rusty nails

ink on paper

Lohbado sat on a concrete pad in the middle of a vacant lot. He picked up a handful of rusty nails and enjoyed their texture in his hand. He inhaled the fragrance of sweet grass and waist high weeds growing from cracks in the pavement of what once had been a gas station. Later, he went into the old house where he decided to spend the night and cooked spaghetti for lunch. After lunch, he carried a sack of garbage to a dumpster outside a shed.

He cleaned up the house a bit and made the place comfortable. He spread his sleeping bag out on a wooden platform and hung his wet socks and trousers on a line strung in front of the oil drum stove to dry. He found an old photo album and various items left behind by a family that had lived there before the Apocalyptic War. There were empty bean cans and beer bottles left from previous lodgers. Among the lost wanderers, those whose lives had been disrupted beyond repair during the war, was a code of etiquette, to always leave a place cleaner than how you found it. During the period between the collapse of one civilization and the beginning of another, people tended to be friendly and considerate, with minimal aggression.