overpass with fidgeting partial limbs. They all had nearly empty cups
of one baht coins and the most unfortunate of them could testify of
dark currents deeper than regular people could imagine for one moment.
They, his surrogate family, knew that there was not just one blackness
but despair had myriad blacker and bleaker hues.
Under the steps of the overpass sniffing his glue while these
transients already riddled in amphetamines and alcohol (at times
borrowing his glue) smoked cigarettes incessantly, his mind swept away
from him like a butterfly fluttering by. When he first met them in
this spot their first words were to offer to him cigarettes but he told
them that if he were to put one in his mouth it would remind him of the
fetid one with his fetid shoes and socks littered everywhere, the one
who had stolen his parents property upon their deaths and had abandoned
them to starvation in the great city of Bangkok. These transients had
the understanding and listening skills of trained psychologists and
offered unto him a piece of bubble gum instead which he gratefully
accepted.
Still, a thought preoccupied him off and on. He wondered why they
were all seated there in such a confined space; but within a few hours
the storm clouds moved overhead and the rain deluged the streets making
him forget about one man complaining of his jock itch and scratching
himself, another that cried and looked up into the clouds, and a third
that kept wanting to barter off his torn sandals for Jatupon's sneakers
and kept calling him "uncle" even though he was ten or fifteen years
the older brother. Across the road he occasionally saw umbrellas sail
out to the gray of the clouds. One of the other five transients was
repulsed by a spider that crept onto him in its effort to escape the
rain, cursed at a rock in his shoe that would not leave the obscure
crevice of the sole, and then in one of his shifting moods made a
declaration of happiness that they had found such an inconspicuous spot