Homeless

Mr. Keeper, known to his friends as Fat Pat, smiled as he walked away from the pantry with a hot cup of coffee and a donut on a saucer. After putting them by his computer console and before sitting down, he stretched his arms all the way up, put his hands on his waist next then twisted his body to the left and the other side. "Hmm!" he exhaled, content at relaxing the tensions which had built up on his back.

Something caught his attention on one of the many monitors mounted next to each other on the wall. A young man suddenly ran off from the waiting area, startling an old man sitting silently in a wheelchair, leaving behind a white paper on the bench.

"What's going on?" Pat asked scratching his curly black locks, curious why the teenage boy stormed away.

Pat pressed a key for replay. Slowly, the events ran backwards. He saw the young man on the chair with a paper and a pen in hand, writing, thinking then writing again. Then the teen walked over to the receptions desk and returned the paper before walking backwards to the bathroom with his bulky backpack.

The door to the men's bathroom was ajar. It had been like that for two days now since the rusted hinges kept it from closing properly. The management just decided to keep it wide open until the repair crew comes.

Pat could see through the security camera, the young man walking with his back to the trash bin. The boy turned to face it. A woman's wig came out of the rotating lid cover and into the hands of the teen. He returned the fake hair in his bag then turned to face the bin once more. Out came what looked like torn pieces of colored postcard-size rectangular paper. It flew onto the hands of the boy which got put back together in one piece. The lad looked at it for some minutes. Next, the boy bent to put the paper on his feet then, like magic, the paper flew up in the bag where the lad had busied scavenging through the tons of things inside it.

After a while, the lad got hold of a dirty-looking white shirt which he used to unwiped his damp face. Then he motioned to unwash his face and fingers. As the seconds in the video counted backwards, the young man looked like he was throwing up. After the water from the faucet flowed back in, the boy stood staring on his dusty face looking at it from side to side. Then he lifted the backpack, unzipped it, took out a rosary and a bundle of cash from it. He bent down and place the two items by his worn shoes then they disappeared from under the lad's right denim pant's cuff before the teen shouldered the backpack and walked backwards through the hall and out of sight.

"Who are you?" Pat kept thinking as he walked out of the security room, a handful of keys rattling by his gun holster wrapped tightly around his rotund belly. He headed to the hospital wing where outpatients waited to be diagnosed.

The area had just been renovated. The room had newly-painted white walls, tiles spic-and-span, the plastic Tonica Easy Bench has a vibrant blue hue showing no signs of heavy use, but the white wooden cabinets stood out looking crippled by years of neglect. Worked up voices of people on a call, orderlies pushing either a patient on a wheelchair or oxygen tanks, a toddler wailing in pain from the far end of the left hall echoed in a nauseating rhythm as there were no sound-absorbing surfaces or ornaments that can dampen them.

Pat walked into the room carefully skirting through a fairly busy traffic of people and machines. The easy benches, which can seat 20 people at a time, had only 8 people seated on them. In one of the front seats, he found the paper the young man left behind.

It was the HIV test request form. Pat read the form. It said the boy is18 years old. His name is Ben Holden. On the address field, Ben wrote "homeless". John walked towards the bathroom, opened the lid of the bin and found the wig. He took it out and found the torn piece of photo paper underneath. He assembled the four pieces and saw a picture of a happy family sitting cross-legged on a wide manicured lawn in front of a white church. A boy of about eight smiled widely from within his mother's embrace while next to them his dad sat with a publication against gay marriage on his lap.