I’ve been delinquent in writing here of late, but I have been writing. Plan on getting a new story every Monday. This one’s not from a photograph as some of my past stories have been, but it is a timed story. Thirty minutes longhand on a topic, unedited.

THE SAFETY OF OBJECTSHis basket was stuffed full, so full that he was having a difficult time pedaling down the street and keeping his bicycle upright. Wrappers from bread he’d long since eaten, bottle caps that jangled when he pedaled, an old lock he’d found just that morning in a car whose windows had been smashed. More things than he had remembered picking up. He pedaled, swerving to avoid people on the busy street on Flatbush. An old woman stepped out of the beauty shop he was at that moment passing, and he turned, smashing into the mailbox near the curb.

His things came tumbling out of his basket. he smiled weakly at her, but she merely scrunched down her hat and scowled at him so that her face looked as if she had just tasted rancid lemons.

Slowly, then, he got his bearings, being disoriented from the fall. His heart had started beating too fast, he thought, and he almost scurried for his things. His things! His things!

“Don’t touch it!” he shouted at a young black boy who had no intention of touching the Mickey Mouse lunchbox from which old baseball cards and GI Joe action figures had spilled.

The old man must have looked funny to the boy, sprawled out on the sidewalk like a thrift shop whose roof had been torn off in a tornado. The boy pumped his skateboard twice, passing the old man kneeling on the sidewalk clutching some of the things he had already began to gather back to himself and he noticed already that his breathing had become more even, his heartbeat more steady. He growled at the boy on the skateboard and picked up a die from a discarded Parcheesi set, two blue jacks and a marble that had come to rest near the mailbox. He began stuffing these objects into the already full pockets of the Army jacket his brother had given him upon his return from Vietnam. The jacks fell out of his pocket, pushed out by the iPod box (sans iPod) and the broken cellphone and the coffee cup he’d gotten in Hell’s Kitchen. He mumbled to himself and looked like Gus, the mouse in Cinderella, as he tried to pick up one more thing before dropping them all again.

Realizing his pockets were full — all four of them — he righted his bike and stacked the national Geographics in the baskets. He was smiling now as he re-fastened the rubberband which had become dangerously close to the edge of the transistor radio on the back of his bike, so that he would have been afraid he might lose the radio had he seen it before now.

The baskets were ready then to accept more of his things. And slowly he had begun to meticulously take stock of what lay on the sidewalk in the bright afternoon sun.

The people on Flatbush walked past and around him without offering to help him pick up his things, but he did not see them and did not want their help.