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PoetryIn-e-Motion

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Poems and short stories ©   by Arno and Anna unless differently stated (Disclaimer).

The people hanging around the local shopping mall often looked somewhat odd. They were drunkards, looking homeless and shabby. They were attracted by the liqueur store, and sat on benches around the area, smoking and gossiping with their rough whiskey-voices. It was not only men there, but women, too. Somehow the difference in appearance between the two sexes was not too pronounced.

As a little girl I didn't pay attention to these people. When they weren't loud, they almost seemed invisible, melting to the surroundings. In fact, I did not know of their existence before one particular event that happened when I was five or six years old.

I was walking across the square close to the liqueur shop. My mother had taken me and my sister along shopping, and she was pushing Nina in a carriage in front of her. Suddenly a white haired man appeared in front of us in the loose crowd. He was drunk, wearing old clothes. He was mad, too, yelling at us all around him. He told us to come back the following night at six o'clock, so that he'd shoot us all.

I asked my mother who he was and why he said such things. She said he was a drunkass, and that I should not care. I took her advice and did not think of it as any important thing, and surely we did not hear about a shooting incident the next day. But from that moment on the homeless people had appeared on the streets, visible for my eye and consciousness.