For Sale: Freedom
For information, please contact your local Congressman or Senator
That's what the headline said, at least. Or more precisely, that's what Michael read. He had no way of knowing what was really printed, short of asking someone else to read it to him. And he didn't much like asking people to read to him. Besides, the newspaper was much more fascinating this way.
He finished skimming an article about Shakespeare suing an author over story rights, and then got up off the park bench. As comfortable as it was to sit and read the paper, a school of fish were drawing closer, and where there were fish, there were sharks.
The bus stop was its usual self, complaining about whatever injustice it had most recently experienced. Today, it was spitting.
“..and they go, hacking up their green gray globs,” The bus stop told Michael, “And then they plaster them all over me. It's like they're hoping to someday form a mosaic on me.”
Michael nodded a sympathetic nod and tried his best to wipe off the offending masses. He knew about spitting too.
Michael liked the bus stop. It would talk to him and he liked that, even though it only ever complained. And what was more, he could talk to the bus stop when he;d had a hard go of it recently and it would listen and neither made judgments about what the other one said.
It's Time To Go, the headline of the newspaper read and Michael bid the bus stop good by. The morning was still young, an hour at least before breakfast.
Breakfast.
He looked back at the bus stop, growing smaller in the distance as he walked. He'd never told the bus stop about breakfast.
Why would he? He had no reason to, and he was sure the bus stop would have very little interest in the subject. Still, a pan fried egg beside some toast and hot cracked wheat...
Spittle dribbled warm and slick out the corner of his mouth and splatted wetly on the pavement.
“Sorry,” Michael apologized instantly to the sidewalk. “So sorry,” And he stooped down to wipe it up.
The sidewalk, for its part, said nothing in return and Michael took it for a very rude stretch of sidewalk indeed. Things should know when an apology was heart felt and should accept it gladly. It wasn't every day someone was courteous to the sidewalk.
Michael told all of this to the sidewalk, very kindly, but with no success in swaying the silent sidewalk. In the end he gave it up as a bad job. Years ago he would have yelled, taught it a lesson, perhaps spit and curse and kick a bit. He was younger then. Now he was older. That meant something to Michael.
Baking bread.
Michael sniffed. It was faint, perhaps imagined. He sniffed again. Thick butter loaves with split tops sprang into his mind. That bread made the best toast. Michael moved to follow the smell. There was a bakery around the corner somewhere. There had to be.
But the fish were back. He tried waving his arms wildly to scare them away. He'd already given them his park bench, why couldn't they let him have his toast? The fish fluttered but never very far and always regrouped and Michael was forced to retreat before sharks could arrive.
Some days Michael was brave and he would dash through the fish to get passed them. Not today. And even if he did muster the courage, at this point in time with all the flailing he'd done, sharks were sure to be closing in soon. He was a fool. Now he'll never get his toast.
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