An early morning scene

Shredded clothes hang on the flesh of a man half painted silver. An old municipal bin, before they had wheels, up-turned. He’s talking to himself and scratching, scratching through the stinking sweaty garbage, scratching through his itching silver skin. A jerky metallic hand lands on a half-loaf. It picks at it, picks at it, eats it, stuffs it in an old Jet packet then picks at itching skin. The hand is stiff, it moves on its own. Like the hand of a break dance kid. Like someone put money in his hat.

I’m watching through the window like a spy- ducking when he turns in case he sees me. But he doesn’t see me. The same way he doesn’t see that what he is holding is an oven pizza that went mouldy before ever making it to the oven. He drops it, stands on it with one foot then both. After scrubbing what might be a toothbrush through his pepper-corn hair he goes back to the pizza, tears away the plastic and stuffs some of the unbaked dough into his mouth.

Terrance the caretaker, dressed in standard blue workers overall, marches into frame shouting. He shouts at the silver scavenger in a language I don’t understand. He seems not to either. Or he doesn’t hear, or care. He has taken possession of something from the scattered pile which he sticks into the Jet packet being thrust at him by Terrence. Terrence who is gesticulating angrily- he will be left to pick up the left over left-overs strewn across the driveway.

There is no trace of the scene by the time the police arrive.