When Giraffes Flew by Jeff Weddle

Author:Jeff Weddle [Weddle, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Southern Yellow Pine Publishing, LLC
Published: 2015-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

Out for Cigarettes

Maggie needs cigarettes.

I was out before to buy some things: furniture polish, Cokes, broccoli, fish for dinner, but she forgot to tell me about the cigarettes, so here I am again in the parking lot at the Bi-Lo, and the place is packed. It’s December first and cold, and like a fool, I’m wearing shorts and a t-shirt.

The Christmas lights are going up and twinkling, and it’s a cold night, and I’m not happy. But here I am, doing one of my little jobs, when a car pulls up beside me and stops. It’s an old car, some old American machine, beat up, nothing you’d ever really notice. The driver’s a man about my age, maybe a bit older, a big guy, but there’s something about him, some terrible aspect of defeat, sitting in the darkness and the cold.

“Excuse me, sir,” he says. Then he tells me his story: hungry, no gas, miles from home, and he is sad and sad and sad, and he apologizes for what he has to ask: The horror of begging.

And I have nothing, just some change, two quarters, two dimes, some pennies, not even a dollar bill. I give it all, of course, and as my hand touches his, I feel it rough and hard and callused, a hand that knows work.

He nods and, I swear, this big man is almost crying.

I don’t know what else to do, so I walk away, walk into the Bi-Lo where everyone has money and there is more food than a man could eat in a year. There are men and women, families. There is even laughter, maybe grace, but none of it is real. I buy Maggie’s cigarettes with our credit card—we always use the credit card—and in my pocket I find a dime. It’s not much, but a little more I could have done. The man is long gone now and, even if he was not, how could I go to him with a dime? What could I say?

Everything is impossible, but Maggie waits for me at home where there is light and food and heat and love, and it is easy to forget the lost dogs, the lost men hungry and miles from home in old American cars you would never really notice, to forget the cold and the darkness, the twinkling, awful, lights of Christmas, two packs of cigarettes and a small coin heavy in my pocket.

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