note: this is an excerpt from the forthcoming chapbook Mere Tragedies, which will be available next month.
A young girl leaves her house to pick up a loaf of bread. She turns the corner at the end of her street and walks past the town’s homeless person. He shifts the weight of his legs and pops one hip to the right.
The baker claims he is out of the day’s French bread. Is she interested in Marble?
She walks back the way she came. Now the man sits crouched against a wall, legs shoveled into knees, knees hitting chest.
At the end of the street a small boy mounts his bike with a whistle in his mouth. The girl can see the whistle is blue and the boy’s shirt is green. She does not have a bike and never learned to ride.
Looking at the ground around her, the homeless man falls into view.
Heather Palmer is a model and writer living behind the times in Chicago, IL. Her writing has previously appeared in elimae, Unlikely Stories, Willows Wept Review, and many others. She has a forthcoming book with Spork Press and is the first author in GwI chapbook series (March, 2011).
