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The sky is bright blue, but the frigid winter wind cuts through ragged blue-jeans and over worn coats thinned by days of sweat. Even over the smell of dirty laundry, the wind tastes of coming rain, and the homeless pack the small court yard of the Salvation Army to get shelter for the night.
The early have found protection from the wind along the wall of the building that forms one side of the fenced enclosure. The rest huddle on beaten benches and chairs, getting up to mill around occasionally, looking for an abandoned spot that might be slightly warmer. Others stand in the ever lengthening dinner line, rocking and turning to keep warm, desperate not to lose their spot. The evening meal won't be served for an hour yet.
Across the street a flock of blackbirds has taken possession of the telephone lines. In long rows along the lines they sit and bicker, fly up and around and land again, to bicker again. They, too, have come for the evening feed. When the homeless have eaten and boarded the buses to the run-down barracks put to emergency use, they will find their meal among the scraps on the patio grounds. And the homeless whirl and bicker, beg and trade, while they wait for society's equivalent of scrapes on the ground.
This idle thought passed through the mind of a man sitting in an old school chair near the end of the wall. On the flat arm of the chair rests a battered book of blank pages with no lines. The man's concentration is on putting lines in the book. Occasionally one of the milling crowd would circle his way and peer down the mysterious scratchings on the white pages.
One came over wanting to bicker; "What'cha draw'n?"
He said, "Nothing, just doodling, not anything in particular."
"Good, 'cause I don'na want no-one draw'n me." said the stranger, and whirled away.
The man with the book paused as a dark thought passed in his mind: Sooner or later the stranger would be six-feet under, and none would want to see his face again. And even sooner than that he was forgotten, as the man went back to his swirling lines, a cryptographic picture of the Salvation Army winter overflow.