He could see a dangerously skinny white kid coming up the street; hands plunged deep in his pockets, head down as if looking for change on the sidewalk. “Hurry up Charlie…” Jack mumbled through the taste of ashtray and Sweet ‘n’ Low that clung to his tongue for dear life. He opened the glove compartment and pulled out a yellowing cassette cover. He turned it over in hands a few times and read the print on the case out loud. “The Greatest Hits of Foreigner.” He smiled, remembering an awesome eighth grade dry-hump. “Bitchin’.” Jack popped the case open and pulled out a wad of tens and twenties. Tossing the case onto the dark red carpeting of the floorboard, he began to count the bills in his sweaty hand. It was $200 exactly. He folded up the wad and stuffed it into an empty Camel soft-pack. Up the block, White Charlie was getting closer. “What the fuck, Charlie? Move your ass!” Jack looked down at his too thin wrist. It was 7:48 pm. The automatic street lamps had begun to come on. In the dirty evening air, they cast severe pyramids of piss-yellow light onto the oil-patched street. Jack thought to himself how the city could look so very beautiful during the day but at night it always looked like a ghetto. White Charlie finally came up to the window of Jack’s Buick. “Hey, man, can you spare a cigarette?” Jack replied, “Here take the whole pack, I’m trying to quit.” He passed the crumpled pack to Charlie who palmed it into his coat pocket in a fluid motion. As Charlie leaned closer in through the window, Jack could see how exquisitely ugly Charlie really was. A dark pink scar ran from one side of his throat to the other like a second, always grinning mouth. Just below his right ear, a faded blue tattoo that said, “Darlene” was scrawled on his buzzard’s neck. “Here, man, take some mints, you know, for your breath.” Charlie smiled as he sickly handed jack a metal box of Altoids. His lips peeled back to reveal a row of brown teeth punctuated by a single gold tooth with a fake diamond pot-leaf in the center. Jack thought to himself that Charlie was a textbook specimen of White-Trash and Jack respected him for his consistency. “Thanks, friend.” Jack wedged the box under his crotch on the seat. Charlie walked into the deli and Jack started the Buick and pulled slowly away from the curb. A loud pop rang out and Jack ducked down, thinking a shot had been fired. But he realized it was only a bottle of Olde English that had been destroyed by his tire when he rolled off down the street. He turned the corner and pulled up in front of a different yet identical Dominican deli and parked there. There was enough light from the street to see inside the Buick and he pulled the small metal box from underneath him. With his thumbs, he pushed the lid open and held the box in the blistered palm of his right hand. Just as ordered, there was a bundle of heroin and a fat eight ball of cocaine rubber-banded together in one side of the box. Jack squinted down at the yellow bags that bore a splotchy red stamp that said: “jump off.” Jack smiled and his eyes crinkled at the corner like old newspaper. He was about to close the lid of the metal box when he noticed a small rectangle of paper folded in the corner of the box. “What’s this, then?” He pried it from the sticky bottom of the box and turned it over pensively in his cracked fingers. Jack squinted as he unfolded the paper and held it under the light that filtered through the dirt-caked windshield. In the center of the paper, there was an address scrawled in purple crayon. It looked as if it had been written by a 4-year old: “588 Marcy Ave. Brooklyn” “Hmmm…” Jack folded the paper back and stuffed it in the grease-smeared front pocket of his mustard yellow corduroy pants. Jack quickly scanned the area to see if anybody was watching him but the street was empty. He pulled one of the red-stamped bags from its rubber-banded clump and carefully pulled the clear strip of tape from one side. He dumped a little pile onto the valley between his thumb and index finger and raised it to his nose.

As Jack opened his eyes and looked at the clock on the floor next to his mattress, he had to grip his forehead very tightly. His head hurt so bad that he felt that if he didn’t keep his hand clamped there, his brains would seep out of his eye sockets. It was 10:32 am but he had no idea what day it was. He was still wearing the same clothes he had on that night in the Buick: the yellow corduroy pants, old checkered Van’s slip-ons that were so soiled, the checks appeared to be hopelessly smudged, and an old black t-shirt shrunken from years of wear with a silver and blue Van Halen logo in the center, so faint and faded it was a distant apparition from a long passed era in his life. Before he went “bad”. His watch was missing. Jack reached into his pocket to see if he had a cigarette so he could smoke his headache into submission. When he pulled his hand out, he found, in his fingers, the small folded piece of paper from the drug-tin. He held it up in front of his crust-clouded eyes and looked at it. “Why, White Charlie?”
Jack stumbled towards the newsstand on the corner. He had looked for the Buick for almost an hour but it just wasn’t there. He could smell, faintly, his own stale odor: cigarette smoke, sweat, red wine, cocaine, and Speed-Stick. He looked down at the newspaper. It was three days since that night in his Buick. His ears were ringing slightly. All he could see when he closed his eyes was that fucking address. Purple scripture, flashing in his brain like the sign in front of a porno theater. “588 Marcy Ave. Brooklyn” Jack pulled a kernel of crust from the corner of his right eye. “What the hell. Might as well…” Jack headed for the G train.

When Jack slithered into the last car of the train, the hardcore white light punched him in the face hard. He plopped his damaged body into the shiny gray seat. He felt a little nervous and he wasn’t sure why. Across the car from him was an abnormally short Puerto Rican lady with a baby stroller pulled up close to her sausage-legs. She looked up at Jack and smiled. Her lips rolled back to expose horrific black gums and yellow needle-teeth. Jack began to sweat. Cold beads of it ran down his neck. He could feel his heart beating in his ears. He looked back at the lady with the baby. She was scratching her right leg very enthusiastically. Jack looked down at his feet. His ears were still ringing. He looked back at the lady. Blood was trickling down her leg like rain on a window. “Next stop, Myrtle-Willoughby.” The muffled voice came through the overhead speaker. Jack felt like he would have an anxiety attack if he didn’t get out of the train immediately. He pulled himself to his feet with the chrome pole that ran the length of the car. As he walked to the other side of the car, he noticed a small dark red puddle forming around the lady’s right shoe. His eyes climbed up to the stroller still nuzzled firmly in her crotch. He looked down to see if the baby was as horrific as the mother. Down in the stroller, wrapped up in a baby-blue blanket, was a dead raccoon. It had a pathetic blue ribbon stapled to its head. Jack fell backwards out of the car and landed against a garbage can that sat near a dark green post in the station.

When Jack emerged from the subway, the smell of urine came at him fast and mean. He shook his head back and forth to try to get his ears to stop ringing but it only made it worse. He looked up at the street signs, shielding his eyes from the sun with his obscenely dirty hands. He was on the corner of Marcy and Myrtle. Across the street from the subway stop, 4 inhuman-looking street people were splayed around in front of a deli with a blood-red awning. He stood there feeling weak; feeling like all the weight in his body was slowly collecting in his feet. Jack heard the sound of teeth chattering. He looked over at the 4 figures across the street to see if the sound was coming from them. They paced back and forth in rhythmic circles like a small pack of wolves. He felt a stream of drool rolling down his lip. When he reached up to wipe it away, he realized the chattering teeth were his. He needed to cross the street but felt something close to terror at the thought of approaching the circling pack in front of the deli. He knew that he had little cause to be afraid. After all it was the middle of the day. But even though there were dozens of other people all over the street, all he could see were the four wolf-men pacing and licking their chapped lips, waiting for their prey to cross the street and fall into their hungry claws. Jack took cautious, trembling steps onto the asphalt street and crossed to the other side. He tried to hold his eyes down, keeping his gaze fixed on the sidewalk in front of him, resisting the compulsion to look at the wolf-men; knowing that by acknowledging them, he would instantly become their dinner. He just kept focusing on the discarded items that lay scattered on the splotched sidewalk: a huge console TV with an empty wine bottle hanging halfway out of the smashed screen. The skeletal remains of an old baby stroller. A torn, crushed queen-sized mattress spattered with something that could only be blood. A dead squirrel, head caved in flatter than a nickel. 25 or 30 empty crack vials, some broken, some intact. And a huge pile of Chinese noodles teeming with flies and ants. Just when Jack thought he had made it safely past the wolf pack, “Friend! Hey, Boss! You got 35 cents?” A voice irreparably damaged by years of abuse pleaded in his ear. Jack tried to walk faster. His feet seemed to be sticky with invisible chewing gum and he could barely move. “Nah…don’t got.” Two and a half words squeezed out of Jack’s mouth with immense effort. “Fuckin’ cracker motherfucker!” One of the other wolf men snarled at Jack. His voice was identical to the first. Jack looked to his right. The four wolf men were lined up by height and all were smiling nastily at Jack. They must have had six teeth between them and half of those had cavities. Jack tried to think of something to say to them but just thrust his hands into his pockets and kept walking. He had a weird taste in his mouth: garlic and peanut butter. He spat on the ground and a small army of ants abandoned the noodles and attacked the small pool of phlegm that Jack had produced on the concrete. He reached the next corner and looked up at the address on the awning of a yellow deli: “588 Marcy Ave”. Jack cleared his throat and mumbled under his breath, “Here it is…now what the fuck?” The building was odd. The yellow deli made up the ground floor. On top was a 3-story apartment that seemed as if it was plopped down on top of the deli like a cherry on an ice cream sundae. It didn’t match, not even a little. Jack didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know why he had even come here. He didn’t even know if White Charlie had slipped him the number on purpose or if it was left in the drug tin accidentally. He opened the door and went inside. The deli smelled like salami and sweat socks. It was way too humid for normal humans to ever get used to. In the back of the store, standing in front of the case that held the 50-cent sodas, a skeleton-skinny girl of unknown origin was holding a sedated looking cat in her arms, stroking its fur with slow, rhythmic motions. She had short, greasy black hair. She must have been about 9. Jack nodded at the girl. She smiled sweetly and the fluorescent lights glinted off her braces. Butterflies filled Jack’s stomach. He felt like he was sliding down a fireman’s pole. “Yes boss, help you?” A well-groomed Dominican man behind the counter stood at attention. His moustache gleamed with sweat and other unknown substances. He seemed to genuinely eager to serve any and all customers. Behind him, squatting on a milk crate, a fat teenage boy was picking his nose with such enthusiasm and vigor; it looked like he was searching for a long-lost toy. Confronted by the smiling clerk, Jack suddenly forgot where he was and why. “Um…I…” Jack stood slack-jawed staring at the deli case filled with meat and weird dried fish and other wrong-looking food items. “Sam-witch?” the clerk suggested. “Huh?” jack replied, totally lost. “Would you like sam-witch?” Jack just stared. “Boss…you okay?” the clerk’s smile had begun to droop almost imperceptibly. Jack finally snapped out of it. “Umm…White Charlie sent me. “Oh, shit!” the clerk’s mouth almost disappeared and all that remained was his shiny, shiny moustache. “Did you say that White Charlie sent you?” All of a sudden, the clerk spoke perfect English with no trace of any kind of accent. Jack was flabbergasted. “Yes, White Charlie sent me to this address. 588 Marcy Avenue.” He felt a sharp pain at the base of his spine. It flared up and then dissipated, spreading down his legs and slowly faded. “Come with me, sir.” The clerk leaned down and grabbed the rubber mat on the floor behind the counter. He pulled back one corner of the mat to reveal a small, square door in the floor. He clutched the handle and pulled the door up and open, the hinges squealing. Jack heard a noise to his right. When he looked, he saw the little girl drop the cat and suck on her middle finger. He realized that the cat must have been startled by the noise and jumped clawed the girl as it jumped to the ground. Jack waved in an attempt to apologize. She popped her bloody middle finger from her mouth and thrust it hard in Jack’s direction. “Fuck off and die, buddy!” the girl barked with a sailor’s authority. Jack felt suddenly, utterly worthless. The clerk turned to the fat kid who had finally stopped digging in his nose. “Hold it down for me, Manny.” The kid gave a retarded thumbs-up. “Come on, sir.” The clerk motioned him down the dark passageway in the floor. Jack started to wonder why he had even come here. He wished he was back in his room on Grand Street sniffing his life into a dull pulp. But it was too late now and he followed blindly down the hole. Halfway down the decaying wooden staircase, the clerk reached up and pulled a string that turned on a single bare light bulb. The light revealed a giant concrete walled, dirt-floored room. It was so big that jack figured it must run under the entire block. In one corner there were four wooden crates piled up. Stenciled on each box in dusty black spray paint was: “PROPERTY OF FRANCE.” There were 3 old rusted shovels strewn about in another corner. Pasted on the far wall was an old poster: “Ted Nugent: Cat Scratch Fever.” The poster was so old and dirty that it was nothing more than a big, sad smear. “Have a seat, sir.” The clerk waved his hand in the direction of a metal folding chair that was sitting in the middle of the dirt floor. Jack walked to the chair. He figured he might as well follow orders at this point. He was disoriented to a state of numbness and all emotion had been sucked from him, sucked bone dry. He sat down on the cold brown metal seat of the chair and let his heavy hands plop down in his lap. “What now?” he asked the clerk who was already advancing backwards up the staircase. “Hang in there, Boss.” The clerk’s accent and stupid grin had both reappeared as suddenly as they had vanished 5 minutes earlier. He disappeared up into the darkness and slammed the door shut. It echoed in the cavernous chamber. Jack strained his eyes to try and make out anything in the other half of the room that was still drowned in blackness. He thought he heard whispering voices, 2 or 3 maybe. The voices were men’s voices and they had an ominous, conspiratorial tone to them. Jack started to feel that same feeling he had on the train: a deep feeling of terror that was suffocating. He stood up and started to walk slowly to the staircase. “Hey, don’t do that!” A deep woman’s voice boomed in the stale air. Jack stopped dead in his tracks and involuntarily cupped a hand over his eyes in a childlike attempt to hide from whatever. He heard footsteps shuffling through the dirt toward him. He didn’t want to turn around. He didn’t want to move. He just wanted to stay in this spot with his hand over his eyes until he grew old and died. He felt a tapping on his shoulder but still didn’t budge. “Hello!” The voice again, now so close to his ear he could feel the warm breath. His hand fell slowly down to his side and he turned around and very, very slowly opened his eyes. She was standing too close to him. He backed up a step and took in what he saw. A pale woman, about 25 years old with severe features, high cheekbones holding up deep-set clear blue eyes that were overpowered by huge, black dilated pupils. She looked like a German prostitute. “Hi…” Jack said and immediately realized that it was the most wrong thing he could say. But at this point, he felt lucky he could speak at all. “Where are you rushing off to?” she said. She was wearing gray parachute pants and a maroon Member’s Only jacket zipped halfway up. Underneath, he could make out the top of an old, yet well preserved, Bon Jovi t-shirt. Jack was impressed with the authenticity of this girl’s retro-ness. “I was just…um…” jack stumbled over his words like his tongue was shot full of Novocain. His gums felt fat. “Well, you should sit back down, sugar. You just got here after all.” Her voice was deep and mannish but Jack still felt a tingling in his groin at her being so close to him and her bubblegum breath brushing his face. Jack maneuvered from around her and walked back to the chair. When he plopped back down into the metal seat, the rivets on his pants struck the chair and rang out with a sad ping, echoing through the sticky air. At the base of the stairs, the woman was standing with her hips cocked to one side. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a pack of Kool’s. She flipped one up into her mouth and lit it with one professional movement. “Smoke?” She held the pack out towards Jack and shook it like a doggie treat. “Umm…Sure.” She pulled out a cigarette and tossed it across the room. Jack held his hands out in front of him and watched as the cigarette came at him in slow motion. After a brief, confusing pause Jack stuck it between his lips. “Light?” She tossed a book of matches at him and they fell limply in his lap. He lit the cigarette and took a deep, long drag. The strange menthol smoke crawled down his throat. As he exhaled, the ringing in his ears that had hung around him all day like a stray dog finally disappeared. “Thank you miss?…” “My name is Julie, but all my friends just call me Freddie.” As she spoke, a long strand of her shiny red hair fell down over her face and her breath blew it in little puffs. “Okay…Freddie, uh.” He struggled with the words. “What am I doing here?” “Didn’t White Charlie send you?” Her delivery of this one question made Jack feel like he was the stupidest man alive. “Um, sort of. I mean he gave me this address. Well, he actually kind of slipped me this address. That is, he might have accidentally slipped me this address…” Jack was rambling and there was no end in sight. Luckily, Freddie cut him off. “Hold it. I understand what you’re saying, Mister?” “Jack.” “I get your drift, Jack. Huh…Jack. I had a golden retriever named Jack when I was 11 years old. He got run over by a mail truck. It totally destroyed me. Ever since then, I deliver all my mail by hand.” “That’s fascinating…” Jack realized that his tone was unintentionally sarcastic. He hoped she wouldn’t notice. “Yeah, that was one hell of a dog.” They both remained there smoking in silence for what seemed to Jack like an hour. “Well, Jack, all that really matters is that you know White Charlie and that you are here now.” Freddie dropped her cigarette onto the dirt floor and ground it out with the toe of her blue and yellow Pro-Keds. “Yep…I’m here.” Jack wished that he could remember how to talk. In any other situation, this was the kind of chick that Jack would try to pick up but he was so out of it that he just wished that whatever was about to happen would hurry up and happen. “Okay, sit tight, sugar. I’ll go get the package.” She winked at Jack and disappeared into the dark regions of the room. As Jack sat there waiting for Freddie to return with “the package” whatever that was, he tried to remember the last few hours that had led him from his stained yet comfortable mattress to this desolate Brooklyn dungeon. But no matter how hard he strained his mind to squeeze out one drop of memory, he could only produce one blurred image: a ladies shoe with a pool of blood collecting around it. When he tried to place it in context, his head started to hurt. He heard the sound of metal clanging against metal in the far unknown dark corners somewhere. He heard Freddie’s voice but couldn’t make out the words. He heard another voice, Russian perhaps; maybe Polish arguing back and forth with Freddie. He thought he heard somebody say “Buttermilk Daiquiri” but he wasn’t sure. Jack squirmed in his chair. He looked down at his pants. There was a small white stain on his right knee. He scratched at it with a dirty fingernail and touched the nail to his tongue. “When the fuck did I eat Ranch dressing?” He spat into the dirt. “Fine, Pablo. Just…fine!” Freddie yelled in the dark. A door opened and closed with an angry slam. Then Freddie emerged from the shadows and stood with her hands on her hips, a brown paper bag under one arm. Her lipstick was smeared and she was visibly upset. “Sorry about that, Jack. Those God-damned Bulgarians, can’t trust ‘em.” “Uh huh…” “Well, here it is, Jack. It’s all you.” “Freddie tossed the brown bag at Jack’s feet, kicking up a small cloud of dust. He sat staring slack-jawed for a second; half expecting the bag to jump up into his lap on its own like an eager puppy. He bent forward and grabbed the bag by its folded, stapled flap. It was much heavier than he expected. It must have weighed 25 pounds. He hoisted it up onto his knees and let it sit there. He couldn’t tell what was inside whether it was one big item or one hundred little ones. Whether it was a cinder block or a box of pool balls. “Um…thanks, Freddie, but…I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this. All Charlie gave me was the address.” Jack spat the words out like a bad taste. “Hey, you’ll figure it out. I mean, you got this far on your own, right, Jackie, my boy?” She was a smart ass and that turned Jack on in spite of his state of mind. “All right, Freddie.” He gripped the bag in his sweating hands, trying in vain to figure out what the fuck was in there. “Well, off you go.” She flicked her long, skinny fingers at him in a motion that made him feel very, very small. He grabbed the bag in his right hand and pushed himself to his feet with his left and walked slowly to the stairs. As he put his right shoe on the step, he looked back over his left shoulder. Freddie had one leg up on the chair and was slowly pushing the material of her parachute pants up her calf to reveal a dark gray plastic artificial leg. She pulled a switchblade from the pocket of her jacket, flicked out the blade and tightened a couple of screws. Jack hurried back up the stairs.

As the clerk pulled back the door, Jack’s eyes recoiled from the glare. “You okay, Boss…need sam-witch? On house…” “Uh, no, I’m alright.” Jack stumbled out from behind the counter. The sight of the deli cases and rows of canned sardines and corned beef hash were shocking to Jack. He felt like he had been underground for days. It had only been about 15 minutes. “Have a nice day.” Jack said, backing out the door onto the sidewalk. Through the door he could see the little girl glaring at him, both middle fingers thrust angrily in his direction. He felt a mixture of hurt and anger but it soon passed. These days no emotion lingered in him longer than a few seconds. He was pretty much dead inside now and that would have upset him if he had any feelings left. Jack started back towards the subway with the bag swinging from his limp, left arm. Somehow, he was relieved that he had made it out of there alive. He knew in his brain that he was in no danger in the dungeon, but fear was one emotion that was still very real to him. It seemed that lately he could only experience fear and exhaustion. He saw the green sphere perched atop the pole by the entrance to the subway. He was almost free. When he got back home, he would sit down, open the bag and then try to figure out what to do next. Maybe he would even call up White Charlie to come over and bring some stuff and explain himself. “Boss!…Hey Boss!!” a familiar voice from the corner. “Oh, shit!” Jack had forgotten about the wolf pack in all the confusion. “What’s in the bag, Boss?” “Give me that fucking bag, my man!” Another one barked. Jack didn’t know whether to run or wet his pants, so he just stood there. “Yo! I said give me the motherfuckin’ bag!” Jack finally looked to his left and saw the wolfmen approaching with ravenous, jackal-eyed intensity. They were coming for the bag. On instinct, Jack dropped the bag on the ground beside him and stepped one foot into the street. They can have it, he thought. I’m going back to my room and put a warm washrag on my head. One of the wolfmen darted over and grabbed the bag. He hunched down and scurried back into the doorway for a moment. From the corner of his eye, Jack could swear that he saw the guy clamp the bag in his jaws and tear off down the street on all fours, leaping like a hyena on the run to safety. The other 3 men were still circling Jack, licking their chops and clacking their teeth. “Umm…” Suddenly, Jack tried to take off running. He saw the sidewalk rush up towards his face. He felt something tearing at his legs. It wasn’t pain. It was more of a strange cold slashing at his calves and thighs. He looked down and saw that two of the homeless wolfmen were gnashing and tearing the flesh from his legs. The third was pissing against the building. Jack dug his fingers into the crack in the sidewalk in front of him, desperately trying to pull himself away from the feeding. He kicked hard back into the swirling mass of bloodlust and beer-breath. He felt something cave in wetly under the sole of his sneaker. He kept kicking until the ripping and tearing stopped. Dragging himself into the street, he rolled over onto his back and raised his swimming head to look back at the corner. The two that had attacked him were squatting down with their hands clamped over their mouths, blood streaming through their fingers and down the cuffs of their coats. “Holy shit…” was all Jack could manage to say as he crab walked backwards across the street, dragging his legs, to the subway station entrance. He looked down the cement steps and wondered how the hell he was going to reach the bottom in one piece. He was delirious and his head felt like it was full of fluid. His thoughts kept drowning before they were fully formed. He was truly running on autopilot, following an ancient instinct to return home at any cost. Jack tucked his blood-streaked knees into his chest and rolled himself up into a little, quivering, package. He heaved himself forward and went bouncing down the steps like a sand-filled volleyball.

When Jack regained consciousness and opened his eyes, he saw that he had wound up at the foot of the stained wooden bench that sat at the near end of the subway station. He climbed up into the seat with slow painful determination and leaned his head back against the cold tile wall. After a few long minutes, he felt the presence of someone sitting on the bench next to him. He turned his head to see who was there and heard his neck pop deep and loud. “Ahhh…” it was the first feeling of relief he had experienced all day. He rubbed the back of his neck with a blood-caked hand. The feeling didn’t last long. There in the last seat of the bench sat the sausage-legged lady from his train ride over to this God-forsaken neighborhood. Jack’s heart thumped once, almost like a hiccup. “Hello…” he said, his voice as thick as old buttermilk. “Hello, sir.” The lady had a surprisingly sweet voice. Jack looked over at her baby stroller to see how the old dead raccoon was getting on. In the stroller where the raccoon had been earlier, now was only an empty blanket. The blue bow was lying, sadly torn, in the center where the staple had been. “Umm…what happened to your…baby?” Jack gurgled. “Oh, she went away. But it’s okay, she was a big girl.” The lady grinned an innocent black-gummed grin. “You having a bad day, mister?” “Um…you could say that.” The lady reached into her bag and pulled out a bottle of ginger ale. Jack could tell it was cold by the tiny beads of condensation that clung to the label. It looked like the most refreshing beverage in the history of mankind. “Here, mister, enjoy.” The lady handed Jack the bottle. He twisted the top off and a sweet, wet hiss emerged. He raised the bottle to his lips and let the cold bubbling elixir flow down his throat. He could feel every cell in his body hungrily sucking up the moisture. He made a “yummy” sound low in his throat. “Thank you, lady. Thank you so much.” Jack felt remotely human again. “You hungry, mister?” she asked. “Starving.” “Why don’t you come back to my apartment and I’ll cook you up some rice and beans and fried pork chops.” Jack blinked audibly. “I would love to.” “Okay then.” The lady stood and straightened her sweater. Jack could feel the breeze from the tunnel as the G train approached the station. He smiled, struggled to his feet and took the lady’s plump hand in his. They walked slowly through the doors, swallowed by the bright fluorescent light of the car, leaving the stroller empty and abandoned by the bench.

THE END

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