A Rabbit for Paul

A homeless man copes with being unemployed.

        When Paul Henders woke up that morning he rolled over and onto a soiled diaper. He felt the squish of the contents, let lose a steady stream of profanity, and scrambled to his feet. Laughter echoed down the ally way and when he looked he saw Mable, the closest he had to a neighbor, doubled over in laughter.

         “Shoulda seen your face!” She hooted, “Shoulda seen your face when you rolled onto that poo!” Her words dissolved into shrieks of hysteria as Paul glared at her.

         “What the f**k, Mable?” He said. He arched back to look over his shoulder to see the back of his grimy pea coat. Finding nothing, he spun and aimed a kick at the flattened diaper so that it soared deeper into the crevice between buildings and landed behind a padlocked dumpster.

         Behind him Mable had gained control of herself and wiped tears from her tiny eyes.

“Pauly, you sure know howta put a smile on a girls face,” she said. She moved deeper into the alley and approached him. From a distance, she looked young and even, in the right lighting, pretty. But up close the hardships of the world weighed heavily on her, lining her eyes deeply and making her seem pale and sickly. Her cracked lips exposed teeth that hadn’t seen a toothbrush in years and greasy hair fell beneath a faded and stained velvet hat. Her shoulders were hunched in a way that bespoke a woman in her late sixties and her skeletal frame was hidden beneath layer upon layer of used and torn clothing.

Mable was Paul’s only friend.

Paul wiped his eyes wearily and ran his hands down his face and over his beard. Mable knelt down to and peer into the dumpster Paul called home. “This looks good, Pauly, you done well for yourself,” she said. It was a smaller dumpster, one who had fallen between the cracks of someone’s memory and into the hands of Paul. One side had was littered with cracks as though hit by a careless dump truck and Paul had lined the insides with cardboard and duct tape. He had nothing inside but a few tattered blankets, three paperbacks, with a single backpack.

“Better then the park bench I been living on.” Mable cocked her head looked at him, one eye shut though the sun had yet to rise above the buildings. Paul was still glaring at her, though his anger had ebbed. Mable had a child’s sense of humor, one that she used to protect herself from the world, like a childhood blanket or stuffed animal.

“You not still mad, are you, Pauly?” Mable stood and dusted her hands together. “A day started with a joke is a good day!”

Paul sighed and let his head fall back. He stared at the sky for a few moments, a clear pale blue that bespoke of a warm early autumn day, before looking back at Mable. “Where did you find the diaper, Mable?”

She shrugged and grinned. “Just any ol’ dumpster, Paul. The early bird catches the poo!” She wagged a finger in his face and giggled. “Come on, let’s go scrounge for some coffee.” Mable took hold of his coat sleeve and began tugging him down the alley.

“Hold on a second.” Paul shook her off and looked at his home. The lid was propped open with two stones set against the hinges. He carefully reached inside and plucked the stones into his hands, letting the lid fall stuff with a soft bang. He slipped the stones, smooth surfaced with ripples of a lighter color sliding across the top, into his coat pockets and followed Mable to the street.

“I know a good place to find change, just you wait and see Pauly boy,” Mable said, “We’ll be sipping coffee with those men in the suits in an hour.”

        

….

 

Three hours had passed and they had not joined the men in the suits. The “place” Mable had mentioned turned out to be another alley of dumpsters three blocks over and it had been picked clean. They searched for fallen change until the sun was well over the buildings and the citizens with jobs skittered around like insects about a hive, manically talking into their phones or adjusting contents of suitcases. Paul leaned against a building at the mouth of a brick wall, hands in pockets, regarding the people. He wondered what it would have been like to always have a cup of coffee.

His stomach rumbled. He shifted as a pang of hunger shot through him. Paul couldn’t remember when he last ate. Yesterday, his mind supplied for him, you ate half of a nearly rotten sandwich you found in the deli garbage. But the belt he wore around his waste and the makeshift holds he had stabbed through the feeble leather said differently.

“Mable,” he said turning, “There’s nothing here.”

The woman was standing in a knee deep pile of black bags, shifting through them while whistling a jaunty tune. She stopped whistling long enough to look at him before shifting another bag. “There’s just gotta be,” she said quietly, “I found enough to buy me a biscuit the other day.”

“There’s not.”

Her hand darted down and pulled out a teddy bear. The ratty thing was missing an ear. Paul approached her and snatched the animal out of her hand like it was poisoned. Mable watched as he threw it away.

Mable sighed and stared at the garbage. “What I wouldn’t do for a biscuit,” she murmured. She waved a hand at him dramatically. “Hey, get me outta here.”

Paul took her arm, all but lifting her out of the filth and setting her on her feet. As they exited the alley Mable looked at her hands, now coated in a fresh layer of muck. Grime made her finger nails appear black and Mable started to pick them clean. Paul grimaced.

“Hey, listen here Paul, I gotta go do something. Won’t take an hour. Can we meet in the park?”

Paul nodded absently. A woman being led by a small dog was walking their way. The small animal made to sniff the hem of Paul’s pants but the woman pulled the dog away quickly. She altered her path to pressing against the wall of buildings, farthest away from the homeless pair. A muscle worked in Paul’s cheek.

“Paul?”

Paul nodded again. “Yeah, sure.”

 

….

 

Paul walked mechanically through the bustling streets, his eyes fixed on the ground. His boots, a once hardy leather pair, were a lucky find while dumpster diving, still looked shabby in comparison to their other feet he saw. It made him feel dirty, self conscious, and he couldn’t bring himself to meet the eyes around him.

He hadn’t been homeless long, only two years in comparison to most he knew. At first, he didn’t care about the stares and glances as his facial hair grew out and his clothes became dirtier and dirtier. It was when a woman shifted her child away from him that he first felt bothered by his circumstances. It had been so subtle, the movement of a mother bringing her child to the other side of her, but it had ignited a sense of bitter resentment.

Paul crossed a street. Ahead of him, just down the block, was the entrance to the park. It was a small one, littered with playgrounds and ponds surrounded by flowers, and it was heavily inhabited. A little pocket of green in a sprawling maze of metal and brick.

He walked through a wrought iron entry way and down a path that sloped slightly, bringing visitors to the center of the park. Car horns and the hum of city life permeated through the soft call of birds in the upper canopy. No place, it seemed, was truth free of the metropolitan muck.

The bench Mable had been sleeping on sat beneath a large oak tree, across from one of the ponds. As Paul sat down in front of a plaque inscribed with, “In loving memory of Andrea Pellinghew,” three ducks splashed loudly into the pond across the pathway.

His back immediately began to ache as he sat against the hard wood, cold, even through the layers of his clothes. The thought of Mable sleeping on the bench sparked a pang of guilt through him that was quickly dispersed when a mother began approaching with a child clinging to her hand. The woman was clearly dressed for business, in a matching suit with a silky scarf wrapped around her hair. The child stared at Paul unabashedly, with large eyes the color of chestnuts and she was carrying a tiny stuffed rabbit. A piercing tone sounded from the woman’s large purse and she halted to dig through it. The child’s hand fell from her mother’s and she clutched the rabbit to her chest.

When the woman located her phone and glanced at the screen and, pointing at the bench next to Paul, answered the phone with a tart, “Hello?” As the conversation ensued, the woman moved away to the pond’s edge, just out of earshot, leaving her child in pathway.

Paul felt a stab of anger. Irresponsible mothers were the reason kids were never seen again. It was never safe to leave a small child, especially one who didn’t look to be above the age of six, left alone in a park, with-

“Hi.”

Paul startled, jolted from his mental ramblings, and looked around. The little girl approached him, rabbit in hand, and looked at him with an expression tinted with curiosity. He shifted, suddenly uncomfortable, and mumbled, “Hello.”

“Why do you have hair on your face?”

He frowned. “What?”

“Hair.” The girl indicated his face with a small hand. “You have hair on your face. Daddy keeps his hair gone.”

“Oh.” Paul fumbled for words. “I…uh…it’s warmer this way.”

The girl nodded as though this made the most sense in the world. “If I grew a hair there, I’d be warm too.” She stepped closer and pointed at the stop next to Paul. “I’m Alma. Can I sit?”

Before Paul could answer the girl plopped the rabbit down and pulled herself into the seat next to it. She rested her hand around the rabbit’s shoulders and peered up at him from beneath a tangle of dark brown curls. “What’s your name?”

“Paul.”

“This is Tommy.” She squeezed the rabbit. “He’s my best friend.”

Paul nodded and keeping his eyes firmly on the ducks in the pond. A slight breeze whisked through the park and he could feel the child’s gaze on him.

“Are you homeless?”

Paul’s head whipped around to face hers. He frowned at her and wondered if her mother had told her what to look for when walking through the streets. “What makes you say that?”

The girl, Alma, shrugged and fiddled with Tommy’s pink ears, her voice growing quiet. “Mama says that homeless people can’t afford to live in homes because they don’t got money. She says that don’t got jobs.” Alma quirked her head at him and asked, “Do you got a job?”

Paul sighed. “No, I don’t have a job.” He looked at the mother who was talking animatedly into her phone, waving her hands with the conversation. “I should though.”

Alma nodded. “Did you go to college?”

Paul looked back at her for a moment, saw innocent curiosity on her face. “Yes, I did. I went for four years.”

Her eyes widened. “You must be really smart.”

Paul smiled. “I don’t think I am, Alma.” He leaned in close and whispered, conspiratorially, “Do you want to know a secret?”

Alma pulled Tommy into her lap and nodded, eyes wide. Paul drew a deep breath and said, “I had a job once. It was for a company that manufactured toys, just like this one. It was owned by a man named Thomas Maylor.” He gestured toward the bunny in her arms. “We made more toys than any other company. Handmade, really nice toys, you see.”

Alma blinked at Tommy before looking back at Paul. She waited, silent, for Paul to continue.

“But kids don’t want stuffed toys anymore, they wanted electronic things. Cell phones, video games, remote controlled cars. My company shut down and I was out of the job.”

The child looked at the ducks in the pond. She had a sad look on her face and Paul found that he was continuing, “No one wanted to hire a washed up toy maker.”

An obsolete art, a woman had informed him at a job meeting in the grueling years of unemployment after the company shut down. Paul stood up, told her to go f**k herself, and stomped out of the office. He remember feeling satisfied about telling the woman off but had unknowingly sealed the fate on his unemployment as the woman sent a train of emails the company’s in the area about his insolence and rude behavior.

“Alma!”

Paul looked around. Alma’s mother stood at the edge of the path, her face pressed into a mask of cold fury. She looked at Paul with a gaze ebbed in ice and gestured to her daughter.

“Alma, let’s go. Now.”

The child skittered off the bench and turned to her mother. Before taking a step she looked back at Paul and pressed Tommy into his hands. “Tommy says that you need him more then me,” she said before hurrying to her mother. The woman grasped her hand and began berating her for talking to strangers. They disappeared down the path.

The rabbit was soft and its color had ebbed slightly with age. Paul turned the thing in his hands and looked at the tag.

Maylor’s Toy Emporium.

Made with you in mind.

“Pauly, look what I got you!”

Mable skipped up to the bench and stood in front of him. In her gloved hands she held two Styrofoam cups. Steam curled form the openings in the lids. She grinned down at him. “Two cups. Called in a favor from the guy that runs the stand on the corner. Said I wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

Paul took the cup with his free hand. “Thank you, Mable.” Coffee burned his tongue and lips and the fur of the rabbit felt like velvet between his fingers. “Just what I needed.” He stood up and they began walking in the opposite direction.

“What you got there?” Mable indicated the bunny in his hand.

Paul smiled. “His name is Thomas.” 

Author's Note

I hope to eventually expand upon this story to more finalize the ending. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I sat down and wrote this in two hours between classes and this is the original draft.

Reviews

[Marie]

I don't think you need to expand on this. You've told a good, solid story, and for a first draft it's pretty clean. I noticed a few misspelled words, but you can take care of those.