I saw an old friend on the street. He was cranked out on something vicious and didn’t seem to recognize me at first. When I stepped up to him, he produced a dull knife and hammered it into my chest. It didn’t pierce the leather jacket I was wearing so I grabbed his head and twisted him around. He still managed to prod me with the blade again and this time it cut through slightly. I let him go and started to walk away but he stabbed me in the back, just under my left arm. My jacket protected me for the most part but I could feel a little blood warming my side. He just stood there and I tried to rip the knife from his hands. The blade broke in two pieces and he started to laugh. Somehow, I was left holding the two halfs while he ran away.
It was late and dark and I was in the part of town you don’t want to be in with somebody else’s broken knife. Throwing the pieces in two seperate places, I climbed up onto a roof to hide. A patrolman was coming with a flashlight and I didn’t want to be seen. On the roof was a little shack, which I crawled into and took a nap on a makeshift bed someone had left there. I awoke to dropletts of rain, falling from the shoddy roof of the shack and to the sound of the door starting to open. I jumped up, intending to lock the door but it was too late. The kind face of a slightly elderly man poked in from the other side. He didn’t seem to hold any ill will toward my intrusion on his shack. I let him in and apologized. He sat at a desk, which I hadn’t noticed before. He began to type on an old Remington and it produced a pleasing tack and clang. The old man explained that he was a writer. He had been a writer his whole life but only recently had he truly written. This rooftop shack was now his home, his escape from his previous life, a small salvation for a dying artist.
When he realized that I was invited to a prestigious dinner party, which took place later that night, he begged me to bring him along. He desired to interview someone at the event for an environmentalist paper he was to publish. I didn’t know the person he wanted to talk to but I said he could come along anyway.
It was an extremely expensive party, with all kinds of dancing, food, deceit and decadence. I lost track of the man from the shack and soon felt it was time to go home.