The Isolate Passenger :: Short Stories Crime Punishment Books Essays

The Isolate Passenger It was a Saturday the day he cried. Early and bitter, the tears were warm and moved in spurts down his face, his whiskers aiding in the formation of tributaries. Cloaked in an afghan and the capitulation of his loneliness, he sat, legs forming a peak, hands clasped loosely in front. Rocking forward and slightly back, he attempted to shake the burden of his inconsiderations. They had mounted and surmounted and he felt ill. He appeared ill, his affect manic as he trembled from an appearance of indignation to trepidation to apathy. Before rising from the chair he felt warm and resolute, lucid. But that was before, and only briefly. He snapped his legs forward and to the floor with the precision of a samurai, composed. The uncoreographed motions that followed were spastic, his fists and arms and palms striking the sky with malice. Such a fit had resulted in a broken hand 5 years earlier. Four months prior to that, such a fit had pinnacled with pieces of a convenient end table mottling th e carpet. This most recent occurrence ended where it started and he dressed, with little consideration for hygiene or otherwise. Exiting, he snatched a back pack and swung the door towards him, managing to forge a distance of 6 feet between himself and the house before it latched precisely behind him. His house was in the residential district of a typical college town, approximately ten blocks removed from campus. Oak trees lined the block, squandering the rain they had collected from the previous evening’s shower; above average sized drops fell randomly on and around him. He had only within the last year begun to enjoy the rain. Before it had been significant only as an agent of somnolence, but now the ominous gray skies and consequential downpours were almost preferred. That Saturday the sky was opaque. It paralleled his mood. Walking a half-step behind what would have been determination, he crossed the paths of seventeen night crawlers and one stray cat before reaching a tunnel that ducked under and around a stream that ran perpendicular to his mood. His eyes were level with the ground, his hands dan gling from his thumbs, his thumbs hooked to the backpack straps. Within sight was the opulent green of a park littered with picnic tables and grills, surrounded on three sides by looming Oak and Maple