<<< PREV | FIRST | NEXT >>>

Over time, the priest has accumulated enough miscellaneous articles of clothing from his impromptu homeless guests to put together an entire wardrobe--an especially worn, moth-eaten wardrobe, but a wardrobe nonetheless.

The man’s clothes go into this collection to be thrown away on Thursday(this one or maybe the next, or the next, or the next, five Thursdays have come and gone and the discarded things remain in a box next to the water heater), and the priest gives the man other clothes to wear.

He wraps a strip of gauze around the man’s leg and asks, “Are you from around here?”

“Nope!” says the man, who in actuality speaks like a boy, his tone excitable and high-pitched, tripping over his tongue like he‘s so eager to get to the next word in the sentence that he‘s forgotten the last. But his eyes are dark, his cheeks are sunken, his limbs are gangly and skeletal, and so he doesn’t look like a boy at all. “How’d you know?”

“You have an accent,” says the priest, “but I can’t place it.”

“Oh.” And then, oddly, he becomes silent and seems to curl in on himself.

Uncomfortable now, the priest changes the subject. “You look more like a tourist than a homeless person.”

The man perks up almost immediately, and when he looks up at the priest he’s grinning again. “I’ve been traveling all over the world. This is the last place I was gonna visit before I go home.” He moves his hand a few centimeters to the right to pet his cat. “I’m on a journey, you know.”

“Journey?”

“I have a mission to free my demon companion from his cumbersome earthly vessel.” The man looks to his cat and asks, “Did I say that right?”

“…”

The cat looks at the priest with the comic timing of a young Charlie Chaplin and continues licking his paw contemptuously.