Free Low Life by Ryan David Jahn Page B

the Filboyd Apartments, Simon made a right onto Vermont, drove past Sixth, and made a left into the Walgreens parking lot. He pulled
into a spot, pushed open the car door, and stepped out onto the asphalt and right into a pink wad of bubble-gum. As he walked, he dragged his right foot along the ground, trying to scrape the gum
off the bottom of his shoe. By the time he reached the front of the store with its automatic glass doors – a kid standing there trying to sell candy bars from a cardboard box – his foot
was barely sticking to the ground at all.
    He stepped past the kid, shaking his head, no, I don’t want a candy bar, and into the bright fluorescent light of the store. A security guard sat just to the right of the door in a metal
fold-out chair – eyeballing him.
    Simon hated security guards. There was something about their mere presence that made him feel guilty. He also felt guilty when he heard a siren, momentarily certain that it was the police coming
for him – coming to take him away. His heart would start beating fast and his mouth would go dry and he would try to figure out what it was he had done. His mind would flip through all the
nasty, horrible thoughts he’d had recently (stupid bitch, someone should—), flip through them like index cards (if I had a knife, I’d—), as he tried to figure out which one
he’d acted upon. He must have acted upon one of them: the police were coming for him. Inevitably, the police car screamed past, or it was a fire engine, or it was an ambulance. Nobody even
glanced in his direction. But the guilt still sat there – weighing on him.
    Maybe it was simply the built-up guilt of his youthful petty crimes. When he was young he had been quite a thief. He had grown up poor, and the only way for him to get things he wanted was to
steal them. He remembered stopping into a convenience store when he was ten or eleven – this was in Austin, Texas, where he had spent his youth – and seeing a box of kites near the back
of the store. He looked through them for several minutes, examining the small pictures on their packaging, pictures which were supposed to be depictions of what they would look like in flight
– eagles and jet planes and flaming rockets.
    ‘You gonna buy one of them or just gawk?’
    ‘Sorry,’ he said, and left the store.
    But the next morning on his way to school he had walked into the convenience store with a pronounced limp – apparently he’d injured his knee and couldn’t bend it –
knowing what he was going to do, and when the guy behind the counter wasn’t looking he slid a kite down the leg of his pants and limped right back out. He was sweaty and full of turmoil
inside – guilt – but even then he knew the trick to stealing was to not have a guilty expression on the outside, so he made sure his face was calm – bored even – until he
was safe.
    He’d flown that kite every weekend for two months, until it finally got caught in a tree in Big Stacy Park and he couldn’t get it out again.
    Maybe it had just been the built-up guilt of his youth before – but this time the guilt was earned, wasn’t it? The reason for it decomposing in his bathtub.
    He grabbed a basket from the stack sitting between the security guard and the newspaper display case and walked through the store. He collected a box of brown hair dye, a box of razor blades,
band-aids, a bottle of alcohol, a bottle of peroxide, and a bag of cotton balls.
    Before going to the checkout line, he stopped to look at the paperback novels. He flipped through a couple, sticking his face into one and inhaling its scent before putting it back down again,
but he didn’t buy one. He didn’t read very much any more, but in his youth books had been his only escape from his adoptive father, who was always drunk and as likely to punch him in
the face for some imagined offense as hand him a beer and let him stay up late watching television with him. He felt an odd, bittersweet