Sherman and the Coffee Creamer
It looked like a distended shotgun cartridge lying on its side on the sidewalk. Sherman kicked it with the tip of his shoe and it exploded in a trail of white liquid. The sound it made as it rolled was the soft tick of plastic and not the coined, clean ring of metal. He wanted to spread the coffee creamer out among the divots in the sidewalk’s sharp surface, so the white streak wasn’t as noticeable, but he didn’t, mainly because it was getting difficult for him to control his movements. The alcohol and general exhaustion were taking their toll, as they do after five hours spent drinking at a handful of bars until three in the morning. In the dark, the creamer shone like a magical type of blood, fired from each cell to glow and be seen, to tell whoever found it necessary for it to be shed that it was worth more than they could imagine, that it was worth something even in itself, even when it lay streaked on the sidewalk and couldn’t support life.
A woman in a white raincoat with enormous, useless buttons appeared. She stopped mid-step on a flight of cement stairs that led from an underground apartment just off the sidewalk. She held onto the black, iron railing and watched Sherman, her mouth gaping like she tasted death and needed to spit it out, but gagged on it instead. Sherman could only look like a threat if he was completely sober and he tried, and even then it was laughable. He felt ashamed so he tried to pull his shirt collar over his face, trying to hide, but then realized that he was only wearing a t-shirt and that the woman probably thought that he was getting undressed in front of her. He wasn’t surprised when, with his shirt half over his head, he heard the woman scream and felt her thin elbow dig into his back, pushing him into the street.
