The man in the alley went unnoticed. Or perhaps he was unremarked upon, ignored. A long, tattered overcoat splattered with various fluids hid the majority of his body, though matted black hair that would have been smooth and glossy had he washed remained visible. His head was bowed, burrowed into his folded arms where he sat curled against the alley wall. It was almost as if he slept. Even then he cowered, flinched.
Foot traffic was low in a forgotten corner of midsummer Los Angeles, the outskirts of downtown or not. No more than a hundred people would have seen him in the whole day, had they been looking. The sun ticked its way downwards, stretching the shadows out longer and longer over crumbling buildings until the city’s streetlights began to shine bright and high rises glittered in mutual reflection. A full moon rose a heavy harvest color in the distance. …show more content…
A lone bus and handful of cars trudged down the street of Oaklawn under dimming and shattered streetlamps at the blurred edges of city and suburban commute. They, too, did not see him. If they had looked through their windows, if they had been close enough, they would have seen that his face was a dirt-smeared and pale sienna, with jaundiced brown eyes and a terribly broken nose. They might have glimpsed the entire left eye drown in oil-slick black for a blink’s worth of time before it resumed its sickly, yet human tinge. Conversely, the sight of his hands shaking prior to his shoving the incorrectly healed fingers into his coat pockets was impossible to miss. His hands, his whole body always shook, as though he were trying to physically hold himself in one piece. Anyone who stopped or observed him would have quite the tale, one way or the other, but none of them
Foot traffic was low in a forgotten corner of midsummer Los Angeles, the outskirts of downtown or not. No more than a hundred people would have seen him in the whole day, had they been looking. The sun ticked its way downwards, stretching the shadows out longer and longer over crumbling buildings until the city’s streetlights began to shine bright and high rises glittered in mutual reflection. A full moon rose a heavy harvest color in the distance. …show more content…
A lone bus and handful of cars trudged down the street of Oaklawn under dimming and shattered streetlamps at the blurred edges of city and suburban commute. They, too, did not see him. If they had looked through their windows, if they had been close enough, they would have seen that his face was a dirt-smeared and pale sienna, with jaundiced brown eyes and a terribly broken nose. They might have glimpsed the entire left eye drown in oil-slick black for a blink’s worth of time before it resumed its sickly, yet human tinge. Conversely, the sight of his hands shaking prior to his shoving the incorrectly healed fingers into his coat pockets was impossible to miss. His hands, his whole body always shook, as though he were trying to physically hold himself in one piece. Anyone who stopped or observed him would have quite the tale, one way or the other, but none of them