[Fiction] Dear Posse No. 2: Dollar Store Twilight

I’m working on a serial fiction project. (Did you miss No. 1?) Each segment will be published here and on Patreon. It is available in full to Patreon supporters:

Dear Posse,

I expected it to be darker, not this dollar store twilight. Left my car at home. My vision’s still pretty blurry, but I see okay enough when I squint my right eye while opening the left really big.

I’m sitting with my new friend at the Fayetteville Road intersection by the Southpoint Crossing shopping center. He’s sitting on an overturned shopping cart. He’s got this battered sign scrawled on what’s left of the side of a Del Monte tomato sauce box. It says: NEED HELP. ANYTHING YOU CAN DO. BLESS.

Seen him here before. Usually went out of my way to avoid looking at him. Never even waved.

“Why bother now?” I ask him.

He scrambles to get a bottle of water and a five dollar bill from a kind stranger waiting for the left. Then he sits back down on his yellow bucket. “Got no job yet,” he says. I think about telling him he could go to the school district job fair on Saturday if he has a ride. Maybe I could give him a ride? But…why, under the circumstances?

I jerk a thumb at the sky, the eclipsed sun still boiling up there. Still shrieking behind the moon’s unsettling snickers. “What’s the point with all that going on?”

He looks up. I jump to my feet to shield his eyes. “Christ’s sake, man, don’t look at that! You want to end up like me?”

“You okay?” he asks.

Am I okay? This guy begs for money at this intersection, day after day, clearly struggling to make it through life, but he looks at me and thinks: Someone’s troubled. Maybe he’s homeless, but at least he’s got a little empathy.

I shrug. Listen, Posse. I am in no way okay. I’m half blind. The eclipse won’t end. The shadows think I should pirouette across Interstate 40.

Now I should go home.

He offers me the bottle of water. “Stay hydrated, pal.”