Teeth
by Mayadet Patitucci
A man pushes a cart with all of his possessions straight down the highway on a snowy midnight. He is wheeling his life down south without looking back but his eyes are shut so he don't look on either. His ears turn deaf to the honking cars that skin past him. Lids wide shut; whenever he sees a shadow of white light he feels he is that much closer to home.
In front of a bar on the south side a woman on her phone tells him she is still at work in downtown and she is going to come home late tonight. She steps closer to the avenue so that the noise resembles State Street. She says her break is almost over and she has to get back in: before she hangs up she pauses then says I love you. Hangs up. It's funny the look people give when they lie, like the moment you decide not to blink when the sun gets in your eyes. She turns with her handle on the door and waits for a while until the muffled song from inside cuts through her eyes. She walks into the bar with the jukebox calling her for the night.
An old man in the front of the bus sits stiff from cold with his mouth hanging open as a cavern. His dentures are doing a little Russian dance he can't control. Drool keeps landing on his coat with a puddle at the zipper and his teeth keep falling, hanging half out half in. He looks straight ahead for his stop and doesn't wipe himself off; he pretends nothing is happening. You begin to wonder if he already past his stop and is just staying stuck in that seat to prove something as nonexistent as a postage stamp's watermark. You could tell he is embarrassed. But what can you do.
Slopped on one leg, a homeless man drags his prosthetic leg onto the wooden platform where he waits for a train that will take him nowhere he needs to go. He has rusted crutches and the beginnings of a hunch back, his lips curl in and his brown skin is cracked and ashed from the busted cold that stings at the tips. You see when he bends over to enter his train that his fake leg is white with half of it painted like mud. The same fake brown color on all the black dolls in the shops. You can tell he tried to paint it himself. It makes the dent in your chest feel like the moon has just sat on it.