The coat was all I took. It wasn’t even a nice coat, an attractive coat, a coat that people would admire, want to wear or want to own. It was just a coat. Thick with sheepskin, drenched with the smell of home. I never got the chance to say goodbye, but I did get a split lip and a hand job on the Greyhound bus to the city.
On my first day I made $7.25 by not asking for money. I ate a six inch Subway sandwich and drank a coke. Though you couldn’t tell by looking at me, I was ecstatic. Though you wouldn’t have known, every breath I took felt as if it were my first.
That night, I slept inside a bank. I sneaked inside when someone swiped their card in the door to use the sheltered ATM. People who came to withdraw money looked at me and hesitated, wondering if I was going to attack, or even worse ask for money when they were standing unguarded holding their disposable dollars. Whenever someone came in, I pretended to be asleep. This seemed to help.
On my second day I met a woman named Bathsheba who was attached to a portable IV on wheels. She told me that I reminded her of her son. I asked how old he was, she said she didn’t know. She gave me two smokes and told me I should never drink the tap water.
On my third day, I began looking. I knew that he would be looking for me too. Every face that went by I scanned and smiled, waiting for eyes to melt, for a face to crumble. For someone to fall in love with me. A man called Richard bought me a smoked turkey sandwich and a too sweet coffee. He never asked me if I ate meat, which I do. He wasn’t the one, but I felt obliged.
By nightfall I was thinking that this may not be the day. Sitting in a doorway I watched the stumbling, giddy groups of boys and girls shouting as if they were far away from each other. I pulled my coat tightly around me and drifted off to sleep.
Upon waking, my chest felt tight, like I’d been shrink wrapped. There was a man kneeling on the ground next to me. He had eyes like Neil Diamond in the pictures my mother had around the house.
He spoke, “Is this your coat? It was just thrown on the sidewalk. Are you hurt?”
Tilting my head I saw him holding my coat which he carefully draped over me. As he looked at me, his face, it crumbled. He disappeared then reappeared with a glass of water which he held under my chin.
“Is it tap?”
‘I think so, just take a drink, just relax.”
As I drank the water I saw him looking intently at my chest and I wondered if he could tell. If he could sense it was spinning like a gyroscope. If he could see it beating so fast it nearly split the skin.
“Oh Christ,” he said, touching me, touching my heart. “You’ve been stabbed”.
My face relaxed into a smile and my pupils dilated. I knew I’d found him. I heard Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’ drifting out from a nearby bar. From that moment on, it would be our song.
“I love you”, I whispered and though my eyes were closed I could feel his tears fall upon my face and I knew for sure that he was mine.
About the author:
HV Whitehead writes fiction and works 9 to 5 in Vancouver, BC. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. She loves cats, party food from the 1980s and Hubert Selby Jnr. Previous work can be found in Cherry Bleeds magazine.
