CHAPTER 30
Harmon pocketed a tangerine and ambled out of Harold’s cramped apartment. The early morning chill prompted the man to sheath his hands in his jacket pockets whereupon he felt paper and paused beside a group of vagrants along the road to the old breaker. With furrowed brow and pursed lips, he withdrew a small, immaculate piece of paper – expensive and exceptionally durable – a business card he’d forgotten. Methodically, the man turned the rectangle, reading the name there inscribed in the ascending, amber light.
Lynder B. Partridge.
He slid the card back into his pocket and moved towards the vagrants, who all starred intently at the wayfarer. He greeted them warmly.
“Hows it going?”
The eldest amongst them, a man some fifty years of age, bearded, gaunt and filthy, screwed up his face into a scowl of disgust.
“Going just like it looks.”
Harmon remembered the tangerine he had brought along and removed it from his pocket, extending it towards the man.
“You folk look hungry.”
The anger and disgust in the old man’s face melted into a visage of confusion.
“What is it?”
“Its a tangerine.”
Hesitantly, the bearded itinerant took the fruit and nodded graciously.
“That’s very kind of ya.”
One of the younger nomads smiled and gestured towards the small ocherous sphere held in Harmon’s left hand.
“Wouldn’t happen to have more than one a those wouldya?”
“Fraid not.”
Harmon continued along the road to the coal breaker, as a flock of crows spun off the branches of a nearby tree like a living cloak of itinerant night.
A woman stood upon the edge of the precipice which let down into the gulf—from town to processing plant—adorned in a thin-worn longsleeved sweater, hair-tie and mud-stained fishing boots. A large ant’s nest lay beside her, some five feet off, covered in the onyx-sheen of busy carapaces.
“Isn’t it beautiful,” she inquired, gesturing towards the decrepit facility beyond the ridge, which hung between the effulgent sun and the colorless shade of earth, as if suspended within the bleeding outer horizon of some other-world.
A ruined castle from a fantastical realm.
“I don’t find anything beautiful in decay.”
“Plants ain’t decaying.”
“Plants replace themselves. Breaker can’t.”
“I’m more concerned about the plants than that old ugly hunk of iron. You know there used to be a forest here? Say its only right that they had some payback.”
Harmon gestured to the ant hill beside them.
“Would you say the same for the colony?”
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