Short Stories

I recognized the man with the sign. I’d seen him in the neighborhood lots of times, walking his dog. The dog was a little terrier, tan, friendly. The man was tall and thin, maybe in his late sixties, I thought. Probably retired. When I’d be walking toward the man on the path around the pond, the dog would strain at his leash to come across the road to me, hoping that if he flopped over on his back, I’d scratch his belly, which I always did.

Everybody in the Social Security Office heard the guy talking to himself. Or maybe he was singing.

The two women speaking Spanish, probably mother and daughter, looked anxiously at each. The heavy guy behind us stopped talking about how it was better with Trump and looked over at the guy.

So some of us were wondering about him, even before the incident. He was kind of twitchy, a little beat-up looking. He hadn’t shaved recently. He wore a leather jacket over a red T-shirt.

He missed his numbe

“There’s some guys, they should never get out. You wouldn’t want ’em out, believe me. You ever saw ’em, you’d know it.”

Marty Harris said that to a group of students in a night class I’d been teaching. It was $800.00 per semester on top of my day job, which was bringing white kids from the suburbs to the city to work on educational projects with Black kids. Eleven thousand a year I got for that, plus gas. Those were the days. Or some of them, anyway.

“It was almost like a shadow,” Amanda said, though she knew that wasn’t right. Even as she said it, she knew.

I knew her. When we spoke about what she was experiencing, it seemed unusual.