Transient

The harshness of the grate ground into his back, making it hard to draw in breath, but the hard chill in the air made it a necessary evil. His teeth still chattered in spite of himself, and in spite of the hot air billowing all around his clothes, emanating from the deep machinery underground that produced the hot, slick steam.

Sweat drenched the small of his back, but he dared not move for fear that someone else would take his position on the coldest night of the year. He opened his tired eyes to see two others of his ilk crouched low over the next grate over, trying to warm up their gloveless hands as if over a campfire. It had been years since he’d seen an actual campfire, but it still brought back memories.

He remembered his mother bent over the pile of already charred sticks left over from the campers who had passed through the night before they arrived, an occurrence she found fortuitous, her back hunched over from years of hard labor. Regardless, she was the epitome of grace to him, but even her memory was a bit faded at the edges she had been gone so long. Where her face used to be in his mind there was now a blur, not unlike when someone doesn’t want their identity known on a show of Cops. But he still recalled her movements, most as subtle as ash drifting low over the ground on a puff of air. She taught him how to be a man.

His back cried out to him for salvation, but it was better than being a frozen corpse, he reminded himself, so far removed from that boy he had been in the woods with his mother, so jaded by what the world had turned into while he had stopped looking. He wore a thick jacket that had been eaten in sections by the rats who often sought the refuge that his body heat provided, and he had long since let them shelter near, something that had seemed an abomination when it first started happening. But he postulated that it meant they felt comfortable with him, that he had somehow assimilated into the world that the rats inhabited, had become one with a nature that lived in harmony with the city that it too inhabited.

Another quick glance across the street at his two peers still warming their hands, but he could tell it wasn’t working, their faces trapped in looks of desperation, looks he knew all too well from more than ten years living and breathing the streets. He had been out there so long he had internalized the city grid, and made it a part of his flesh, the marrow in his bones. The soup kitchen on 42nd street that opened early on Thursdays and closed late on Sundays. The shelter on 55th street that let people in on a first come, first bedded basis. The library on 69th street with the comfortable chairs and the smell of freshly brewed coffee emanating from its attached cafe.

But on that brisk, wintry night, there was just him and the elements, and the elements were slowly but surely winning a game he never wanted to play. He closed his eyes once more and tried to imagine a different world, one that was warm and inviting, one that would always take his breath away, but he wasn’t able to sleep. Instead he watched his breath rising into the air as it climbed the frosty ladder into the clouds and joined with the other spirits waiting there for deliverance, hoping for a second chance to thrive. And he imagined his mother looking up at him once she had gotten the fire going, the cinders dancing behind her back in rhythm with her movements. He remembered her smile, and it kept him grounded.

Until morning, when he unpacks his weary bones and trudges off down the street, heading nowhere in particular.

Sam