Retardant and Sterno

The shamble leg man met the bow legged man at the soup kitchen on a day when the sky was mutton grey and their legs stiff with rickets and chill. The bow legged man smelled faintly of cloves, the shamble leg man of retardant and sterno. They sat across from one another, knees knocking and jimmying, jaws working frantically, teeth clacking curds of meat and boiled sweet potato that had lost its sweetness. The bow legged man had rubbed his gums with oil of cloves to assuage the pain of a pyorrhea brought on by a toothpick that had lodged itself under his lower front tooth, embedding itself in the milk of his jawbone. The shamble leg man always smelled of retardant and sterno, sometimes curial and peppermint, or dog meat and rashers when he'd been invited to share the man in the hat’s supper, which he seldom was. The soup kitchen was abuzz with men, some in hats, others in toques, and some who wrapped scarves round their necks like woolen garrotes. The bow legged man seldom wore a hat, or a toque, or anything that could be cinched round one’s neck like a lynch knot. He felt that hats were for small men with small heads that were incapable of retaining sufficient heat to keep them warm. These men he referred to as the small men, men whose heads, and the thoughts they had in them, were so small that they weren’t worth the bother of noticing, or referring to as thoughts or heads at all. As he had a full lustrous head of hair he felt that those who didn’t were either thick skulled or lacking in common sense, because if they had common sense they’d have taken precautions against loosing their hair, and their thoughts, silly cunts.