Free Take One With You by Oak Anderson Page A

passed down from father to son.
    There were a lot of people in the city who wouldn’t be missed should something tragic befall them, people who looked like they’d already fallen through the cracks a few times before and somehow managed, against all odds, to crawl back into the light to await a similar fate.
    People like the man being pushed up against the wall with a knife to his throat.
    What the speaker of those words had no way of knowing was that the object of his derision, though a derelict through and through, was not one of those people.
    The smaller man, the one holding a knife to the big man’s throat, the speaker of those cold, hard words, pressed the blade a little deeper into the larger man’s flesh, an especially nasty glint in his eye.
    “You know what I mean, you piece of shit?”
    The bigger man nodded once, being careful not to move much at all given the sharp steel against his skin. It was really more of a look in his eyes than a movement of his head, but he sensed the smaller man wanted something more. He was already bleeding from several places after the beating he’d taken, and had no desire at all to test the sincerity of the smaller man’s claim, especially when it would be his own knife that would be cutting his throat.
    “Lemme hear you say it,” the man with the knife hissed, pressing harder. The big man could feel his life pulsing beneath metal, an odd thing to experience, indeed.
    One summer when he was a boy he’d hiked through the woods with some buddies to an old dam during a drought, and after they’d snuck past two fences, one of them had dared him to walk across the cement shoulder to the other side. It was about the width of two shoes, not that hard to balance, but falling to either side would likely mean serious injury or death.
    It was the longest 200 feet he’d ever traveled, and about halfway across the dam he got the same queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach that he felt now, in a darkened alley behind a liquor store just a block from the cheap flophouse where he always stayed until his check ran out, which was usually about the middle of each month.
    Like his life was teetering on the edge of something cold and unfeeling, something that would just as soon have him die as live.
    Just as it had always been. The larger of the two men had lived a precarious life for as long as he could remember, and the edge was all he knew. A blade, a concrete wall, a tripwire in Kandahar. It was somehow all the same. He felt his body relax, and he could see in the smaller man’s eyes that he’d felt it, too.
    “I said say it,” the man with the knife repeated, and suddenly the larger man wanted desperately to live, a desire he hadn’t felt in a very long time.
    “I want to live,” he croaked, and for a moment the man with the knife looked at him oddly, as if he were a particularly puzzling specimen he had pinned beneath his microscope, which was really not that far from the truth, in a way.
    Then the smaller man laughed, and it was the laugh that landed the larger man in the hospital, and it was the laugh that probably saved his life.
    It was an evil-sounding laugh, a contagious cackle that reminded the big man of everyone who had ever mocked him, from his lumpy, oversized childhood to basic training to his prison days, and it turned his emotions on a dime. He was right back to the semi-homeless derelict who’d ripped the plastic bag filled with chips and candy from the hands of a nine year-old boy, who was now cowering a few feet away and long forgotten by both men.
    He was right back to being someone with nothing to lose.
    The smaller man was taken completely by surprise when the larger man suddenly pushed off the wall, knocking the knife from his hand and causing him to fall backwards into a row of garbage bags piled next to an overflowing dumpster, and like the laugh that saved the big man’s life, the garbage saved his own. He hit that pile of trash at the perfect angle to