The Heart of a Child Miguel Vasquez

dumpster, probably, and worn the tread threadbare since. There was no debating the source of that stench, and she felt a ping of irritation and contempt, avoiding the man’s haggard face with the reflexive ease most Haves experience when confronted with a Have Not. Don’t make eye contact, the maxim went, and she wouldn’t, because he might ask for change, or take her attention as an invitation to begin some delusional panegyric. Cripes, but he stank.

The homeless man sat blessedly silent and unobtrusive beside her, hands jammed into his pockets and face buried in the collar of his coat, but she still felt a flood of relief when she saw the bus approaching, and shot to her feet with a haste that bordered on rudeness. She didn’t care — homeless people were, in her own opinion and that of many of her friends, useful only as a very last resort. If one had to stoop to eating the indigent, one was either incompetent or desperately ill — or possessing unaccountable poor taste.

She boarded, paid her fare, and chose a seat halfway down the length of the bus, preparing to settle in with the half-finished book in her purse. Another wave of that stench stopped her before she had even opened the cover. The homeless man had boarded the bus behind her, slotting coins slowly into the farebox, and she firmly glanced away the moment he turned down the aisle, holding her breath as he passed. He took a seat near the back of the bus - probably planned to sleep there until he was kicked out at the end of the circuit - and the driver pulled away into the thoroughfare, leaving her in a steel box with that horrible stink.

After suffering it for five minutes, she glanced cautiously to the left and ahead of her, gauging the reaction of the other passengers — really, it smelled so bad she thought someone else must have noticed it, but none of the other commuters seemed bothered. The old woman sitting across the aisle from her had glanced toward the back of the bus once with an expression of sadness, or maybe pity, but that was all. Humans had weaker senses as a rule, but she didn’t know how they could miss it — that horrible, pervasive stench of spoiled rotten vegetables.

And... something else, she thought. The overlaying smell of alcohol made it hard to pick out, but there was something beneath it, too — a sort of musky, polecat odor that made her think of roadkill. She curled her lip at the thought, then frowned at a tickling familiarity the smell tried to bring her. It was a vague thing, and she couldn’t quite seem to get it, fleeing further away the harder she tried to focus on it. Shaking her head like a dog trying to clear its ears of water, she determinedly opened her book and tried to read.

She managed twenty minutes of the hour-long drive across town before she finally gave into the urge to actually turn around in her seat and look at the man, whose presence she didn’t seem able to completely shut out. She had been prepared to look away immediately if she thought he might catch her, but she found that she needn’t have worried: the homeless man did indeed appear to have fallen asleep, his forehead pressed to the grimy bus window, mouth a little ajar, breathing slow and even. He was older, long, bone white hair shot through with strands of steel gray, but just looking at his weather-beaten face, she couldn’t have said if he was fifty or seventy. She got the sense that he might have been remarkably handsome, once — in the strong cleft of his chin, the shape of his jaw, the evenly spaced eyes — but she couldn’t bring herself to find any beauty in the dirty ruin of a thing he was now. She felt another surge of contempt for him, stronger this time.

He had stuffed one hand into his coat as if to hold in the warmth, and his other hand rested lax on his lap, tough, pitted fingers curled between the V of his bowed knees. He looked dead to the world, and she thought the odds that he would get off before her stop extremely slim. She thought of mentioning the man to the driver and asking to have him removed, but she had seen him pay his fare, and no one else seemed the least bit bothered by him, or even aware of him.

She tried to read again, actually angry now, but after little more than a page or so found her mind wandering, snagging again and again on that lingering sense of familiarity that was trying to become memory somewhere in the back of her mind. It niggled at her, like something important that she knew she had forgotten. She smoothed her hair again and she didn’t see the single blood-shot disc of an iris gleaming at her from under coal gray eyelashes.

As the bus trundled through the sun-bleached glitz of Miracle Mile, the elusive memory began to infuriate her even more than the smell, and she was glaring intently out the window when the bus passed Sunrise Deli, and the muscles in her lower belly tightened into a stone.

All at once, it recurred to her: she remembered this smell from the first time she saw the graffiti, on the alley wall of that very deli. She had had to pass through the alley to get to the subway station from the Italian restaurant across the street, where she had stayed late with a date she had ultimately decided she could do better than. She had noted the graffiti then, passed it by, and then had given herself quite a scare along the following blocks toward the subway. It had been that smell — not the booze, but the rotten stink, and that underlying musky odor that tickled something in her lizard brain. She had fancied