The raspberries were brighter in his hands. Red, wet, and twinkling, they were ripe there, but not before, before, too tiny, too green. They were his jewels, rupturing attention spans and stealing glances of crystals and glass diamonds.

The juice spilled and melted into the folds of winkles, as he clenched them in some sort of frustration, or was it fascination? There seemed to be some great mystery in the way his brown, papyrus hands soaked red, folded then released. He seemed to pay no attention to the way of blaring traffic, the flashing green and yellow prime colors, the hurried indifference of the working class, middle class, he paid no attention to his own poverty. While I stood there, stricken.

A statue of some figure shown behind him, all rusted gold and silver: imposing. He didn’t pay attention to fact he sat in the famous shadow of some kind of hero. Rather, he stared into his hands, completely entranced by the fruit and soft palpable mess: magic, there was a real bravery there. Some of the imagination had spilled and stained the dirty pile of feces infested, time corrupted, age lost, blankets.

And I stood there, utterly immobilized. My eyes traveled to the stickiness of summer, the heaving of childhood bushes, and blank ignorance. There seemed to be a stream screaming, calling back cold blue, and high contrast red berries. The hero’s shadow shifted slightly. I shifted slightly.

Slowly, lungs rotten, I bent down to throw him a silver dollar.