Sunny Side Up

“I don’t carry cash,” Marc lied. “I’m sorry.”
That was a lie, too.
The beggar’s face drooped, which wasn’t unlike the tied-off plastic bag that, too, drooped from his hand, plastered with a yellow smiley that was encircled in the words, "Have a Nice Day" set against a white, crinkled background. The ghetto grocery sack was cumbered by what must’ve been a clump of quarters and a few crumpled singles that the bum had managed to squeeze out of some gullible saps.
But not Marc Riley. No — Marc Riley was anything but a sap.
“You sure you don’t need any?”
Marc had already clocked out of the impromptu social exchange when the homeless man’s words snagged him by the shirt collar, which, at that time, was already saturated in its fourth layer of sweat that day — one from the stroll into the office, one to and one from lunch, and one on the way out. And now that he was standing still, under the unforgiving Miami sun, and wedged between two mountains of Miami skyscrapers, the Florida heat was cooking him like an Easy Bake oven, and some pity party hosted by a dimwitted street person wasn’t going to keep him from the cool AC of his BMW.
“Excuse me?” Marc asked, pissed that he even had to do so, giving the man half a glance over his sweaty cold shoulder, which was already facing the employee parking garage — the shaded employee parking garage.
“You sure you don’t need any?”
“Any…what?” Marc asked with a snip.
“Change.”
Marc’s jaw settled into place before he took two strides toward the bum. The homeless man was silent, and despite the hustle-bustle of the city life — the beeping of cement trucks, and the honking of car horns — there was an intimacy between the two of them, which wasn’t a moment Marc wanted, but merely one he got.
“And why would I need that?” Marc asked. His gaze was sharp as a razor, but perhaps not as piercing as the homeless man’s, who looked up at Marc from the sidewalk and grinned. For a moment, Marc thought he might’ve recognized the man, but Marc Riley wasn’t the kind to hang around bums.
“You just looked like a man that needed some change. Or am I mistaken?”
They were close, now — perhaps too close for Marc’s liking — with noses but inches apart, dripping sweat onto the sidewalk. It seemed to evaporate almost instantaneously, disappearing from a dark grey blotch in a matter of seconds, and the heat was quickly rising to Marc’s head. And yet, despite the oily slick accumulating on the bum’s face, he didn’t smell like the typical street dwellers of the city. Even so, this was the closest Marc Riley had ever been to a homeless bum before, and he was only so to prove a point.
“Yeah, you’re mistaken. I’ve got plenty of change,” Marc said, glancing down to the plastic bag, “and it looks like so do you. So, why don’t you go take your four dollars and go and buy yourself and some of your street people friends a warm beer before I kick your ass right here on the street — huh? It’s not like anyone would care.”
The homeless man’s smile faded, but only for a moment, before he lifted the bag and grimaced once again, matching the cheeky face on the wrinkled plastic.
“It just looked like you could use a smile.”
The yellow smiley stared back at Marc with wide, black eyes. In the quite-literal heat of the moment, Marc was tempted to say something, perhaps even yell it, but he couldn’t compete with the sounds of the city and the beeping of cement trucks. So, instead of saying anything, he frustratedly snagged the bag from the bum’s hand and marched off into the shade of the garage, not taking a second glance at the homeless man who — had Marc bothered to turn back around — was still staring him down.
Marc quickly reached his shaded BMW — which was a dark shade of Carbon Black, as they called it, both slick and hot to the touch at this point — and flung himself inside, his stained button-up clinging to his back as he leaned into the crisp AC set to maximum speed and breathed in a refreshing sigh of ice-cold air with a hint of Black Ice. After a moment of cooling down, he laid back and lifted the plastic bag before the steering wheel. He went to open it but stopped himself midway.
“It’s probably got AIDS in it,” he murmured to himself with a smirk and a wag of his head. Or maybe it was chock-full of those Bible tracts — the little pamphlets that told you to ‘repent and trust in the Lord’ or some corny crap like that. Hell, sometimes they made ‘em look like dollar bills just to entice shmucks that wanted a freebie handout. And Marc Riley was anything but a shmuck.
Before he had time to decide whether or not to chuck the bag out the window, it was already too late — whatever kind of gas it was that was seeping from within it had managed to fill up the BMW, and within mere moments, Marc Riley was out like a light.
And if he had bothered to check the rearview, he would’ve seen a familiar face staring back at him.
It was six ‘o clock in the morning when Marc Riley came to, and all he could perceive was the smell of scrambled eggs and the wetness of the morning dew on his face. It was only but a second after smelling the eggs and feeling the dew that his other senses kicked in, and very quickly, Marc Riley realized the situation he was in — that he was stuck.
The first thing he noticed was the starlit sky, with nothing unusual or remarkable about it, other than the fact that its orientation indicated that he was on the ground, facing upward, and lying on his back. And when he tried to move from that position, he realized that he couldn’t. Hence, he was stuck. And it was this realization that sent him into a fit of panic — screaming and hollering, but even then, at six in the morning in God-knows-where downtown Miami, his voice was barely loud enough to cross the street. With all his might, he attempted to lift himself from the substance that coated his backside and held him down to the ground like glue, but each and every time he tried, it sucked him back into itself like a vat of quicksand, heavy and thick and hot. So very hot.
“H-help! Help!” he screamed, his voice choked beneath the gray, viscous substance that slowly swallowed him up. After a grueling series of attempts to free himself, all he managed to do was wiggle his pinky finger free, which, along with his bare chest, face, stomach, and the tops of his thighs and toes, felt the coolness of the morning breeze and raised goosebumps that stuck out of his skin like a plucked chicken. He was submerged, split exactly halfway down the middle of his body, and there was nothing he could do about it.
It was the then joyous sound of shuffling shoes that suddenly interrupted his panic, and though he couldn’t lift his head but a half inch, he knew someone was approaching from, in his perspective, anyway, above.
"Oh, thank God, please help-"
Marc Riley’s voice cut off swiftly as the approaching shuffling shoes halted in their tracks, and the homeless bum, that very same man from before, but now holding a plate of scrambled eggs and a plastic fork, knelt down before Marc’s immobile body, sticking halfway out of the ground.
“Do you really think anyone’s coming to help you, Marc?” the man asked. Had Marc been able to scratch his head, he surely would’ve at this point. He stumbled over his words before, of all the questions to be asked, a quite mild one left his chapped and trembling lips.
“H-how do you know my name?”
The bum smiled, as if genuinely surprised he had asked that one.
“I know a lot more about you than your name, Marc. Do you really think it was a coincidence that I approached you yesterday?”
Marc thought about it before asking his second, more obvious question, “Wait — did you do this to me?”
The bum seemed to have expected that one.
“You did this to yourself, Marc.”
“Is this about the money?” Marc snapped, changing the subject, his face twitching around while he tried to make eye contact with the stranger. “I-I’m sorry. Look, I had a bad day yesterday a-and I’ll give you whatever you want and — just, please-”
“Are you truly sorry?” the beggar asked.
“Y-yes. Yes.”
The bum sighed.
“I’d like to believe you, Marc. Really, I would. But I offered you change yesterday, and you turned me down. And I found forty dollars, in cash, mind you, in your wallet. So not only did you not help me, but you lied to me, Marc. And if there was ever a time to lie and, say, fake an apology…fake your change of heart…it’d be right now. Wouldn’t it?”
Marc Riley, or at least half of Marc Riley, winced.
"Just…help me, dammit! Or I swear to God-"
“You’ll do what, exactly?” the bum asked, calmly shoveling a fork-load of eggs into his mouth. “What was it that you called me yesterday? Street person?” the bum chuckled down the eggs as he stood and began pacing around Marc’s motionless body, briefly snagging a second of eye contact, “Well, look who’s laughin’ now, you son of a bitch.”
Marc gritted his teeth and attempted to push himself through the substance at the man, who smiled down at him with a narrowed focus. After an exhausting moment, he caught his breath and huffed loudly, prompting the homeless man to continue his spiel.
“Good luck getting outta there,” the beggar said with a cheeky grin, “that’s cement concrete. You think you have any leverage in cement?” The bum chuckled and tsked and then lifted his arm to reveal a small, shiny watch that flickered in the fading moonlight. The time was now six fifteen. He lifted his head to face the sky — which was a dark, cool blue with a faded orange seeping in from the horizon. “You’ve got about…eh, give or take, ten or so hours ‘til that stuff dries. Now while this might be a rather unusual punishment, surely I’m not cruel. See, there is a way out of this, Marc. That being, a good Samaritan helps you.”
Marc’s heart sunk in his chest, which was already sunken itself. He gasped, nearly suffocating on his own spit.
“And if they don’t?” he asked. The bum knelt down once again and forced another gulp of scrambled eggs into his mouth.
"And if they don’t, well-" the bum’s voice trailed off as he thought about his answer. A bus, somewhere not far off, honked its horn, and Marc began to beg for help. No one heard him. “You’ve lived in Miami for some time now?” the bum asked. Marc attempted to nod but couldn’t.
"Y-yes. Listen-"
“You’ve gotta admit,” the beggar interrupted, “it gets pretty hot out here, doesn’t it?”
Marc didn’t answer. He was too busy staring up at the sky, which was swelling with a deep, rich, orange-yellow, saturating the once misty blue and white.
“Sometimes it gets so hot that I’ve heard folks say you can fry an egg on the sidewalk,” the bum chuckled, again shoveling a bite into his mouth. He set the plate down and, from it, pinched a tiny white shell — that of an egg. He made sure Marc could see it, and then cracked it against the pavement, the yellow yolk oozing out and seeping into the concrete. “You know how hot it’s gotta be to fry an egg, Marc? One hundred and sixty degrees. That’s hot — and it only takes a hundred ‘n four to cause heat stroke.” He looked down at Marc intently and watched as the light from the rising sun began reflecting off of the shiny, yellow yolk beside him. “What I’m saying, Marc, is that you’re about to be quite the scrambled egg. Better yet, sunny side up,” he said with a flash of his pearly whites. “Now, I’m hoping that your good Samaritan finds you soon because, let’s face it, right now it’s not so hot. But come two, three ‘o clock-"
“Why’re you doing this to me?” Marc begged of him, a final plea of desperation. “Really, why?”
The homeless man’s smile snapped from his face, and he reached into his pocket and retrieved a small, folded-up piece of paper — a photograph of some kinda pamphlet. He began to read it aloud with a cold, probing voice as Marc remained what was his captive audience.
“In loving memory of our dearest Bethany White — mother, wife, daughter, friend. Gone too soon, but never forgotten,” he stopped, turning to face Marc with that smile once again flaring up, “I take it you’ve already forgotten, haven’t you, Marc?”
“Forgotten what?”
The bum shook his head with a series of clicks, lowering the unraveled paper to show the stuck man the image. It was that of a young woman — no older than thirty-five. She had soft eyes and a wide smile, not that it mattered anymore.
“Who is she?” Marc asked.
“Oh, you probably wouldn’t recognize her. But rest assured, Marc, she would’ve definitely recognized you.”
“Who is she?” Marc snapped firmly. Had his hands been free, he would’ve been balling his fingers into a fist by now, maybe even planting them in the bum’s face. But because he couldn’t do that, all he could do was lie on his back and listen.
“Do you recall where you were the night of August eighth? It was a Monday, if memory serves.”
Marc thought briefly. “If it was a Monday night, I was probably at home with my wife.”
“Well, no — before that.”
“I-I must’ve been at the office.”
“Were you, now?” the bum hemmed and hawed, “And what about…after you left the office?”
"I drove ho-" Marc quickly stopped himself in a hot sweat, which wasn’t difficult given his current predicament. His face drooped as his memory began to recall the Monday night of August the eighth, which, as he rested rather uncomfortably assured, was a night he had done a fairly good job at forgetting. He spastically attempted to face the bum, but after again remembering that he couldn’t, he wheezed a heavy breath and licked his lips.
“Wait…this is about that?”
“About what?”
"Look, I didn’t do anything. I swear to God-"
“I never said you did,” the bum said, cutting him off sharply. “What did you do?”
“I just drove by.”
“Drove by what? Whom?”
"It was raining. But there was someone out in the street. A woman-" Marc stopped himself again. He would’ve swallowed his own tongue if he could. “Wait — is that her?” he asked, attempting to glance at the photograph. And then a far more sickening question popped into his head. “Was she your wife?”
“Would that make any difference? She was someone’s wife.”
“Yeah, but was she yours?” he gasped, "I-I’m so sorry if she was-"
“She wasn’t,” the bum said coldly, rising to his feet.
“T-then, who was she?” For a moment, Marc’s fear turned to confusion, before returning to fear once again.
“Would it surprise you if I said — to you and me, at least — that she was no one special?”
"Y-" Marc nearly droned out his answer but decided to ask another question instead. “She’s…nobody?”
“Well, she was somebody to someone. And that makes what you did an awfully bad thing.”
“But I didn’t even do anything. You said it yourself.”
“And that’s exactly the point, Marc,” the bum said. “You didn’t do anything. You watched a woman take her final breaths, sprawled out on the street like some kinda crippled animal, and you just kept driving.”
Marc’s face froze solid, which wasn’t unlike the rest of him by this point — frozen, yet at the same time, terribly and bitterly hot.
“It wasn’t my business,” he admitted.
“Oh,” the bum nodded, pitying the poor man, “what exactly, then, is your business, Marc? Do tell me.”
Marc swallowed, despite how constricting it was, “I’m an insurance agent.”
“Oh,” the bum said, more condescendingly than before, “insurance. I hope the irony there isn’t lost on you, Marc.”
It wasn’t.
“Look, just,” Marc said calmly, trying to slow his pounding heart, “just listen, okay?”
“No, you stupid bastard!" the beggar snapped. He took in a sharp breath and cleared his throat. "This is your turn to listen, now. If I didn’t want you to listen, I would’ve put you in deeper — and your eardrums would’ve clogged with cement. So shut up, Marc. Or I’ll have to fill up your mouth, too.”
Marc, as he was told, shut up.
“Y’know Marc, there’re a lot of folks that’ve said that people like you oughta burn — people who love watching train wrecks but hate doing anything to stop ‘em.” The bum paced to a halt before pivoting in the opposite direction, carefully stepping over the runny egg yolk. “And I used to be one of those folks — waiting for the day when people like you would burn. But then, one day, I thought to myself…why wait? A lifetime sure is a hell of a long time to wait, and who knows if hell is even real?” The bum’s face grew sour as he lowered to meet Marc, who physically couldn’t look away. “Oh, but I know that hell is real, Marc. When you’ve seen the things I’ve seen, you know.”
The seventh hour of the morning was approaching, and it seemed that even the sun was a voyeur to Marc Riley’s peculiar punishment as it peeked over the high-rise buildings that scraped the clouds. And it was at that point that the bum had found himself seated next to the quickly-drying pool of cement, and the egg yolk that floated around on top of it.
“Y’know Marc, I used to be so…desperate for purpose that I’d wander the streets and collect cigarette butts — if you could believe it.” Marc looked up at the man with an ironic stare, but the bum’s sharp, malicious gaze quickly wiped it from his face. The homeless man continued, “And then one day, while I was scavenging to get a high from other people’s garbage, I found something that changed my life — well, three things, actually: a positive pregnancy test, and a metal coat hanger. The third was a woman, bleeding out on the sidewalk — one of those ‘street people’, as I believe you called them. Apparently, she was a local whore — sold her body out just to eat. And the last thing she wanted — a look that was bad for business — was a baby bump. She tried to stop it herself, in fact, and in the process caused something of a hemorrhage,” he said, regrettably. “But do you know the worst part about all of it? Not one person stopped to help her,” he swallowed. “And she died. And all those people will burn. Just like you.”
And burn, he did. Not even an hour later, at half past seven, did the sun begin fully shining through the clouds. And despite it only rearing its fiery head for a few morning moments, the ground around him was already beginning to cook, and the yolk beginning to bubble. And if the concrete was close to simmering before the clock reached eight in the morning, he could only imagine what the sun would do to his skin by the time it was ten.
“H-hey!” Marc cried out. The bum was nowhere in his line of sight, and it had been nearly a half hour since he had spoken a word to him. And while he wasn’t so fond of the man’s presence, he figured some of that signature Marc Riley charm — the kind they taught him in sales training — would persuade the beggar to reconsider his punishment. Maybe.
“What?” the homeless man’s voice rang out, just loud enough to be heard above the city traffic. Marc squinted a tear from his eyes as he attempted to follow the man’s voice, yet the sun’s reflection off the hot asphalt rendered him essentially blind.
“Look,” he said exasperatedly, “I think we got off on the wrong foot. I-I’m not a bad guy, I just-"
“Did a bad thing?” the bum said, filling in the blank.
“Yes. Exactly,” Marc said. He forced a smile, but as the concrete engulfing his body cooked, his skin began to sting, and that smile faded. “I’d like to start over…if you’d let me.”
The bum remained silent.
"Look, just…come over here and we’ll ta-"
“I’m fine right where I am, thank you. It’s shaded. I can’t say the same about over there.”
The sweat pooled inside of Marc’s ear as he gasped for his next breath, “This is cruel, dammit! You’re no better than I am!”
“You, Marc,” the bum snapped, stepping forward into the sun and, for a moment, offering a merciful patch of shade across his face, “put a woman in the ground. I’m simply returning the favor.”
“My wife will notice when I don’t call — I always call her on my lunch break. She’ll call the police and they’ll have your ass, you stupid bastard!” Marc laughed, forcing another smile, cracking his lips.
“And the police will find, if your good Samaritan ever bothers to show up, a hollow Marc Riley-shaped hole in this sidewalk,” the bum said as he tapped his foot against a dry patch of surface concrete. “And if your good Samaritan doesn’t show…they'll find Marc Riley and Marc Riley alone, probably dead from heatstroke, and crispy,” he grinned.
Marc Riley’s quote-unquote good Samaritan, if a word such as good should apply, came — over an hour later — in the form of a curious young man with bleach-blonde hair and gazing green eyes — eyes that were better at snooping than sympathizing. He was late for his morning bus and was no stranger to hopping metal fences and brick walls to get to his stop. And it was when he decided to hop a temporary fence — one of those that bordered the construction site where Marc lay — that a new decision, one he was not anticipating, broke his morning ritual.
It was a decision that he decided quite quickly, as a matter of fact. Because after a few confused seconds of concerned wide-eyed staring at a man halfway stuck in the street, the blonde-haired, green-eyed stranger ducked beneath the fence line and scurried off — unseen to Marc Riley, but not to the beggar.
Marc, whose eyelids burned, and whose vision grew teary, had clamped his eyes shut by the time it was nine. And by ten, when the yolk had begun to sizzle on the sidewalk next to him, he began to scream. And of course, aside from the blonde-haired, green-eyed young man, no one noticed, and no one helped.
He couldn’t help but be reminded of the woman he had driven past, seeing that moment play out over and over again in the blackness that was the back of his eyelids, flushed with the red of sunlight peeking through the thin skin — skin that was turning red itself.
And it was in that redness, that darkness, that moment, that Marc Riley remembered something — no, someone. A face, maybe — through a car window; a windshield speckled in rain-washed red smudges, pulled to the side of the highway in the pouring rain. The driver — the hit-and-run driver. He must’ve driven past him.
It was the bum.
“Hey! Hey!” Marc shouted, eyes still clenched shut, skin tight, and tongue dry. “Who the hell are you? I know you can hear me!”
Those footsteps, the sound of shuffling shoes from before against the craggy gravel just beyond the drying concrete, slowly approached him, as did the invasive smell of fried eggs, which he could not discern from his own, frying flesh.
“What’re you screaming about?” the homeless beggar’s voice asked.
“You,” Marc said, “Y-you’re the son of a bitch that ran her over. Are you even homeless?”
The bum remained quiet.
"This isn’t about me, Marc. This is about you-"
“This is all because of you — you stupid bastard! Of course, this is about you!”
There was a silence between the two of them, and despite Marc feeling quite heated, the heat slowly faded from his face — enough to open his eyes, anyway, and blink out the salty sea of tears that had accumulated. When they finally adjusted to the imposing sunlight, he noticed that the sky had begun to gray, and clouds had begun to form overhead.
And he laughed. And what made it all the better, was that the bum didn’t.
“I’ve got your ass,” Marc chuckled, as the sky darkened. The bum lifted his face to face the sky, and then looked down at Marc.
“Don’t forget, Marc,” the homeless man clicked, “you’re still stuck.”
“And you’ll be stuck in prison until you burn in hell — then I guess we’ll both be stuck, won’t we? Tell me this one, huh — who’s worse? The kind of man that drives by a woman who's been hit, or the kind of man that would run her over?”
The bum lowered to his knee, careful not to kneel in half-baked egg yolk, before he spoke, looking down at Marc.
“What if the woman was worse than both?”
Marc swallowed, despite the concrete constricting him like a globby gray python. There was a flash of light that shot across the sky, and then a crack of thunder. The fence rattled, but Marc was still.
“What’d she do?”
The bum smiled.
“She didn’t do anything.”
Another flash flashed across the clouds that covered the sun — illuminating the shadows of the homeless man’s grinning face — and again, a thunderous boom shook the fence and the nearby buildings, but Marc was still in the ground. He felt the softness of a raindrop cool his red, scorched, dry skin — then another — and another — until the sky erupted in a flurry of refreshing water, cooling the concrete and sending the yolk down a nearby sewage drain. Marc opened his mouth wide and let the pitter-patter of droplets accumulate on his dried-up tongue. He smirked and glanced up at the bum, who was looking to the sky.
“Karma’s a bitch,” Marc said, blinking away the water that pooled over his eyes.
The bum continued to stare up into the clouds, “That it is, Marc. That it is.” He glanced down at Marc as the rainwater dripped from his nose onto Marc’s face. “All this heat really brings out the rain. We had three inches last week. You remember that?”
Marc tried to nod but couldn’t.
“Thank God for the rain,” he spat under his breath, the crisp, wet coolness gliding down his face.
“Oh, I wouldn’t thank Him just yet,” the bum said, looking back up to the blackened sky, then down to Marc, “you’re only an inch and a half out of the ground.”
The realization washed over Marc as the water continued to surge over the concrete. He frantically began pushing himself with all his might, screaming through gnashing teeth as the cement resisted him with every attempted turn of his crisp body. And of course, no one could hear him struggle or scream over the gusts of the storm. The water continued to rise, and Marc Riley continued to blow it from his mouth and nostrils, but he only had so much energy — so much breath. And after only five minutes, the water had risen two and a half inches, past his chin and cheeks and nose, and Marc Riley was underwater, forced to stare up at the droplets that pounded the surface.
And he shook and screamed, and bubbles flew from his mouth and popped when they reached the humid, outside air.
And after two and a half minutes of being an inch under water, Marc Riley stopped screaming.
And the bum, when he saw Marc Riley cease to scream, fled.
“LOCAL MAN FOUND DEAD IN CONCRETE”, the paper read. There was no image, but the morbid title alone said it all.
“A buck twenty,” the salesman said, squinting through the morning sunlight. The man holding the paper reached into his pocket and dropped two dollar bills into his hand. “You wanna round up? It’s for a good cause.”
“Yeah, sure — keep it,” the man said. He folded open the paper to page four and began scanning the page with his gazing green eyes, walking down the city street, waiting for the nine ‘o clock, but six words in, he tripped and caught himself, turning quickly to the man whose foot he must’ve snagged.
“My bad,” the man said, raking his fingers through his bleach-blonde hair and gripping his newspaper.
“All is forgivable,” the bum smiled. “Say,” he grinned, “while I have you…do you happen to have any change to spare?”
Category:Weird
Category:MakRalston