
I caught a glimpse of a man whose image remained seared into my memory long after the bus I was riding in passed him by, and it formed a story in my mind.
Hurricane Jonah
The man is what remains after grief has rolled through a body like a hurricane, wetting, battering, and drying out. He is the frame of something white-faced, sunken-eyed and starving, standing on nothing but spite and stubbornness, shivering in the door of his broken house with a straight back because he will not be bowed. “What?” he says, and his voice is tempered iron.
“We’ve been trying to reach you about your hire purchase, on your car.” The other man is a boy by comparison, packed into a boxy uniform of starched khaki two sizes too big. He looks at the man like you would look at god. With fear that is awe at the same time.
The man draws in a breath that is like eating. It inflates him, fills the space between skin and skeleton for the long second before he exhales. The boy startles and realizes something then that makes his eyes widen. This man is living on air. Nothing but air.
“I don’t have a car.” The man says. And he believes him. With every sweat-soaked inch of his skin, the boy believes the man, but there is a job to do and it does not care for the boy’s beliefs.
“It says here that you do.” A tattered paper with the sweaty imprint of his fingers. “A 2018 Toyota, registered with Rainy Day Financing.” He points to the round gleaming badge on his breast. “That’s my company.” On the verge of bankruptcy, grasping for pennies at the hand of beggars.
The man frowns and watches the badge, searching it for the answer. The boy cannot tell if he finds it, only that the man looks up and turns the force of his gaze on him again. “Perhaps, I did have a car.” His sunken eyes brighten. “Yes. Once.” A sharp bark of a laugh tears out of his mouth, rattling his body with it. “I remember now. I had a house too.” He sticks out an arm like a jointed branch, gesturing behind him, and the laughter cuts out like a guttered flame. “You can see what’s left of it.”
One room. Hurricane Jonah rolled over the southern coastline and through a house, just ahead of where the boy is standing, and now this is all that is left of the man’s earthly possessions. One single room. The door hangs in the frame, slightly cracked but intact. The room it leads to has kept its four walls and most of its roof. Jagged rods of iron jut out from exposed bricks where the rest of the house shattered and crumbled around this room. And, that day, Hurricane Jonah coughed up dust and a little rain and rolled away.
“Well, the company has sent me to…” The boy trails off.
“To what?”
“To…” He sweats. His tongue is a leaden block and he hates the taste of it.
“To what, boy?” The man grabs both his shoulders, leans into him. His eyes are too dry. When was the last time he had any water? “For the love of God, to what?”
“To collect your missed payments.”
“Ha!” The man falls over the boy, air and bones and the laughter racking his body. He weighs nothing. But the boy sinks to his knees under the weight of everything.
“They sent you to collect, did they, boy? They sent you to collect?”
The man pushes himself to his full height, standing on nothing but spite and stubbornness. And air. He takes a breath. “Here I am, boy,” he says. “Collect.”
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