Jo M Thomas
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Passage 14 - Shelter for the Homeless

Passage 14 - Shelter for the Homeless

Nov 15, 2021

Days are started, shifts changed, shops opened, stalls set up, and an endless stream of boats loaded.

Footsteps hurry over cobbles. But Captain Flynn lies quietly in the gutter, blind eyes shut, hands clenched over misshapen ears, and, crying all the salt water he ever drank, begs for solitude among lost coins and unwanted dirt.

CAPTAIN FLYNN : Leave me be and give me back my life.

He turns his head and looks for some sanity, and hears, among the hurrying throng, the lurching steps that haunt his senses, the soft pleadings, hands outreached, skin swollen, but nothing that the passers-by, or you, can see. And in this dream, Captain Flynn cries out. Carry Winters, crossing over the cobbles on her way to her clean collar job of clerk, pauses, considers, watches a while, then dismisses the broken blinded beaten body, and mutters to herself, as she continues to pass by:

CARRY WINTERS : Drunken old fool.

Her words cut through the fevered dream. The lost captain is shamed. He hides his face with his hands. The hands of a hard-won life on both lake and sea, horned and dirty. And, curled up in that marketplace gutter, Captain Flynn listens for the morning of the city. Better the voices of contempt than the noise and touch of his long drowned ghosts.

CAPTAIN FLYNN : Goodbye my boys, crane dancer, donkey engine, that John, the dead traitors, Simon Barber of the Seahawk, goodbye you old girls, with low cut blouses, with high cut skirts ... Will you leave me be? Now the morning is here? Oh I wish you had never been.

PASSERS-BY : The dirty mad old beggar. He's talking to himself again. Never trust a man like him.

CAPTAIN FLYNN : Right you are! Old pirate.

And the passers-by walk around him.

PASSERS-BY : That man's a danger himself and us. Dangerous, bad crazy. Should be in the Workhouse that one. Surely someone's called the relieving officer?

CAPTAIN FLYNN : Careful now, I must get to my feet. Every step's a leap in the dark. Let me get up here. This body would disgrace me and fail if it only could.

FIRST DAMNED MAN : Morning, captain of the Seahawk.

CAPTAIN FLYNN : Leave me be, Barber.

FIRST DAMNED MAN : We can never leave you with your guilt and our blood upon your hands, bad old Flynn. Our blood has been there far too long and soaked through that pock-marked salt-stained grimy hide of yours and into your addled brain.

CAPTAIN FLYNN : No.

FIRST DAMNED MAN : I'm surprised you even care we're here, mad bad dangerous Flynn. You never cared so much when you were a pirate and ordered deaths or even did your own dirty work...

PASSERS-BY : And there goes his great unwashed insanity. We don't want the homeless on our nice clean streets breathing in our nice clean air...

FIRST DAMNED MAN : My captain, you won't breathe...

PASSERS-BY : and gesturing wildly and mumbling to themselves and not working hard like normal people...

FIRST DAMNED MAN : Just accept your fitting end, Captain Matthias Flynn.

CAPTAIN FLYNN : I will not die for some guilt ghost, brought on by cold sleepless nights.

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