Coat
2005-03-04 - 7:39 p.m.

He pulls on the long, black coat like a suit of armor. It drapes like a robe from his shoulders to his ankles. He is a priest without a god.

He walks outside and down the empty street. There's no one to see him. A couple of blocks, and he ducks into a bar, its windows spangled with frost and grit. Inside, it is warm. He sits and orders a whiskey, and drinks it slowly. The patrons stare at the figure, eldritch and haunting in the dim light of the bar. He lowers the brim of his hat, and his observers flinch and turn away at the movement. Some things, they realize, are not meant to be observed. He finishes his whiskey and stands to leave. No one stands in his way.

On the horizon, the sun is sighing its dying rays across the great, faceless city. Its breath strikes his body, illuminating his face for the first time. As the shards of light cut across his countenance, it changes. Tiny cracks begin to appear, starting at the puckers of his eyes, and spreading out across his face like tiny highways to the end of the world. His eyes dry and wither, his lips crack and turn to dust. His body begins the irreversible process of disintegration. For a moment, the coat seems to stand under its own power, saluting a commander only it can see, and then it collapses to the ground, its folds and fibers becoming mountains and valleys. His weathered hat, grey and threadbare, tops the peak at a testament to the head which it once covered. Finally, it is at rest.

Laws of nature fall mute, and, if there had been witnesses, they would not have known what to say. They would have seen only that a man who was once flesh and blood had been reduced to dirt and dust before their eyes. They would have no way of knowing that this is all he ever really was to begin with.