addendum to post below

Years of too much the same have left him with few gifts. But he has enough to get by.
One is the ability to forget everything that is not important. A prize few would even consider as such, but one that can bring a rare lightness of touch to what is otherwise a poor life. Bereft.

He pays the bill and tips. Misfortune should be vested on a choice few and there is nothing here to make him want to waste what he can deliver, if he wishes it.

Outside, the day moves before his eyes in undulating waves: scope and distance struggling to hold on to the shimmering space between landmarks roasting in this dry oasis where green desert would otherwise be.
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Time is a fiction: bundles of moments struggling to rise out of a tangle of indeterminate nothing. But one of those moments is approaching and, like a high
speed train that's not stopping, it will pass all too quickly if he lets it.

And he/I/he won't let that happen. It's been a long time coming. Let it be quick in execution and a long time in the passing: a modern fairytale.

Even at this early hour there's a bustle to those few who choose to use what God gave them and walk, as though the sun fuels their motion in a bid to make them explode. That or they are rushing to escape its flaming mane of rays and burning up the quicker in the process.

And one of them was his. This braunium motion of sweaty, cotton-covered atoms floating in a way that to the observer would be as random as it was to these unconscious atoms themselves. One of them was an opportunity.

People. Even those who relax, don't hurry, don't fight the sweletering unmoving block of air that threatens to choke them if they dare to stay still, drip sweat and seem to shrink before his eyes.

Even those with nothing to offer are ... an opportunity.

But it's a certain no-one he seeks, a certain vacuum-packed side of adipose tissue that will be his gain.

The glass guardians part, a subtle hum their only complaint and he enters.

The saccharin sweet of conditioned air pushes against his unwilling nostrils until decompression sucks it in and his insides turn to look and stare at this rude intruder, even as they cheer its necessity.
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Maybe he shouldn't be here. Superstition forbids it, but that's for freaks. Not the freaks of this poisoned mirage; a law unto themselves, but the regular ones: all the happy freaks, refusing to see Dorian in the mirror that mocks their daily ablutions.

For them Responsibility is always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

But their blindness is his guide, the reason he walks among them untrammelled as their gazes dissect him with prejudices that send them to sleep sound each night.

And so he walks among them slowly, pandering to their dual desires: action to shatter the solidified mucous that once was blood and the soporific lull of prime time television; simply by being incongruous, being there and then gone. Leaving them undisturbed save for the prompting of a fading memory that once... before...there...was...some....

And out of all the slow-bobbing, bloodless piscatory: Gloria.