The coffee drips down Dave’s long fingers like brown blood, his mother’s fingernails pressed into the palms of his hands along with the coins like the Stigmata, this tall boy with limbs so long he looks stretched out, a rubber band pulled until he cannot regain his original shape, his face narrow, sharp, nearly fish-like with each eye set on each side of his head, his lips as thin as ribbon candy, vanishing when pressed Yet, when he stops to look at me he looks like a warped reflection of me in a carnival mirror, the color of his eyes just like mine, the look in his eyes just like mine, curious and sad, his drunken father lost in their depths just the way my mad mother is lost in mine. His trip takes him diagonally across Crooks and Vernon from an apartment near the liquor store, mine takes me the length of the block down from Lakeview, and we both order the same thing: cigarettes and coffee. Cigarettes and coffee, and candy if the store keeper hands us any change. Dave...
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