Years of working with the homeless might have left someone else callous, but Max had so many times been amazed by the homeless people he’d met and what they’d done. He was routinely humbled by their resiliency. Most of them had a long history of chemical dependency and/or mental illness, but some had simply fallen through society’s cracks, like Jill who’d been a homemaker with four kids who’d suddenly found herself homeless after her husband had gambled away everything and then shot himself. Or Mehmet who’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Innocence Project had done its job and cleared him, but 17 years in prison had left him a broken man.
Max did his rounds at the shelter and the days blended into months, into years. Some things never changed. Confiscating bottles of Night Train from ingenious hidey-holes. Sorting through lost and found for the correct set of dentures among the sea of false teeth, the prosthetic eye that remained unclaimed. How do you lose something like that and not go looking for it?
The men who were regulars for years and then suddenly absent. Had they hopped a train and left town? Fallen into the river when drunk and been swept down to the ocean a few miles away? So many mysteries, so few answers. Occasionally, one might show up three years later, acting as if he had just left the shelter yesterday. Max knew better than to press them for their stories. Their stories would come out, or they wouldn’t. No sense in picking at what was likely a deep wound.
Written in response to the #freewrite challenges that @mariannewest has been posting. The prompt for this story was callous.
image from Pixabay