It was sunrise. The beautiful light of dawn beamed onto the asphalt. The bridge was short and narrow. Mopeds zipped by busily. The hour made them sound magical. A calmness with intermittent soft humming noises. But it was the bottle that woke him up. The stray plastic bottle which was run over by one of the ‘zippers’. It lay awkwardly lopsided; deformed by coming under the wheel. He had been asleep on the footpath with his back resting on the sidewall of the bridge. The sun wouldn’t have woken him since he was comfortably in the shade of the half-wall. Specks of dust floated down, glittering in the first rays of the morning and settling down on his ginger hair. His eyes were on the bottle. Crackle! Another moped just went by crushing and flinging it at the same time. It landed next to his feet on the sidewalk. He stared at it for a little while and then leaned forward to pick it up. Like a curious kid he looked in through the mouth with the bottle held up close to his right eye. No water. With one quick short blow he puffed it up and made it look like a bottle again. Still crumpled, but less crumpled than before. It passed his ‘stand upright’ test which seemed to satisfy him. He placed it carefully beside him like it was his new priced possession. It might very well have been.
Dozing back to sleep was not going to be easy as the screeching of horns grew more frequent by the minute. His eyed swung back open. Half-way this time. The hesitation to give up the idea of an extended morning nap was writ large on his face. As if unbeknownst to him, his left hand scratched his belly much like a primate’s expression of hunger. Yet he lay there, putting off the day’s scavenging by a little while longer. The way things looked, some teenager’s urge to buy the umpteenth t-shirt could easily triumph this man’s interest to find a morsel and feed himself. I’ve heard elders say that the less financially privileged you are, the more you would fight to succeed in life. Maybe I should introduce them to this guy. He seemed clearly penniless and was undoubtedly one of the laziest human beings on the planet.
What would ideas like freedom, human rights or patriotism mean to him?
I’m not really sure.
But, what I am pretty sure about is that they must mean less to him than that crumpled bottle that sat beside him.
