The Deposition
“The police are giving us an apartment!" Are you coming or not?" Each of us hop into the police van and see the grinning cops joking with us. They usually swear at us and look at us like we are rats, but never are they happy to see us.
The city spins outside the van a few times and we pull up. "5th floor", we traipse up the stairs one after another. 'Who can bust in the door?" We all jump up and start pounding in the door. There are no sounds inside, just echoes of beating on the door. John falls in on his side on top of the mangled door and there she is.
In the kitchen lies an old woman. She must have been dead for a while now. The kitchen is moldy and smells like the bottom of a garbage can. The woman’s face is an old spotted bleached house shirt.
“The granddaughter was sent to the orphanage there is no one left to carry her out boys', Here is a bag, lets get her down to the van, we'll talk about the apartment later.
It is one of those houses, where there are no corners, only worn edges and solidified gum in every corner filling in until the home rounds till it looks like the underground tunnels we sleep in for now.
Dark, damp collections of clothes, shag strip on the bathroom floor, split toilet seat, scraps of wood, broken furniture, hear the echoes in the walls, neighbors gargling through the bathroom wall.
We all find places around the body and carry her over the broken door spiraling down together like the 'Lord’s Cow' bug with each of us as a leg.
We carry the black bag down the five flights of stairs and each of us knows what to do with death. Laugh in its face. (Except when we carried Mike out of the sewer last year after he got beat up and drank himself till he choked on his own vomit in the sewer, nobody looked at anybody, we all hated him anyway and you don’t want him haunting you just because you laughed). So we tell jokes the whole time, we joke that the body would ride nicely on the top of the van and we could aim and drop it down quite easily. The police are quiet for once, those two hate us and love us at the same time. We all know it.
We scuffle out the back of the van stopped at the morgue entrance at the back of the hospital. Placing her body on the hospital stretcher for a minute I remember my grandmother. Her smell, the way she always touched my ear and couldn't get me to eat enough. The way her bare feet looked in those jelly slippers in the summer. Blackened toe nails, And I thought of my mother, and hell, the last time I saw my dad, my brother fishing, and my mother. I feel that nameless black blob coming up my chest and say, 'so do we get to use the apartment or not?'
“We'll see what the mayors office works out and we'll let you know. I am not sure it will do any good, you'll still be back at the corner smearing your dirty rags on car windows pestering good people for change”
(a short story based an experience of the kids we meet with regularly on the streets)
art for therapy
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