/lit/ - Literature

>>16649475

>>16323940

>>4626091
>'You're the only O anh for me'

>>4112944
I went on break and moved to the park where I usually had my lunch, only to discover an obese good-ole-boy sitting motionless atop my rickety blue park bench, his doughy flesh baking to a golden brown beneath the listless Georgia sun. In a town where everyone hid their emotions out of fear of breaking the fragile tension of Southern protocol, where women were damsels and then men were always strong, there was something dangerously overt about the expression on his face. A look which spoke of loss and longing, and tore at my heart though I dared not show it.

Empathy drove me forward, one foot in front of the other, towards an inevitable rendezvous. Curse that emotion. That instinctive evolutionary twitch which made you -feel- when you'd rather do anything but.

"Hey buddy," I said, the words croaking out of my dry throat in sand-paper pitch. "Buddy, you okay?"

He looked up to me with his pale blue eyes, the pupils locked and set in a gaze of haunting which sent my soul in flight.

And then I saw.

There, by the faded grey soles of his ancient work boots, lay a tragedy.

His triple-stack Checkers burger had fallen out of its box and now openly caressed the bird shit-caked sizzling pavement; mourned, but not forgotten. Like an astronaut drifting off into space, still alive but with no chance of rescue.

A single tear rolled down my cheek, and I nodded.

>>1990442

You are everything wrong in the world today.