Short Story: The Abundance of Emptiness

As I round the corner just off the street and into the park at a ninety-degree angle, a man with no shirt and one eye on a very stolen bike holding an apparently empty bucket on the handlebars shouts at me as loud as he can, "Wrong side of the road asshole!" I smile with half my mouth and say nothing and peer quickly askance into his bucket to see that it is in fact empty just as I pass him and keep going into the crimson bloody tarnation of fall's sea of sense and color.

A little over a year later in the very heart of winter’s jail a couple days after I see them out there talking to him about coming in from the cold or something else beyond my ken, the one-eyed man with the bucket dies out there on the street downtown freezing alone screaming on the corner by the alley, screaming at nothing and nobody, screaming in pain, screaming at everything and everyone, his beleaguered mind addled by also-screaming sirens from some phantom world nobody'll ever know.

Nobody hears the screaming because it's not really there. By now he's as mute as the frozen winter air trapped by night, trapped in the book between worlds, where silence moves through the body and the ghost body. The clock stops its incessant heartbeat for a moment, if only to know that the dream is really happening. A thief catches the falling knife, and the night breathes us in like ruby sleep but black as blood against the moonlight, the silvery moonlight. Clouds hang low, almost touching their own shadows, slowdancing to the pale shade of the sea of rains.

The next day when they find his body there on the street, there's something there in his bucket.