“You speak English?” Rob asked, forgoing the translation.

“Un poco.” One answered.

“He speaks a little.” Rob told me unnecessarily. Across the street several other workers started to make their way towards the van to make a bid. One bearded guy was crouched in a position like a child playing jacks. He rose slowly and raised his hand as he walked over. At first he looked a bit menacing but as he got closer he seemed to shrink a little. His clothes were oversized and billowed with the wind and gave a false declaration of size. The polo shirt he wore hung down to mid thigh like a hand-me-down worn by a kid.

“We need someone who speaks English.” Rob and I continued to instruct in alternating turns. The different men all took shots at convincing us of their fluency but most could not do more than point to themselves and offer ‘I speak.’ The bearded guy pushed his way through the crowd with an urgent and fearful disregard like a child who’d lost his mother in a grocery store and he was met with little resistance. When he reached the van his arm was still raised and his facial expression was one of terror. His eyes bulged wide from their sockets and his exposed upper teeth gnawed at his surrendering jaw. His raised hand dove finger first to his chest.

“I’m speaking English.” He said.

“Yeah.” I agreed, tired of the interview process.

“Yeah.” He continued while his eyes darted around. “I speak Eng…” He trailed off. The other men had resigned now to patting the bearded guy’s back in congratulation. Some of the other men rubbed his shoulders like a boxing coach would do in the hopes of psyching up a fighter for battle. But the guy still looked uneasy, like he had been trapped by his good fortune.

“Hop in.” Rob and I overlapped. The sliding door opened and some supplies rolled out as the guy scrambled in laboriously.

“Let’s go.” His ‘t’ silent. “I can smoke in here?” He dug into a pouch of tobacco before anyone answered.

“What’s your name?”

“Honres.” He mumbled, his tongue involved with a rolling paper.

“Henry?”

“Amdes.” He corrected

“Am-dez?” I slowed the vehicle to turn around in my chair.

“Eh.”

“Andre?” Rob guessed correctly.

“Yeah.” Andre answered and lit up his rolled cigarette.

“Where are you from?” I asked without thinking. I regretted asking the question. I knew that I’d initiated a second strained conversation for an answer that I didn’t really need. We stumbled back and forth with Andre’s answer a couple of times before Rob heard Puerto Rico. I pulled to a stop in front of Rob’s building and he got out.

“Good luck, let me know how it goes, tell the judge that it wasn’t public urination, you were passing a kidney stone.” I said and then wondered if Rob knew that kidney stones pass out of the same route as piss. He smiled and left.

“C’mon up front.” I told Andre and he crawled over the rear of the passenger seat, his small khaki covered legs kicking around in the air. Now with just the two of us I felt that the void was too great to not fill with talk.

“So.” I began. “How long you stand out there…for work?” His answer was mumbled and I couldn’t understand it at all. I continued to ask small-talk types of questions and got answers that I could only respond to by nodding. Andre chain rolled cigarette after cigarette and never stopped smoking and I assumed it was his method to avoid talking. At a red light I rolled a smoke from my own pouch of tobacco and attempted to bridge the language gap.

“Fuego?”

“Tha lighter.” Andre handed me his lighter and started on another cigarette himself. His watch featured a giant plastic diamond mounted over the numbers.

“I like your watch.” I was truthful.

“Mywrendgimewhasz.” He told me. We rode in silence for a while on the way to the job.

The streets of Midwood swarmed with Hasidic Jews celebrating the holiday. We arrived at the home of a couple that was waiting for their table in order to entertain guests.

“Oh, here it is at last.” The woman answered the door as though the table had arrived on its own.

“You’re a beast!” I told Andre after we had set down the massive piece. He smiled in bewilderment.

“This is as big as it gets?” The woman asked her husband twice before he relayed the question to me. I told him that it extended further out with the help of table leaves. They waited unhappily for the table to extend itself. I offered that I could extend the tabletop and the wife’s glance told the husband to tell me that that would be best. When the furniture was at last placed to their satisfaction I announced that the transaction had come to an end and the time of payment was upon us. The woman wrote a check from a small table by the front door. As usual I stood to a side and feigned interest in some piece of household ornament as though I were oblivious to what I was about to receive. Apart from the check the woman also plucked a twenty-dollar bill from her purse and held it out. I smiled and moved toward her and the money and the door. At the last minute it seemed to dawn on her that the bill might have acted as a conductor for my filthy commonality and she swatted it down to the surface of the table.

“Thank you.” I said.

“Oh, it’s not even our house.” The words sprinted from her with clumsy uncertainty.

“It’s very nice.” I responded without processing her statement, I’d heard the word house. We both grinned awkwardly. I assumed that we realized at once our mutual disinterest in what the other had said, and then realized that the other had also come to this conclusion.

“Let’s go Andre.” I said. He’d been as still as a cigar store Indian propped in the corner but when I said his name he reanimated. Swathed in moving quilts that flowed from his shoulders to the ground and covered most of his head, he looked like a mummified prince awakened for the sake of fulfilling a curse. He strode between the woman and me and then down the steps.

“Thanks again.” I gave as I stepped out the door. Her mouth seemed to start to form into the origins of a word but the door closed between us before any sound could escape.

Before our next job I stopped at a bodega to get some water. I asked Andre if he would like something to drink.

“Water, juice, soda…?”

“Coca-Cola.” He answered.

“Coke?”

“The can of.” He held his hands several inches apart from one another to signify the size of a can and I nodded. The store carried only twenty ounce bottles of soft drink and when I returned to Andre with more Coke than he had expected he smiled like I had just called him a beast again. He was smoking a rolled cigarette and I rolled another of my own to keep up.

“You got the lighter?” I asked when I was ready to light up. He reached in his pocket and handed the lighter to me without looking over.

At the next job a young lady was waiting for us at the foot of her apartment steps.

“Come on up.” She was friendly. “I’m sorry, there’s…no smoking.”
I turned to match her gaze and saw Andre coming up the steps with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

“Andre.” I immediately felt embarrassed by my parental tone but I had to finish what I’d started. “You can’t smoke that inside.” I ended with a more employer-ish type of inflection. Andre looked a bit betrayed, like I had switched sides.

“I finish the smoking.” He pinched through his dusty teeth. Upstairs we were shown what was to be moved and then left to our own devices. The apartment was on the third floor and I could see that Andre’s legs were growing tired inside of his baggy pants. With each trip his look of fear became more amplified and he started to mutter curses under his shortened breath. I would ask him if he was okay and he would look to me and say something undecipherable and start laughing in a strained rhythm. Sometimes I would join in the laughter so he would think I was savvy to the joke, sometimes I would pat his back for added confirmation. After a while we took a water break. He removed his cap for the first time to wipe his brow. I’d been wondering if he was bald under the hat but in fact he had an admirable, sweat soaked mane. At that moment I recalled something that Rob had said to me at some time earlier, ‘Mexicans don’t really lose a lot of hair, sometimes you see old ones with big, beautiful heads of hair.’ I started to laugh; Andre smoked and laughed along nervously.

“More working?” Andre asked after lunch and I said yes. I’d gotten a text message about a third job and we headed deeper into Brooklyn. We arrived at an apartment shared by two young guys.

“Hans.” The first guy introduced himself. The second little guy only nodded at us.

“I’m Granger, this is Andre.” I turned to point at a bare wall. I kept my gaze and my finger trained on the spot where I’d gestured toward so as not to look foolish. We all stared at the wall for a moment before Andre trudged inside and filled his rightful place. Hans and friend had only Ikea furniture and Andre and I carried it easily. In the lobby an old woman had taken a perch by the front vestibule.

“You must remove.” She spoke with an Eastern European accent and pointed at a stack of phonebooks that I had propped the door open with. After a moment's thought she smiled and qualified her statement. “When you are done.” One of her slippers had dropped to the tile floor and her naked toes wiggled feverishly. I laughed and said that I would remove the books.

On my next trip up to the apartment I found Hans’s little friend firmly rooted in an air guitar solo to a System Of A Down song. Hans stood nearby participating with what was either approving nods or stifled head banging. The little friend looked up at me and halted in embarrassment, thought and then continued. He probably figured that I’d seen a decent enough amount of his performance that to stop now would be a more damning indictment of his behavior. He finished the song strong but I can’t help but feel that his show was compromised at some level by self-consciousness. As the tune died I surveyed the room for what I would carry next and my eyes fell on an open box. There, resting atop the other loosely placed items was a large purple dildo. I looked up quickly so the others would not see what I’d discovered but Hans and his friend were performing showy but mitigated rock maneuvers. I figured Andre would be not far behind me so I lingered near the dildo. I wanted to point it out to Andre so he wouldn’t make the horrific discovery alone. I waited by the box and contents as long as I could for Andre but when Hans looked questioningly toward me I had to continue working.

“A lot?” The elderly woman asked of me as I walked through the lobby. I said that there was not much more and she looked comforted. While I loaded boxes into the van Hans’s little friend came downstairs to talk to me.

“So.” He began. “I have this other mattress that I need to go to Manhattan.” He looked around and shuffled his feet like a nervous kid asking for a date to the prom. I told him that I would take his mattress but it would cost him extra money. The prospect of more money dissuaded him but he slunk around while I worked like he thought his presence would change my mind. I imagined he thought that since I’d seen his vulnerability at his guitar mime act that there was a connection between us. After a few minutes Andre came down with a box and disrupted the stand-off, his face was in its normal posture of angst and I could only guess if he had seen the dildo.

On the final trip the woman in the lobby smiled and nodded at the stacked phonebooks. I nodded in return and moved the books from the door.

“I’m sorry.” She said. “I am old.”

Unable to deny her statement I presented her with a smile that was hers to interpret. “God bless you.” She followed up. Without thinking I mimicked her words.

“God bless you.” I sounded strange to my own ears. I don’t remember ever saying that to anyone before.

I got into the vehicle’s cab a moment before Andre and when he climbed in he had a weird little grin.

“Wha you think of those guys?” He asked as we readied for departure.

“I don’t know, they’re alright.” At my answer his face grew more grotesque, a mixture of delight and disgust. “Why? What do you think?”

“They are funny.”

I knew what he meant by ‘funny’ but I asked him what he meant anyway.

“They have ses.” He told me.

“Oh, you think they are gay?”

He shook his head up and down. I rolled up a smoke from my pouch to end the discussion. When I put the cigarette to my lips Andre held his lighter out to me without me asking. I put the van in gear and accelerated. The boxes I’d stacked in back shook and stumbled a bit, and then everything settled into its place as I drove away.

 Granger Greenbaum owns a moving company in Brooklyn, www.greenbaumexpertmoving.com. He doesn't have time to write anymore cause he's always lifting people's crappy ikea stuff.

The job had us scheduled to shadow a businessman in midtown for two weeks to try to determine if he was sleeping with another woman. At first he seemed innocent of any wrongdoing. He just went to work, to long lunches and then back home. It was a lax schedule that allowed for Ray and me to spend most of our time in the bakery across the street from his office.

“This guy loves eating, but not cheating,” Ray said on the fifth day. “If he was a cheater I would know.” Ray cared a great deal about screwing around on his girlfriend and since he had spent a lot of time concealing his cheating ways he seemed to be somewhat of an expert on the matter.

“If you mess around you must carry this.” He told me, revealing a small canister of Febreeze and several bottles of cologne in his satchel. “The girl that I’m with now, she’s like forty, her face is ‘eh’ but her body is great. No, her face is ugly.” He frowned, humbled by his honesty.

“But she never catches you?”

“No, I met her at the bus stop. She is Haitian so you know, they are always suspicious, and she can do the voodoo curses, so I have to be real careful.”

“What do you mean, what has she done?” People had begun to leave the office building across the street for lunch.

“You know, I can’t leave any of my stuff lying around her house or she’ll use it to curse me, like my underwears and stuff, I have to make sure none of my hair is ever left on the bed and I always take the used condoms with me when we are done or she can use the sperms against me. She asks me to give her the condoms to throw away but I don’t let her. Also I won’t take any food from her if it is opened. She brought me a can of Sprite to drink, but it was open so I threw it away when she didn’t look.”
“So you take the used condoms away? Like in your pocket? She can get you when you’re asleep.” This idea bothered Ray, he must have thought about it before but to have someone else say it really drove it home. Across the street our guy came outside, looked to his watch and walked up Sixth Avenue.

“That’s him right, so many people in that building look the same.” I stalled for a moment because I wanted to finish my cake.

“Yeah, let’s go.” Ray hopped up. There was enough of a cake piece left that I didn’t want to throw it away, but I also didn’t want to carry it outside in the drizzle. The only option that I felt was reasonable was to shove the remaining amount into my mouth. It wouldn’t be enjoyable but I knew I would be unhappy either way so I went for it. Frosting skidded to a halt at the corners of my mouth as I choked down the slab but at least I hadn’t wasted anything. We followed behind our guy for several blocks before he turned left on 54th. He was average height with graying hair and a suit which made him pretty similar looking to many other businessmen so we had to stay close. Ray crossed the street and ran ahead of the guy so he could get video footage of his face. After a few more minutes the guy entered a bar and grill on the corner of 8th.

“Did you tape his face?” I asked Ray outside of the restaurant, I giggled to myself imagining Ray putting duct tape over the man’s eyes and mouth.

“Yeah, but he looked at the camera, so you go inside and see if he is alone.”

The inside of the restaurant was much more dimly lit than the outside even though it was an overcast day. I had trouble making out different people.

“Just you sir?” The greeter asked. I told the girl that I was trying to locate a friend and she let me go free to roam about. Our guy was nowhere to be found on the first floor so I climbed the stairs to the second level. There, in the farthest corner from me, he was seated at a booth. He was facing my direction and speaking to someone on the opposite side of the table. The other person was obscured from my view by a high backrest. It was the perfect seating scenario for a secret rendezvous. There was no veiled way that I could see the other person since their table was the only one in the corner. If I got too close then my face might be noticed and possibly remembered. It was unlikely since my face isn’t really memorable but I was still reticent to get near the table.

“This guy is damn good.” I told Ray when I got outside.

“Look at this.” He held his cell phone screen up to show a digital photo of a woman’s naked ass. “That’s my girl.”

“Ooh, that’s nice. Do you think we should call and give this guy’s wife an update?”

“Yes, you call.”

The wife was a wealthy woman. She was told by Arty that we would keep her aware of any developments. When she answered the phone I said, “This is Granger, with the Silver Agency.”

“Yes, hello, what is he doing?”

“He’s at a restaurant. He’s with someone but I can’t see who it is yet.”

“Oh, I bet I know who it is, is it a woman from Jersey?”

“I don’t know.” Ray held another phone picture in front of my face, this time it was breasts. “We’re gonna wait and see who the person is though.” There was silence on the other end. I wished I had more explicit details to report.

“Okay.” She sighed, “Let me know.” She hung up. I sighed loudly but Ray didn’t ask what had happened.

“Hmm.” I hummed, “I used to be better at this job, in Connecticut.”

“Really,” Ray glanced up for a moment from his phone “not me.”

“Yeah…me neither.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw what I thought was our guy exit the restaurant. I grabbed Ray’s shoulder and turned us both to face a brick wall. There we stood for about ten seconds.

“What’s up?” Ray whispered, “Is it him?”

“It’s him.” I mumbled. We turned around and saw a man who slightly resembled our guy walking away. “It’s not him.”

“There he is.” Ray grabbed me and turned us toward the wall again. When we turned back around our guy was walking away, hand in hand with a skinny, blonde haired woman. The two of them walked to the end of the block before the woman kissed our guy lightly on the cheek and they parted ways.

“I’ll take the girl, you get the guy.” Ray said. We split up and I followed the guy north on Eighth Avenue. He was headed in the direction of his apartment. A couple of times during the walk he stopped and looked down at his phone or looked around the street but I was always able to duck behind something or someone larger than me. It was a short trip from the restaurant and after about twelve minutes the guy entered his building. I pulled my notepad out to document the time, when I looked up I was surprised to see the blonde woman, followed by Ray, walking toward the building. Once she got inside the door Ray dropped back and we regrouped across the street.

“They’re gonna do it.” I surmised.

“Yep, but we need to get a shot of her face.”

“Yeah, that’s what he said.”

“Huh, oh yeah, right, the sex.”

One of the doormen stared at us through the large plate glass. He had begun to notice us skulking around each morning and now again in the afternoon.

“That guy is gonna make trouble for us.” I pointed at the doorman. Ray looked at the door and then around the street like he was bored with the idea of trouble. I wished I had pictures of naked girls on my phone to show him, but I didn’t so I called the wife.

“Hello.” She answered.

“Your husband is in the apartment with another woman.”

She gasped at the news, “Who is it?”

“She’s blonde, and thin.”

“I knew it, I knew it, I’m coming there now.”

“No, no.” I wanted to drag the job out as long as possible, “Wait, don’t come, wait until we get some more video.”

She considered for a moment before agreeing that more evidence would be best, “Okay, follow them today and tomorrow, then I’ll confront them.”

“Okay.” I didn’t know what else to say so I said ‘okay’ again, and then hung up. The doorman was still watching us and pointing us out to another doorman. “Ray, let’s go across the street where that guy can’t see us.” We walked to a subway entrance next to the building and crouched down in the steps.

“How much longer do you think you’ll do this job?” I asked.

“I don’t know, I been with John and Arty now for like twelve years.”

“Have they given you a lot of raises?”

“It’s okay, I do alright, I did a case once for fifty hours straight, lots of overtime.”

“Daaaamn!” I tried to sound jealous.

“Yeah, I got a Playstation 2 and I’m probably gonna get a Playstation 3.”

“So you’re gonna do this forever huh? That’s cool, to know what you want.”

He shrugged, “I remember my first case, I was ducking down in the bushes, trying to take pictures of people in a canoe, and a bird, a water bird, kept coming up to me.”

“Can I help you gentlemen?” The doorman had come over and was standing at the top of the steps.”

“No” I said, “We’re waiting for the train.”

“Okay, on the stairs?”

“No.” Ray stood up and started talking to the man in Spanish. The doorman understood what was being said and nodded. I reached into my bag, pulled out some mints and ate them while they spoke. My mouth began to sting with freshness. There were too many mints but I wanted to look busy while they talked to each other in their language. A disheveled man staggered up the steps and bulged his eyes, not just at me but also in general. After him came a fat child. The boy’s face looked like that of a CPR dummy, mouth slightly agape, lifeless eyes. At first glance the boy appeared to be holding a golden fried funnel cake, poised to take a bite. On second look the cake revealed itself to actually be the boy’s chubby, segmented hand with the index finger extended upwards and at me. Taken off guard by his insulting gesture I laughed, but he held his hand position the entire way up the steps, never lowering his eyes. As he passed by me I threw a mint at his load-burdened knees. The candy struck its target and bounced down the stairs and out of sight.

“…And him too?” The doorman pointed the reception antenna of his walkie-talkie at me.

“Si, el sabe lo que esta haciendo.” Ray said.

Granger Greenbaum lives in Brooklyn, owns a small business, and writes he can. Some work he’s made can be seen at goldenboynatural.com.
 

“You’re…you’re a fucking asshole” She told me again as I got in the cab. I stared directly at her eyeglasses to let her know that I knew. Her glasses were dark and I could not see her eyes. I drove away and by the time I turned the corner and went out of view she had still not gone into a car.

My next stop was the storage center in Brooklyn where I would unload the furniture I had. I always felt more as ease in the outer boroughs because the streets are wider and reprisal for inconveniencing the public is less ostentatious. The girl whose items I was moving rode in the truck with me, her name was Tia, she was very beautiful and I struggled for a way to reveal without being obvious, that I was of a higher class than the average mover. I tried to lure her into asking me questions but everything I said seemed calculated in my ears.

“The thing about moving is you pass a lot of stuff, like buildings and colleges, there’s a lot of colleges in New York, I remember college.” I groped. “What are you…oh, this is a great song, on the radio.”

“Don’t you get tired moving stuff by yourself?” She asked with a sort of obligatory disinterest.

“Not when you have the strength of 2 men and do cocaine in the morning.” I told her. She sighed and looked at a passing cemetery. I didn’t care, her looks made up for her total lack of a sense of humor. When we drove by a crowd of Hasidic Jews she stared as she had never seen them. I gauged her surprise and said.

“Oh yeah, you’ve never seen the Hasidic Jews before? You have to get out of Manhattan more.” She looked toward me with dread to see if I was in the early stages of inviting her somewhere. I saw her anxiety and trailed off in what I figured was a vague populist complaint about traffic. Eventually I just told her that this was not my real job and that I was only helping out a friend on the side for some extra cash. In the end I think she was less impressed with a guy who had to moonlight as a mover than just a regular mover.

When we arrived at the storage facility Tia went in to rent a locker for her stuff. I waited outside and started to unload the back of the truck. The furniture was really too much for one man to be handling safely so I searched an employee to help me with a dresser. I found a stout young woman behind a counter. She was not really working so much as she was looking at her fingernails and dancing to the radio. Being that she was a girl I asked only if she might hold open the rear door of the truck while I pulled the dresser out.

“Uhm-uh, no, um, uh uh, no I ain’t doing that” She told me and went back to dancing. A top forty pop song came on and she announced that it was her favorite. I remember thinking that her life was going to be either really easy or really hard. A guy was walking across the parking lot and I stopped him with the request for help. He looked gnarled around head and body but he looked like he’d lifted a lot of things in his day. He gladly obliged and when I told him afterward that I owed him one he replied by saying.

“Uh-uh, no sir, no that’s what we on this earth for, now god bless you.” He walked away and I really did feel like I owed him one at that point. I like it better when I tell someone that they are owed one and they agree that they are owed and settle for a future reciprocation. We both know that we’ll never meet again to reconcile the debt but at least I don’t feel like I’m in the karmic red.

Tia came out from the office and gave me a check for the cost of labor but she stiffed me on the tip. Had she been married instead of just committed to a boyfriend I might have protested, but I didn’t want to blow any future shot I had. She then left abruptly before I could think of something clever for her to remember me by. I unloaded the rest of the truck by myself and got ready to leave. The diesel engine took a minute to warm up and as I sat there I saw the young girl employee who had earlier refused to help me. She was still just dancing to the little radio, still doing what she was on this earth for.

Granger Greenbaum is a Brooklyn artist whose writing can be found at imminentbystander

“How a you doing?” he asks me, “is beautiful day but must still be working, what can do.” He shrugs at the day’s obligations.

“Yes, yes,” I agree, “what can do?” He sees me enough around the building to realize that I do not work as hard as he does and I can’t help but wonder if he thinks of me as shiftless. I recall the time I asked him why he had not retired at the age of seventy and he stared at me bewildered as if he had caught me eating soup with a fork.

“What you talking?” he had responded incredulously.

A lot of the time our transactions only last moment or so but if a task is not imminent he chats longer. Often he will recount the early days in his homeland where at the age of 26 he was the only person in his village to be able to get a private car.

“I have a private car drive ah through street in snow, it ah stuck and everyone come out and say ‘you ah good man’ and push car from mud.” His face glazed over in bliss at this memory.

Whenever I meet people who don’t have a strong command of the English language I have a tendency to regard them as vulnerable and childlike, in need of my guidance to work through a conversation. In George’s case this feeling is more pronounced due to his small stature and habit of following almost everything he says with a genuine little belly laugh complete with tiny arm flails. This prejudice I have comes back to bite me sometimes when I’m talking with him. Once in particular he was telling me about a time he was driving his cab (his second job) and a man attempted to rob him of his valuables.

“He come to my side and say ‘give me money’ I say okay and then I come from under and box him” as he spoke his full body gestured the motion of a large sweeping uppercut “I say ‘I kill you mahtherfahker’ and I box him and take knife and.” At this point he butted his balled fist into my arm to show where he had stabbed his would be mugger. The story took me off guard and he must have noticed my shock because he stared wide-eyed shaking his head slowly as if in disbelief of the actions also.

About a month after my roommates and I moved into the brownstone apartment we got a knock at the door and were pleased as always to see George. At our consent he entered with a rare somber look on his face and told us of his stress. As it was he had amidst his busy schedule forgot to make receipt of our security deposit and in an honest mistake had come to try to collect the amount for a second time. We told him that we had paid and were able to dig up the bank record of the cashed check. Upon seeing the evidence and realizing his error George appeared deeply embarrassed about the whole thing and he apologized at great length.

“Please, I no try to take money twice.” He pleaded, “ I don’t know how I forget.” We assured him that we knew it was an honest mistake and that we harbored no ill feeling toward him. He left still feeling unresolved and couldn’t help but feel that in some way we had wronged him. Later that evening he returned and repeated his regret, only this time the apology came with two small cactus fruits that he produced from his pocket. “These ah for you” he qualified the gift as he placed them gently in my hand.

Since that day it has become commonplace for George to have several cactus fruits on standby in his coat should he run into me on the stairs. This week I went to his door one morning to report a problem with my freezer and he met me in his long john underwear. I saw that I had woken him and said that I’d come back later. He agreed but then grabbed my arm as I turned.

“Wait one ah minute” he said and trotted back inside his room. He returned a moment later clutching a small green cactus fruit in each hand; with no words he extended them to me and went back inside leaving me in the hallway alone. What can do, I thought.

Granger Greenbaum is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. His blog can be found at: imminentbystander.blogspot.com