His sandpaper complexion was creased with lines of age and sin, connecting the features on his face like a dot-to-dot. His eyes half closed and bulging, saliva dripping from the corner of his mouth. On his back he wore a mountain of vague clothing in tired colors, torn at the seams and dragging on the ground. They carried an awful stench that followed behind him like an old dog.

A group of children, having just visited the street corner to take advantage of a spouting fire hydrant on a steamy day, had never seen anything close to the likes of him before. They stopped their playing in the water and stood stock-still, water dripping from flushed faces and stringy shirts. The man slowly approached with an odd kind of limp. Shuffle, lift, drag.

A young boy turned and whispered fiercely to his friend. He desperately suggested that they return to the safe harbor of their parents, talking in a plastically cheerful cluster down the block. His friend, an outgoing girl with colorful barrettes in her hair, ignored him. They both remained.

For a couple moments, it seemed as though the man was going to limp past them without so much as lifting the bald, mottled stump of his head. But the smell that followed him prompted the girl to scrunch up her nose in disgust and work up the gall to speak out to the man. Her high, innocent voice made him flinch.

“You smell like poop!” She stated, giggling. The children crowded around her joined in. “Are you a hobo?”

The man stopped moving, but remained quiet. After a couple moments, the silence started to turn grainy and uncomfortable, and the children stopped laughing. Slowly, he turned, and the girl’s smile gave away.

His mouth started moving like a line of static, and at first it seemed as if he emitted just an odd stream of mutterings. But, gradually, words started to form and float in haggard clouds of air surrounded by his foul breath.

“Watch out...you had better watch yourself...it will be green...chapels and roses, chapels and roses...”

The child withdrew as he started coming nearer, and the rest grew flighty, scattering and running back towards their parents or to their houses down the street. The man’s words started to become more grotesque, more violent, and the girl grew scared.

“Bones and blood...it will be green...blood on the flowers...chapels and roses...”

The girl, close to tears as his scent and his presence assaulted her, was abruptly saved by the coming of her father. He swept her behind him and berated the man with choice harsh words. He then grabbed her hand and hauled her away, muttering about the ‘foul scum’ that the mayor let populate the city.

Several hours deeper into the afternoon, an ice cream cone and long walk later, the girl found herself strapped into the backseat of a car. Her wet clothes were dried, and the scary encounter with the man had faded to a corner in her mind. She noticed the pretty purple pansies, newly planted, that decorated the side of the downtown sidewalk in patches of moist dirt. She did not, however, see that they had come to the corner of Chapel Boulevard and Rose Street, nor did she realize when a large green sedan came careening down the road.
It swerved with a terrible screech of burning tires and panic onto the sidewalk before colliding in a chaos of crushed metal into the girl’s car. Seconds later both of the cars came to a shuddering stop, one on its side, shatter-proof glass frosting the ground in neat squares.

The girl’s blood seeped into the flowers.