Adelbert

“I wanted the chance to turn someone away the way I am always turned away. I’m always rejected. Now I have my turn to be on the other side of the fence. Go away now, Addie. Please, Addie. Go away.”

His eyes were wet again and it was not the rain. His tears distorted the image of her in the chair, her hands hanging limply over the arms.

“Cleda, I can’t go away. I can’t.” Tears were pouring from him and he was shaking. He felt her arms around him. His lips found her lips and his tongue found her tongue and her thighs parted to his hand. Suddenly she struggled against him, pushing against his chest and clawing his shirt with her nails. Bending both his arms around her, he tried to pin her against the back of the chair, reaching for her with his knee but he could not and she freed herself knocking him to the floor.

“Oh, you really are something. You and your crooked self. You crooked, bent little man.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks. Doubled over laughing, she held onto her stomach. He left her laughing and wiping away the tears.

Adelbert’s head was in a cloud of smoke and his body in ashes to his knees. The brace of the park bench against his back suggested a fireplace gridiron but here in the park among the tree towers he was more like mulch on a compost rack. The crooked right arm, a Camel® at one end and Adelbert at the other was loosely girded by bark green cloth. To and from his face the arm moved, a little up and down, one stunted growth upon another. The face the arm moved to was wide and fair and smiled through the smoke at the Camel. His limber fingers caressed the Camel, his eyes narrowed upon the Camel and closed when the Camel touched his lips. His lips nibbled at the tip of the Camel.

His breathing became deeper and quick. The acrid warmth of the smoke caressed his tongue and reached far back in his throat and down to his lungs. He held it fast, his full strength pitted against its struggle to escape. When he could hold it no more, his body gave it up to the air and he rested. Unclaimed smoke from the Camel dripped upward in spirals and hovered about Adelbert’s head. His eyes closed, he did not see the ashes, worked by the breeze of the tree towers nestle even more snugly against him.

(Excerpt - We Are Many - Is It Up or Down From Here?)

Copyright 2015 by Renee Foss