As the afternoon melted into night, under a stone-grey sky and amidst the splashes of car wheels through rainwater lakes, he entered the bus shelter with two men who walked like zombies. One sat on the ground and began rolling a cigarette; the other eyed my newly bought groceries. My muscles tensed and I held my breath, an unconscious reaction to their slow movements and the scent of unwashed jeans. Clouds rolled by like a freight train. I felt his eyes on my face.

“I’m Charles,” he said. Young. Hair the color of sunset and teeth like aged paper.

“Born and raised in this city,” he said. “Spent my childhood escaping my father’s fists.” And just like that, he had laid it out on the table. I wondered what it was that let him know. The way I looked into his eyes when he spoke? My silence, maybe. The safety hidden in my silence.

But his words were stones in the ocean of my stomach. I nodded mechanically; my tongue was heavy. I reached into the brown paper bag at my side and offered him an apple, which he refused. The man next to him took it instead and shrank back, his eyes studying the wet cement. Charles kept talking while his eyes drifted miles from this bus stop. His friend lit the cigarette and the smoke danced in the air, a ghostly vine winding itself around nothing.

“I’m an alcoholic, you know. I get the shakes if I don’t drink a fifth of liquor every day, hahaha.” His face twisted into a strange grimace posing as a smile. “Ever feel that? It’s like dying. You become a shadow of skin and watch the light fade away, watch your hands tremble, tiny earthquakes. The platelets in your blood shifting and grinding against each other.”

“I haven’t felt that,” I replied. The wind blew icy against my face. I clutched my collar tightly around my neck, but no one else seemed to notice. There would be a storm, I sensed. The clouds loomed over our heads, ominous.

Charles’ hungry friend began to pace, mumbling and scratching his face while the smoker flicked the butt onto the ground, sighing out his last toke. Charles glanced about, suddenly frantic, as if tiny electric shocks had begun to fire through his torso.

“But once,” he said. “I hopped trains across America and found myself in San Francisco, drinkin’ red wine with legs danglin’ off this cliff, lookin’ out into that incomprehensible Pacific. It roared, it was so vast, and then there were children…with pearl white skin glowing. They put their hands on my face, underneath my tired eyes. And I wept, and they smiled and laughed and glowed. Put their cold soft hands on my weeping eyes.” His eyes burned like embers into mine.

“Who were they?”

“Angels,” he whispered.

It had begun to snow, and I suddenly noticed how late it was. Fat white flakes fell slowly, rested upon onto our eyelashes and hair.

I heard the car doors slam before I saw them. They sauntered into the shelter, their navy uniforms startling. It always makes you tense up, that color. Charles and his friends looked away or at the ground. The cops stood there for a while, heads close together and murmuring. Their eyes were alert, their jaws locked tight as they listened to one another. Their badges gleamed like shiny quarters in the dim streetlights, gleaming like diamonds nestled in the cleavage of a woman in a ball gown.

When the orders were given for them to put their hands on the roof of the car, the men shuffled forward and complied. The cops spat out curses like chewing tobacco, and while searching him, one cop leaned his fat red face near Charles’ ear and sneered, “You smell like shit.”

Too much. I turned, ducking my head and rushing away with my hands thrust into my pockets. It wasn’t too far a walk back to my place; it would only take about 15 minutes. Passing by restaurants, I glanced in at tables full of patrons dressed in somber clothing, laughing and sipping their drinks, the kind of restaurants that are all glass, so that those inside can see and be seen. There was clean china and dark red wines and caramel-colored whiskeys. Slightly raising their hands towards anxious waiters, “Check, please.”

One man I noticed was sitting at the head of a long rectangular table that was draped in white cloth. In front of him sat a plate of untouched food, and he sat with his back very straight as if he were meditating. While his friends laughed and interrupted one another and glanced around nervously, he stared sadly out into the soft, cold snow that collected at the corners of the windows.