nATURE'S dISTEMPER*

The shamble leg man awoke ambivalently, not wanting to jump willy-nilly into the day like a walnut-cracker without a pip-splint. His leg, the shambled one, ached and whittled. Perhaps today was a day in between, one of those almost but not quite days that seemed to have snuck into his life like a pickpocket. He patted down the ache in his leg with the heel of his hand and lit a cigarette, one he had snubbed out the night before. His father smoked shag tobacco he swept from the floor of the lunchroom where he worked, the chaff from other’s hastily rolled cigarettes, churned with dirt and oil. The morning sky, in peril of rain, tucked its knees up into its chest and cowered; the threat of hailstones the size of a beggar's ankle-stump, Nature’s distemper and bilge.