Stoolies' Jacket and Spoiled Meat

‘Surely this is no way to start the day, all this kafuffle and beastliness. I must find a less taxing way to make my reentrance into the world’. The man in the hat collected vagrant stones and pebbles. He kept them in the toecap of his boot (pressed up against the curve of his toes) for safekeeping. The stones and pebbles italicized his toes, forming a hard trebled crust on the pads of his feet. He could barely slip socks over the ends of his feet, as the toenails had curled upwards presenting a rough sharp edge to the socking. He knew a man who liked to eat his dinner with a capsicum monkey with a spelt-tail. They sat across from one another, fork and knife in hand, and ate greedily, the one eying the other for missed forkfuls or scattered bits and ends. It reminded him of all those men with chuck teeth and knobby fingers clacking copper-ware against millrace plates and plastic cups, all that noise and confusion and shuffling feet and the odor of spoiled meat and indigestion.

(His own father ate great mouthfuls of cabbage and fatty shoulder boiled to a placental mush, carrots cut into timbered sticks and onions with some of the outside peal still on). One day he watched as a hobo in a stoolies’ jacket pushed to the front of the soup-line and demanded a bowl of Jell-O. When the server said they were fresh out of Jell-O the hobo stamped his feet and stammered, ‘there’s nothing fresh about your Jell-O young lady, so mind you’re P’s and Q’s!’ He saw another man with a cone-shaped head hit another man with a feeble-arm in the noggin with his food-tray, the feeble-armed man ticking and carom in wide uneven circles, a clap of blood jockey from the middle of his face. (The soup-kitchen was a beggars’-line of stench and bad posture, every man a cutthroat’s nick closer to an early burial).