The man sat on a bench for no reason in particular. He sat only to sit; he needed something today, and if he could enjoy a decent view and a cigarette, so be it. His lungs alternate between the burning sensation and guilty relief to the stoic feeling of the frozen air.
The only real sense of warmth was the thin roll of paper, everything else, frozen as if the devil had taken all the fire and brimstone from here and used it to keep hell aflame. The steel bench beneath him even more so. The bench was not rusted, but it needed to be more comfortable. It could have been smoother, as the ones built thirty years ago were, but the graffiti was minimal. No young men solidified their beliefs, had drawn words so vulgar that they had been fined fifteen hundred dollars for the city had to repaint
The immovable bar, splitting the bench in two, made it difficult to get comfortable. The raindrops, not coming from the clouds, but the raindrop bumps carved from the bottom made it even worse. The steep ninety-degree angle from the back to the seat.Â
The man knew the comfort of a nice bench. Thirty-odd years ago, he only knew a bench by a local park in the town he grew up in. As it grew dark, the man pressed his cigarette into a raindrop divot, leaving a mark of ash as the embers flickered out.
As he returned the next day, a truck in tow, a generator lying on the flatbed. Pulling out a saw, the man removed the center crossbar with ease. The man could lie down without the center bar, but the raindrops made it impossible to stay like that. With no words and no thoughts, he began sanding down the raindrops. The bench was softer, but it was not enough. He left a pillow at the end and $20 under the case. The man was fined $1,500 that day, "every penny," he claimed, "was worth it."