The Bicycle Shed

‘Today is the first day of the rest of your strife’ said the alms man. Tucking the brim of his alms-cap underneath his knees, two scabby cups of bone and flesh, the alms man readjusted his eyeglasses and prepared for the day. Today, being his birthday, his head felt like a truck-load of melons, plum ripened and crushed in at the ends. His father told him that he would amount to nothing, and even if he did, it would still be less than something. His father spent the off-hours at the local booze-can; a bicycle shed that sold off-hour beer and spirits at twice the cost. The proprietor drank rye whiskey with ice-water and was unable to count past eighteen. His clothing emitted a foul stench, a mixture of boiled cabbage and wet fur, and those few teeth he had left in his head were crawling with food worms. He spit out chits of undigested food, some still moist and half-chewed, others of indeterminate nature and origin. The alms man stood watch for his father outside the bicycle shed, his father’s admonitions fresh in his head; you will amount to nothing, not a damn thing. The midget would bring him boiled meat sandwiches wrapped in wax-paper, leftovers from the night before, ‘you be a good boy and stay put, you’re daddy’s a fine man, a gentlemen if I’d ever seen one’. He would chew slowly and think of numbers and calculations and how much things he couldn’t afford cost.