Excerpt
He was odd. There were only a couple of people who were still around that remembered when he arrived years earlier. There was something more to the fact that he was just “slow” of mind. The way he blinked. One eye was quicker in shutting and opening than the other. Or, on cold winter days, one foot seemed to drag a little longer than it would with a normal stride. His head had an odd shape. One side of his forehead was larger than the other and his scalp was off in its design around his face. He had some birth defect or maybe it was a surgery years ago that allowed for the malformation of the man’s head. No one knew. The man was getting older. He was not a large man, with the exception of his arms, particularly his hands. They were larger than one would expect for an aged man of his height, even for a man who had worked with his hands for decades; the type of hands that one could feel great strength and protection in. Maybe it was the way you felt after you shook his hand? You were always careful not to let him see you wipe your own hand on the back of your pants because his were always wet from perspiration, always. But after a few days, people began to set it aside as their own buried prejudice. Still, when you looked into his face, you always had a tendency to see your own reflection in his eyes; but then it happened, a spark, a flash, something inside the windows lit up, then it was gone. He preferred you called him “Tony,” not “Anthony” and would correct you gently, but firmly, if you erred.
He had been the elementary school’s janitor, gardener, and crossing guard for as long as people could remember. He could be seen every morning patting the small ones, “his charges” he would call them, on the head with those huge powerful paws. But there was something. After a while; people would sign off their curiosity to wasted time. He became invisible to the new teachers and staff. He disappeared and became just someone else on campus. Maybe they didn’t really want to see the product of the world’s sin, blunders, or things that go bump in the night. Invisibility, remaining in the shadows and out of the eyes of those around us is accepted in many areas of society. People didn’t mind looking or even interacting with those things as long as they stayed at an arm’s distance. Every year, shortly after the start of the new school year, people would settle into a routine and forget about those things that hide in closets. It wasn’t fear that people felt. Society had come too far for that. Someone of his mentality looked physically different. Still today, people were uncomfortable, almost embarrassed to be seen with him. They’d never admit it. But the world had come to recognize those in the shadows and they had all been mainstreamed and woven into the world where the rest of us live. He had gentle eyes and a disposition of soft stuffing from a favorite pillow. Still, there was something odd about him.