Urchin

Output from a writing group, based on one picture taken a long time ago.

Stefanos looked at his watch and simultaneously said “shit” under his breath and walked faster. The sun beat down on him, making his shirt stick to his shoulders and back. Without looking he knew that the fabric would be visibly staining. It was unlikely he would have time to straighten his appearance in a chill bathroom at his destination in the steel tower he could see two blocks away.

He passed things without seeing them. An old woman selling scarves, young guys in groups looking tougher than they actually were, two women sharing lunch and secrets. He passed a small fountain, its water a little greener than might be considered healthy. Once, he had seen someone in the fountain taking what his father’s nurse at the hospice had called a “bird bath.”

He tried to focus on what he had picked up online about the Centurion Company: just under two hundred employees with international dreams. They wanted a skilled communications manager, and that, he had decided, could be him. It would be a major leap up his career ladder, so he had revised the details of his experiences in his application. He reviewed them now in his head: degree, internship, three years as a front-line salesman, two more as an assistant manager at a second firm whose products are far more widely known than the name of the company itself. This job was going to be a stretch, but still possible. Fast-learner, work ethic….

He never heard her; he certainly never saw the little, dark-haired girl softly squeezing the damned accordion. Panhandlers were commonplace in the tourist areas, but to a native they were all but invisible to him and he to them. He literally kicked the five-gallon plastic bucket she sat on and stumbled over the top of her, barely keeping his feet. The accordion hit the ground, making the squawks commonplace to its kind.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry! I never saw you there!” he stammered out, flustered and—just a little—angry. He hesitated, weighing the value of more apologies against the potential of being late for his interview.

“You should be sorry. That accordion is how I make money, idiot. You better hope you didn’t break it.” She fairly hissed the words; steam escaping from an underground pipe about to burst.

Her tone, especially coming from an eight-or-whatever-year-old so clearly in a lower economic station, strummed his already-pinched nerves. “Who do you think you are, urchin? You shouldn’t even be out here in the first place. Breaking that thing would be doing a favor to everyone with ears. Go home!”

The little girl responded by making a growling sound and punched him squarely in the groin. “You go home, asshole! You’re standing in my home right now!” One or two people nearby giggled, one of them mumbling something he couldn’t quite catch.

Slightly doubled over, he continued, cursing. The unrealized lay ahead of one native, the fully realized world of the other drifted behind.