Sanctuary
by Elizabeth Brownrigg
It’s louder in winter up under the bridge: the slap, slap, slap of tires; the grind and boom of diesel engines. She sits at the very top of the long concrete slope that falls down to the road, on a little shelf between where the slope ends and the roadway above her head begins. It’s getting cold. She’s got a pile of jackets that she’s gathered around her like a nest. Pete stirs next to her. You can’t even see him, he’s got so much stuff piled on top of him.
His ratty old head pokes out. “Looks like I made it to another day.” He sits up and dislodges the bottle that bounces down the concrete and onto the road where it gets kicked around by the cars and broken. A waft of Pete-stink comes out of the disturbed blankets.
“You need a bath,” she says.
“Not ‘til spring, darlin’. Dirt keeps you warmer.” He fiddles with something under the blankets. Then he covers his head and the whole pile wriggles like a restless animal. Pete is a modest man. He emerges fully clothed.
“You going down to the corner in this weather?”
“Yep. Gotta get to work.” He leans over to pick up his pail and his sign. Disabled vet. Please help. “You coming?”
“Too cold.”
“You gonna be hungry by tonight.”
“You ain’t bringin’ me nothing?”
“I ain’t the man of the house.” He pulls on a yellow plastic poncho.
Pete leans low as he walks under the bridge and down the side, out of sight. She can hear him peeing. He comes back into view by the road and walks through the weeds toward the traffic light in the distance.
She’s hungry already. She considers her options. Stay. Panhandle at the next light down the road from Pete. Go to the mission where they’ll tell her about Jesus. It’s a free lunch, unless you count praying as a price, which she does.
The rain picks up. Mission it is.
She makes her way through the streets of hard times, boarded up store windows, a blind old man sitting on the pavement next to his crutches. He looks worse off than her.
The mission is in a former clothing store with plate glass windows. A wooden sign out front says, “Sanctuary.”
She goes in. It’s barely warmer in here than it is outside. It smells familiar. Poor people carry a cloud with them wherever they go, the scent of lost days, the odor of frustration.
She goes to stand in the food line.
“Wait a minute.” A big woman with curly blonde hair touches her on the arm. She jumps. She don’t like to be touched.
“Come on over here,” the woman says. Her nametag reads “Shirley.”
She follows Shirley to a table where other people are sitting and writing.
“Before you eat, you have to write down what you’re grateful for.” Shirley sets a piece of notebook paper and a pencil on the table.
Deb pulls out the metal chair and sits down. She writes, “I’m grateful for the love of Jesus,” and hands the paper to Shirley.
Shirley reads it and pulls out a loose leaf notebook from the shelf next to the table.
“Name?”
“Deb.”
“Last name?”
“That ain’t none of your business.”
Shirley picks up a marker and writes DEB on the spine. She clips Deb’s paper into the notebook.
“Okay. Get in line.”
Deb takes her food to the row of long tables in the middle of the empty room. Conversations echo all around her. She jumps when she thinks she hears a familiar deep voice, turns around, and sees it’s not him.
She settles in to eat. Kale. Mac and cheese. Some kind of stew. Hot glop.
A man with a new haircut sits near her. He’s looking around, not hungry like the rest of them. Clean clothes. You can tell if someone’s washed himself in a gas station bathroom or if he’s had a real shower.
She peeks at him from the corner of her eye. Pretty soon, he wipes his mouth with the cheap napkin, pulls out his wallet, and leaves a bill under his mostly full plate.
Without glancing at her, he gets up and leaves the table. She waits until his back is turned and sidles over to slip the money into her pocket. Twenty dollars? Hell of a tip for serving yourself.
On her way back to the bridge, she sees Pete at his corner. He’s walking up to cars in his bright yellow poncho, hunched over in the rain. He’ll quit when he’s got enough for a hamburger sandwich and a fifth of whiskey. He has the most regular habits of any man she’s ever met. He gives her a little wave as she walks by.
She climbs up under the bridge, disturbing the pigeons that flap out from under the struts. They fly back in to roost when she gets settled.
Pete comes along with a McDonald’s sack and the whiskey.
“Evenin’, darlin’.”
He screws off the bottle top and hands it to her for the first sip. She wonders where he got his nice manners.
“How was your day, Pete?”
“Wet.”
She hands the bottle back to him, and he takes one long, slow drink, and then another. He closes his eyes. “They feed you down at the mission?”
“Yeah, and I found twenty dollars.”
“Found it, huh?”
“I had to tell them I was grateful for the love of Jesus, but they didn’t preach or make us pray or nothin.”
“That is a blessing in itself.”
“You oughta come with me tomorrow.”
“Nah. I got my gig.”
Next day, the rain has let up some. Pete goes off to work and she heads down to the mission. That Shirley is still there. There’s something about her that Deb doesn’t care for. Shirley hands her a sheet of notebook paper and a pencil. Deb writes, “I’m grateful for the love of Jesus,” and gives it back to her.
“You said that yesterday. You gotta write something different. Come back tomorrow.”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me. You never said nothing about different.”
Shirley’s already sliding Deb’s notebook back onto the shelf. All’s she can see is the back of Shirley’s fat neck. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”
“Come back tomorrow.” Shirley doesn’t even look at her.
Deb steams out the door and onto the street, muttering. “I’ll show you different. How about a different shape to your big ugly nose?”
That night, Pete takes one look at Deb and says,“Uh-oh.”
He hands her the bottle. She takes a long drink.
“Bad day, darlin’?”
“They want different.”
“Different how?”
“Evidently the love of Jesus ain’t enough anymore.”
“I’ll be damned. That used to be all you needed. They throw out eternal salvation too?”
“I ain’t never going back there.”
She’s restless all night, thinking up ways to get back at Shirley. Pull her yellow hair. Punch her eyes out. Throw a plate of mac and cheese in her face. In her dreams, Deb screams at Shirley and Shirley gets bigger and bigger until she pops like a balloon and turns into a thousand little Shirleys all running around with notebooks saying “I want different I want different I want different.”
Morning light comes under the bridge. She glares at invisible Pete, snoring under his bundle of blankets. He’s smart not to go to the mission. They always come up with a new way to humiliate you. On the street, the weather can be rough, but all you have to do is hold your sign and walk up and down the row of cars. People say yes or no. You don’t have to do what nobody tells you. If somebody tells you to get a job, you tell them where to go.
That’s what she’s gonna do from now on. She gathers up her money bucket and her sign, and steps around Pete.
She gets down to her corner in time for rush hour. If she walks up beside the cars, she can get a good look at the drivers through the side windows. She’s not one to tap on the glass with a long, sad story about how her car broke down and all’s she needs is bus money and by the way baby don’t have no shoes. She got her fill of begging when she was married.
She’s worked out her own style. She makes eye contact but she doesn’t stare. She looks sad but not crazy. Being a woman helps. Everybody wonders what a woman’s story is, why she’s out there, if she has children. They just figure men are bums.
She gets a pretty good haul of bills and change. Enough to last a few days if she’s careful. The mission isn’t really on the way to the bridge, but she’ll walk by there anyway and give them the finger. Show Shirley she don’t need nothing from her. Then she has a better idea.
Deb goes inside. Shirley’s standing next to the table where people are writing. One by one, they give their papers to her. She reads what they wrote, takes out a notebook with each person’s name on it, and leafs through the pages. She nods, and the lucky winner gets to eat.
Shirley hands her paper and a pencil and acts like she doesn’t even remember her. Deb’ll fix that. She writes, “I’m grateful I’m not a big blonde bitch.”
Shirley reads what she wrote, and says, “Name?”
She pulls out Deb’s notebook that only has the one little page about Jesus and pops the new page in. She nods. Deb is left sitting there like a fool. Well, she’d be a fool for sure if she turned down a free meal.
“You wrote that and they still fed you?” It’s evening and she’s up under the bridge with Pete.
“Didn’t bat an eye. It was like I told her she was gorgeous.”
Pete shakes his head. “That is one weird cafeteria.”
“I bet I could say anything, long as I stick ‘I’m grateful’ in front of it.” Deb ponders.
“How about ‘I’m grateful I don’t have Shirley’s butt, ‘cause then it would be so big it would drag on the ground.’”
“That’s a good one. How about ‘I’m grateful I don’t have Shirley’s legs, ‘cause dogs think they’re tree trunks and pee on them.’”
“Ha! How about ‘I’m grateful I can go outside. They don’t let Shirley out because she scares the little babies and makes them cry.’”
“Or this one—‘I’m grateful I ain’t Shirley’s husband ‘cause he keeps telling her to put her clothes back on.’”
“Whoo. You’re mean!” Deb laughs.
Pete’s quiet for a bit. Then he chuckles to himself.
“What’s so funny? Tell.”
He clears his throat. “I’m grateful I don’t look like Shirley/Her hair is all whirly and swirly./Just like her face,/it’s a plumb disgrace/and it makes me want to hurly.”
Pete laughs helplessly and soundlessly.
“That’s stupid.”
"It’s a limerick.”
“It’s still stupid.”
“You gonna remember all these? Maybe you should write them down.”
“I’ll remember them. I’m trying to forget the limer-whatever.”
“There’s more where that one came from. You’re gonna eat lunch for at least a month.”
Even homelessness has a routine. In the mornings, Pete says, “Looks like I made it to another day,” and heads down to his corner. Deb straightens up their little nest, which doesn’t take long. They’re not the ones with the shopping carts; they both like to travel light.
There’s a Mobil station where she can use the washroom to clean herself up. She avoids her own eyes in the mirror.
She might go to her corner. She might swing by the Presbyterian church where they’re handing out clothes. She’s picking up a few more jackets now that the weather’s getting colder.
They follow her, the ones she left behind. The husband who was so nice until he showed her the back of his hand again and again. She stayed with him too long, and now she can’t erase the sound of his voice, or her own rage at herself for what she should have said and done but didn’t for the sake of the kids. Then she took the kids and found a place. She got a job at a Walmart; it was a fresh start. She was doing good until the supervisor got up in her face about some lie a customer told and she was out of there, glad to be free. Then the kids kept screaming and pulling on her and wanting to go back to daddy until she couldn’t take it no more and called social services to come get them and walked out the door. She found a camp near the waste treatment plant where other wanderers had pitched tents. It was a real friendly place. Then Little Floyd took an interest in her, and his woman didn’t care for that and came after Deb with a broken bottle.
She answers back to their voices, “You go to hell.” The way people look at her lets her know she’s saying this out loud. “Stop it. Stop it,” she whispers.
She visits the library downtown. She holds a book in her lap so’s they won’t kick her out for loitering.
When you don’t have nothing, there’s not all that much to do. The mission opens for lunch at 11:30. She leaves the library at 11:00 and walks the few blocks slowly. People like herself come out from the alleys, a sad tide drifting to the sanctuary.
They shuffle in the door. The new ones head straight for the lunch line until Shirley stops them and points them to the long table. The top of the table is marked up where so many people have pressed their pencils into the paper. Deb can see edges of letters and bits of words.
There’s an old man with bright blue eyes that shine out from the tanned filth of his cheeks. He looks into space for a long time. Shirley gives you fifteen minutes. If you ain’t writing by then, it’s up and out with you. Some days the old man doesn’t write nothing until Shirley taps him on the shoulder to tell him his time’s up. Then he puts his face close to his paper and presses the pencil hard. He fills up the whole page. Deb leans over to see what he’s written. Shirley stops her. “No cheating.”
“Bitch,” Deb mutters. She puts down,“I’m grateful I don’t look like Shirley cause when she was born her momma died of fright.”
Not everybody at the table seems to belong there. Some don’t even eat lunch. A woman in her thirties comes in every day right at 11:30, writes one sentence, hands the page to Shirley, and leaves. The guy who left the twenty has come back. He don’t sit near Deb, though, and somebody else always gets to the tip before her.
It’s another cold morning under the bridge. Deb wakes up and watches the pigeons fluttering around above her. There’s one she calls Stormy and another one she calls Rumpus. They’re both troublemakers. She likes them.
The traffic noise picks up. Pete should get moving so he don’t miss rush hour. She nudges him. His hand is resting on his blankets –she pulls at it. The fingers seem a little stiff.
She shakes him. “Wakey upey, sleepyhead.” She shakes him harder and harder, then rocks him back and forth. His blanket falls away. His knees and arms stay bent. He falls over on his side like a dead dog. “That ain’t funny.”
His face is white. She touches his cold lips. He’s not breathing. “Oh, Pete. Don’t do this.”
She covers him back up. The noise under the bridge echoes and swirls around her. The traffic roars by below her. The pigeons flap and coo above her. She feels as though she’s dropping down a long tunnel of noise, into the bottom of a well where no one can hear her. She strokes Pete’s still hand for a long time.
She stands up to collect her things: her blankets, her bucket, her sign. With her arms full, she picks her way down the bank to the road. She walks through the streets, weighed down by her burden. Her arms are starting to ache. She drops the whole mess right there on the sidewalk and keeps going.
She walks all morning, around and around in a big circle that goes by the Mobil station, the library, the Presbyterian church. She doesn’t stop at any of them. Toward noon, she goes into the mission.
She slumps in a chair and stares at the writing table. “Leave me be,” Deb whispers. “All of you. Leave me be.” Their voices. The children. The husband. The boss. Even Pete. Maybe he woke up and came here to find her. She looks around.
Voices bounce against the wooden floors and fade against the high ceiling. Little kids dangle and dance from their mothers’ hands as they wait in the food line. Two teenage boys lean over their plates. They eat fast and desperate. The sun shines through the dirty plate glass windows. An old man holds the door open for a woman with two screaming children and bows deeply. The big women working the steam tables nudge each other over some joke and throw their heads back and laugh. White uniforms cover their broad backs. A baby with shining brown eyes gazes at her, the spittle dropping like a pearl from its open mouth. A crazy man sings in a sweet baritone. OH ROCK A BABY DOO WOP MANSHUGSHUGASHUGA BOW WOW WOW!
Shirley taps the page with her blunt finger. “One minute. Then you need to leave.”
There’s nowhere to go. Deb starts writing, just to stall.
“I don’t have nothing to be grateful for. If I’d thought about it, I would of been grateful for Pete, but now he’s gone. I would of have been grateful for my babies before they got to be too much trouble. I would of have been grateful for their daddy specially when we first got together and couldn’t get enough of each other. We had to be touching all the time. He’d slip out from work and we’d hop to it right there on the living room floor. I would of been grateful for that if I’d a known it wasn’t going to last.
“I would of been grateful for when momma and daddy took me to the state fair that one time and we saw the little bitty horse and I got to ride on the Ferris wheel and chew on a turkey leg big as my head. I carried that leg around with me all day, until it got dusty and dirty and momma pulled it out of my hand. That was a good day.
“Now I got nothing but this piece of paper and Shirley breathing down my neck waiting for me to stop writing so she can get rid of me.
“Everything just slips away.”
Deb feels a warm hand on her shoulder. Shirley is reading her paper. “Go get you something to eat,” she says.
Elizabeth Brownrigg’s “Sanctuary” received first honorable mention for the 2012 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network. Her first novel, Falling to Earth, published by Firebrand Books in 1998, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Elizabeth’s essays, articles, and short fiction have been published in Sierra Magazine, Shambhala Sun, and many other publications
by Elizabeth Brownrigg
It’s louder in winter up under the bridge: the slap, slap, slap of tires; the grind and boom of diesel engines. She sits at the very top of the long concrete slope that falls down to the road, on a little shelf between where the slope ends and the roadway above her head begins. It’s getting cold. She’s got a pile of jackets that she’s gathered around her like a nest. Pete stirs next to her. You can’t even see him, he’s got so much stuff piled on top of him.
His ratty old head pokes out. “Looks like I made it to another day.” He sits up and dislodges the bottle that bounces down the concrete and onto the road where it gets kicked around by the cars and broken. A waft of Pete-stink comes out of the disturbed blankets.
“You need a bath,” she says.
“Not ‘til spring, darlin’. Dirt keeps you warmer.” He fiddles with something under the blankets. Then he covers his head and the whole pile wriggles like a restless animal. Pete is a modest man. He emerges fully clothed.
“You going down to the corner in this weather?”
“Yep. Gotta get to work.” He leans over to pick up his pail and his sign. Disabled vet. Please help. “You coming?”
“Too cold.”
“You gonna be hungry by tonight.”
“You ain’t bringin’ me nothing?”
“I ain’t the man of the house.” He pulls on a yellow plastic poncho.
Pete leans low as he walks under the bridge and down the side, out of sight. She can hear him peeing. He comes back into view by the road and walks through the weeds toward the traffic light in the distance.
She’s hungry already. She considers her options. Stay. Panhandle at the next light down the road from Pete. Go to the mission where they’ll tell her about Jesus. It’s a free lunch, unless you count praying as a price, which she does.
The rain picks up. Mission it is.
She makes her way through the streets of hard times, boarded up store windows, a blind old man sitting on the pavement next to his crutches. He looks worse off than her.
The mission is in a former clothing store with plate glass windows. A wooden sign out front says, “Sanctuary.”
She goes in. It’s barely warmer in here than it is outside. It smells familiar. Poor people carry a cloud with them wherever they go, the scent of lost days, the odor of frustration.
She goes to stand in the food line.
“Wait a minute.” A big woman with curly blonde hair touches her on the arm. She jumps. She don’t like to be touched.
“Come on over here,” the woman says. Her nametag reads “Shirley.”
She follows Shirley to a table where other people are sitting and writing.
“Before you eat, you have to write down what you’re grateful for.” Shirley sets a piece of notebook paper and a pencil on the table.
Deb pulls out the metal chair and sits down. She writes, “I’m grateful for the love of Jesus,” and hands the paper to Shirley.
Shirley reads it and pulls out a loose leaf notebook from the shelf next to the table.
“Name?”
“Deb.”
“Last name?”
“That ain’t none of your business.”
Shirley picks up a marker and writes DEB on the spine. She clips Deb’s paper into the notebook.
“Okay. Get in line.”
Deb takes her food to the row of long tables in the middle of the empty room. Conversations echo all around her. She jumps when she thinks she hears a familiar deep voice, turns around, and sees it’s not him.
She settles in to eat. Kale. Mac and cheese. Some kind of stew. Hot glop.
A man with a new haircut sits near her. He’s looking around, not hungry like the rest of them. Clean clothes. You can tell if someone’s washed himself in a gas station bathroom or if he’s had a real shower.
She peeks at him from the corner of her eye. Pretty soon, he wipes his mouth with the cheap napkin, pulls out his wallet, and leaves a bill under his mostly full plate.
Without glancing at her, he gets up and leaves the table. She waits until his back is turned and sidles over to slip the money into her pocket. Twenty dollars? Hell of a tip for serving yourself.
On her way back to the bridge, she sees Pete at his corner. He’s walking up to cars in his bright yellow poncho, hunched over in the rain. He’ll quit when he’s got enough for a hamburger sandwich and a fifth of whiskey. He has the most regular habits of any man she’s ever met. He gives her a little wave as she walks by.
She climbs up under the bridge, disturbing the pigeons that flap out from under the struts. They fly back in to roost when she gets settled.
Pete comes along with a McDonald’s sack and the whiskey.
“Evenin’, darlin’.”
He screws off the bottle top and hands it to her for the first sip. She wonders where he got his nice manners.
“How was your day, Pete?”
“Wet.”
She hands the bottle back to him, and he takes one long, slow drink, and then another. He closes his eyes. “They feed you down at the mission?”
“Yeah, and I found twenty dollars.”
“Found it, huh?”
“I had to tell them I was grateful for the love of Jesus, but they didn’t preach or make us pray or nothin.”
“That is a blessing in itself.”
“You oughta come with me tomorrow.”
“Nah. I got my gig.”
Next day, the rain has let up some. Pete goes off to work and she heads down to the mission. That Shirley is still there. There’s something about her that Deb doesn’t care for. Shirley hands her a sheet of notebook paper and a pencil. Deb writes, “I’m grateful for the love of Jesus,” and gives it back to her.
“You said that yesterday. You gotta write something different. Come back tomorrow.”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me. You never said nothing about different.”
Shirley’s already sliding Deb’s notebook back onto the shelf. All’s she can see is the back of Shirley’s fat neck. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”
“Come back tomorrow.” Shirley doesn’t even look at her.
Deb steams out the door and onto the street, muttering. “I’ll show you different. How about a different shape to your big ugly nose?”
That night, Pete takes one look at Deb and says,“Uh-oh.”
He hands her the bottle. She takes a long drink.
“Bad day, darlin’?”
“They want different.”
“Different how?”
“Evidently the love of Jesus ain’t enough anymore.”
“I’ll be damned. That used to be all you needed. They throw out eternal salvation too?”
“I ain’t never going back there.”
She’s restless all night, thinking up ways to get back at Shirley. Pull her yellow hair. Punch her eyes out. Throw a plate of mac and cheese in her face. In her dreams, Deb screams at Shirley and Shirley gets bigger and bigger until she pops like a balloon and turns into a thousand little Shirleys all running around with notebooks saying “I want different I want different I want different.”
Morning light comes under the bridge. She glares at invisible Pete, snoring under his bundle of blankets. He’s smart not to go to the mission. They always come up with a new way to humiliate you. On the street, the weather can be rough, but all you have to do is hold your sign and walk up and down the row of cars. People say yes or no. You don’t have to do what nobody tells you. If somebody tells you to get a job, you tell them where to go.
That’s what she’s gonna do from now on. She gathers up her money bucket and her sign, and steps around Pete.
She gets down to her corner in time for rush hour. If she walks up beside the cars, she can get a good look at the drivers through the side windows. She’s not one to tap on the glass with a long, sad story about how her car broke down and all’s she needs is bus money and by the way baby don’t have no shoes. She got her fill of begging when she was married.
She’s worked out her own style. She makes eye contact but she doesn’t stare. She looks sad but not crazy. Being a woman helps. Everybody wonders what a woman’s story is, why she’s out there, if she has children. They just figure men are bums.
She gets a pretty good haul of bills and change. Enough to last a few days if she’s careful. The mission isn’t really on the way to the bridge, but she’ll walk by there anyway and give them the finger. Show Shirley she don’t need nothing from her. Then she has a better idea.
Deb goes inside. Shirley’s standing next to the table where people are writing. One by one, they give their papers to her. She reads what they wrote, takes out a notebook with each person’s name on it, and leafs through the pages. She nods, and the lucky winner gets to eat.
Shirley hands her paper and a pencil and acts like she doesn’t even remember her. Deb’ll fix that. She writes, “I’m grateful I’m not a big blonde bitch.”
Shirley reads what she wrote, and says, “Name?”
She pulls out Deb’s notebook that only has the one little page about Jesus and pops the new page in. She nods. Deb is left sitting there like a fool. Well, she’d be a fool for sure if she turned down a free meal.
“You wrote that and they still fed you?” It’s evening and she’s up under the bridge with Pete.
“Didn’t bat an eye. It was like I told her she was gorgeous.”
Pete shakes his head. “That is one weird cafeteria.”
“I bet I could say anything, long as I stick ‘I’m grateful’ in front of it.” Deb ponders.
“How about ‘I’m grateful I don’t have Shirley’s butt, ‘cause then it would be so big it would drag on the ground.’”
“That’s a good one. How about ‘I’m grateful I don’t have Shirley’s legs, ‘cause dogs think they’re tree trunks and pee on them.’”
“Ha! How about ‘I’m grateful I can go outside. They don’t let Shirley out because she scares the little babies and makes them cry.’”
“Or this one—‘I’m grateful I ain’t Shirley’s husband ‘cause he keeps telling her to put her clothes back on.’”
“Whoo. You’re mean!” Deb laughs.
Pete’s quiet for a bit. Then he chuckles to himself.
“What’s so funny? Tell.”
He clears his throat. “I’m grateful I don’t look like Shirley/Her hair is all whirly and swirly./Just like her face,/it’s a plumb disgrace/and it makes me want to hurly.”
Pete laughs helplessly and soundlessly.
“That’s stupid.”
"It’s a limerick.”
“It’s still stupid.”
“You gonna remember all these? Maybe you should write them down.”
“I’ll remember them. I’m trying to forget the limer-whatever.”
“There’s more where that one came from. You’re gonna eat lunch for at least a month.”
Even homelessness has a routine. In the mornings, Pete says, “Looks like I made it to another day,” and heads down to his corner. Deb straightens up their little nest, which doesn’t take long. They’re not the ones with the shopping carts; they both like to travel light.
There’s a Mobil station where she can use the washroom to clean herself up. She avoids her own eyes in the mirror.
She might go to her corner. She might swing by the Presbyterian church where they’re handing out clothes. She’s picking up a few more jackets now that the weather’s getting colder.
They follow her, the ones she left behind. The husband who was so nice until he showed her the back of his hand again and again. She stayed with him too long, and now she can’t erase the sound of his voice, or her own rage at herself for what she should have said and done but didn’t for the sake of the kids. Then she took the kids and found a place. She got a job at a Walmart; it was a fresh start. She was doing good until the supervisor got up in her face about some lie a customer told and she was out of there, glad to be free. Then the kids kept screaming and pulling on her and wanting to go back to daddy until she couldn’t take it no more and called social services to come get them and walked out the door. She found a camp near the waste treatment plant where other wanderers had pitched tents. It was a real friendly place. Then Little Floyd took an interest in her, and his woman didn’t care for that and came after Deb with a broken bottle.
She answers back to their voices, “You go to hell.” The way people look at her lets her know she’s saying this out loud. “Stop it. Stop it,” she whispers.
She visits the library downtown. She holds a book in her lap so’s they won’t kick her out for loitering.
When you don’t have nothing, there’s not all that much to do. The mission opens for lunch at 11:30. She leaves the library at 11:00 and walks the few blocks slowly. People like herself come out from the alleys, a sad tide drifting to the sanctuary.
They shuffle in the door. The new ones head straight for the lunch line until Shirley stops them and points them to the long table. The top of the table is marked up where so many people have pressed their pencils into the paper. Deb can see edges of letters and bits of words.
There’s an old man with bright blue eyes that shine out from the tanned filth of his cheeks. He looks into space for a long time. Shirley gives you fifteen minutes. If you ain’t writing by then, it’s up and out with you. Some days the old man doesn’t write nothing until Shirley taps him on the shoulder to tell him his time’s up. Then he puts his face close to his paper and presses the pencil hard. He fills up the whole page. Deb leans over to see what he’s written. Shirley stops her. “No cheating.”
“Bitch,” Deb mutters. She puts down,“I’m grateful I don’t look like Shirley cause when she was born her momma died of fright.”
Not everybody at the table seems to belong there. Some don’t even eat lunch. A woman in her thirties comes in every day right at 11:30, writes one sentence, hands the page to Shirley, and leaves. The guy who left the twenty has come back. He don’t sit near Deb, though, and somebody else always gets to the tip before her.
It’s another cold morning under the bridge. Deb wakes up and watches the pigeons fluttering around above her. There’s one she calls Stormy and another one she calls Rumpus. They’re both troublemakers. She likes them.
The traffic noise picks up. Pete should get moving so he don’t miss rush hour. She nudges him. His hand is resting on his blankets –she pulls at it. The fingers seem a little stiff.
She shakes him. “Wakey upey, sleepyhead.” She shakes him harder and harder, then rocks him back and forth. His blanket falls away. His knees and arms stay bent. He falls over on his side like a dead dog. “That ain’t funny.”
His face is white. She touches his cold lips. He’s not breathing. “Oh, Pete. Don’t do this.”
She covers him back up. The noise under the bridge echoes and swirls around her. The traffic roars by below her. The pigeons flap and coo above her. She feels as though she’s dropping down a long tunnel of noise, into the bottom of a well where no one can hear her. She strokes Pete’s still hand for a long time.
She stands up to collect her things: her blankets, her bucket, her sign. With her arms full, she picks her way down the bank to the road. She walks through the streets, weighed down by her burden. Her arms are starting to ache. She drops the whole mess right there on the sidewalk and keeps going.
She walks all morning, around and around in a big circle that goes by the Mobil station, the library, the Presbyterian church. She doesn’t stop at any of them. Toward noon, she goes into the mission.
She slumps in a chair and stares at the writing table. “Leave me be,” Deb whispers. “All of you. Leave me be.” Their voices. The children. The husband. The boss. Even Pete. Maybe he woke up and came here to find her. She looks around.
Voices bounce against the wooden floors and fade against the high ceiling. Little kids dangle and dance from their mothers’ hands as they wait in the food line. Two teenage boys lean over their plates. They eat fast and desperate. The sun shines through the dirty plate glass windows. An old man holds the door open for a woman with two screaming children and bows deeply. The big women working the steam tables nudge each other over some joke and throw their heads back and laugh. White uniforms cover their broad backs. A baby with shining brown eyes gazes at her, the spittle dropping like a pearl from its open mouth. A crazy man sings in a sweet baritone. OH ROCK A BABY DOO WOP MANSHUGSHUGASHUGA BOW WOW WOW!
Shirley taps the page with her blunt finger. “One minute. Then you need to leave.”
There’s nowhere to go. Deb starts writing, just to stall.
“I don’t have nothing to be grateful for. If I’d thought about it, I would of been grateful for Pete, but now he’s gone. I would of have been grateful for my babies before they got to be too much trouble. I would of have been grateful for their daddy specially when we first got together and couldn’t get enough of each other. We had to be touching all the time. He’d slip out from work and we’d hop to it right there on the living room floor. I would of been grateful for that if I’d a known it wasn’t going to last.
“I would of been grateful for when momma and daddy took me to the state fair that one time and we saw the little bitty horse and I got to ride on the Ferris wheel and chew on a turkey leg big as my head. I carried that leg around with me all day, until it got dusty and dirty and momma pulled it out of my hand. That was a good day.
“Now I got nothing but this piece of paper and Shirley breathing down my neck waiting for me to stop writing so she can get rid of me.
“Everything just slips away.”
Deb feels a warm hand on her shoulder. Shirley is reading her paper. “Go get you something to eat,” she says.
Elizabeth Brownrigg’s “Sanctuary” received first honorable mention for the 2012 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network. Her first novel, Falling to Earth, published by Firebrand Books in 1998, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Elizabeth’s essays, articles, and short fiction have been published in Sierra Magazine, Shambhala Sun, and many other publications