Photo by freepix.com
by David Luntz
A homeless man sees office workers move in a tranced circle, sometimes clockwise, sometimes the other way. He watches them from his cardboard home across the street and wonders why they don’t paint the sides of their office doors every night a different color—so they know which side is in and which side is out. The workers pretend not to see the homeless man: his stillness makes them wonder if they’re really moving backwards, not forwards. Two doors down from the office workers, on the second floor of a brownstone, a nun watches the homeless man: she thanks God each night for him. She’s marked the side of the door to her home nearer to the man as “out” and the farther side from him as “in.” At any moment she fears she might forget the difference.
David Luntz‘s work is forthcoming in or has appeared in Post Road, Hobart Pulp, Farewell Transmission, trampset, scaffold, ergot., X-R-A-Y Lit, Maudlin House, HAD and other print and online journals. Twitter: @luntz_david
