As the rats hopelessly foraged for one, just one, morsel of food in the tight alley way, and the last surviving flies of the summer incessantly sought to penetrate the one flickering street lamp and its limited warmth, the old man walked. He plodded and lumbered and brooded and wandered through the unforgiving cold and dark. His gait was that of a decrepit lemon, on its last miles, crawling agonizingly up its one last hill; that of a beast of burden whose master is preparing to euthanize due to its lack of productivity and efficiency. Yes, society had declared the old man as one unable to acquire a meaningful profit; they had gotten all they could from him; his abilities, replaced by the new generation, were no longer needed. So down the abandoned street he went, with no where to go, and no where to rest, knowing that if he stopped, the creeping cold would take over.
He chose to sit down for a while, his aching body begging for some sort of a reprieve. But his body contradicted this action after a few minutes of sitting; his stillness invited the cold bitter air to invade his waning warmth and his body once again commanded him to get back up and keep walking, keep crawling. He couldn’t make himself stand so he curled up in a tight ball to better resist the cold. As the old man sat there, against the cold cement of the building he gazed around at his surroundings. The windows of the buildings winked back with the soft glow of comfort and warmth behind each curtain. He looked longingly at each window to see if any lights were on; if there was any hope that some compassionate soul might see an old man 30 stories below, dirty, exhausted, unshaven, and invite him in to stay in the warmth and comfort for the night.
As he sat there gazing blankly at the building, a motion in one of the windows caught his eye. It was that of young girl getting off the couch to turn off the lights and draw the curtains closed. The old man saw the girl distinctly and noticed just before she turned off the light that she had wrapped herself up in a colorful quilt probably to beat out the feeble attempts of the cold to pervade her body. The vision of that quilt, the bringer of warmth, incited the budding of a dormant memory within the old man. He remembered like he never thought he would remember before, a moment before his abandonment and his betrayal and before incessant cold and discomforts were only present when the door opened. The memory simply consisted of him slowly drifting off to sleep on the family’s couch, swaddled in his favorite, beloved quilt. He had been reminiscing about the productive day’s work, his caring family, thankful for the continued fortune in his life despite age.
As if awaking from a dream, the old Man remembered where he was and just when his last golden drop of warmth was about to be spent, he discovered a new cache of energy that just enough to get him moving again. He finally got to the end of the street only to see another endless, dark sidewalk disappearing into the abyss of the city. Regardless, the elderly trudged on. He finally decided to lay down on the cold side walk near a darkened linen shop. The sign on the door read: “Hiring.” As the old man drifted off to sleep, surrendering to the cold, a peep of sunlight reflected off the glass windows of the buildings lining the streets.
