owl swooped low over his head before sailing out over the grass and into the trees across the park, the image of it transforming from black to gray and then into nothingness as it disappeared into the branches. As it got close to morning, he couldn’t sleep any more, and Elijah sat up and put his coat back on. He looked around the cell, now a smaller one in a different corner of the facility. The dirtied green paint on the walls had chips raked off so that the white mortar showed through, grimy but somehow brilliant in their place. Stained, three-slat wood benches ran along the length of them and cut the room in half, and upon them sat three other men. There was a white man in his thirties wearing glasses and a collared shirt talking with a black man in a hospital gown and a younger black man in a track suit. A ripped trash bag that contained the old man’s clothes sat at his feet. Elijah had seen, earlier in the main holding cell from which they had all come, a crazed homeless man reach out from under a bench to snatch at it, and the older man stood up, six-and-a-half feet tall with his gown lapping at his thighs, and bellowed, and the homeless man cried out a wordless sound and retracted further under the bench to press himself against the wall. “If you aren’t going to stay in Atlanta, what are you going to do?” the old man was asking the younger man in the track suit. “I think I want to travel the world a little,” the boy said. “Try to find a place I can be happy. And then I’m going to take some classes at whatever college is around me when I get there.” He was perhaps in his early twenties, and he had been brought in on public intoxication charges. “That’s a good thing, you know,” the old man said, shifting his gown around his knees. “I missed my chance to
travel when I was young. I had to take care of the family, and I never got an education.” “Yeah. And I know I don’t want to work at a hotel all my life.” The boy shook his head as he spoke. “There’s just not a lot of money in it. Atlanta’s a different place than outside The Perimeter. Out there, it’s quiet. I never really think about it when I’m out there, how different it is. And there’s things I like about Atlanta, inside the city, I like how it feels like something’s happening even when it’s not. But I think it’s too much for me, I mean. . .” “That may be true,” the man with the glasses stated, “But keep in mind that you also just made a mistake. I haven’t drank in. . .well, not three months like you, but I don’t drink very often, but tonight, I just. . .I just got carried away.” He too, had been brought in on public intoxication charges. “Don’t let this color your opinion of a place, because it’s not always the case that you go overboard and wind up in jail. Give it some time before you decide it’s not for you.” “I agree,” said the old man as he scratched at his beard. “It’s probably a good idea to stick around and save up a few thousand dollars before you hit the road. But I really think it’s good for a young man to see a little of the world. Don’t you?” He addressed his question to the man with the glasses. “Oh, yeah, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying ‘don’t travel.’ I’m just saying that you need to be able to make a reasonable judgment of a place, and you cannot do that when you’ve hit bad luck.” “I can see what you’re saying,” said the boy. “I like that idea. I have to practice moderation. And that just gets me closer to God anyway.” He looked up briefly before continuing. “I have some money right now, about three hundred dollars in the bank. I think I’m gonna go up and see my cousin in Charlotte, just for a weekend.” “Yeah, but whenever you travel, you always end up
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