An Excremental Incident

Sunlight blazed down onto the hot concrete of the city when Derek rushed out the front door of his apartment building, briefcase in hand. Beads of perspiration stippled dark-blue patterns on the light-blue button down shirt visible under his suit jacket. The phone in his pocket buzzed. He glanced at the screen for a moment but ignored the call, returned the phone to his pocket, and hurriedly strode down the stoop two steps at a time. At the sidewalk, he turned to the left and walked as quickly as he could without doing the weird butt-wiggle thing that speed walkers did.

He had made it nearly halfway to his subway stop in record time, while becoming increasingly moist, when his foot slipped forward and his arms went akimbo in a desperate bid to maintain balance. When he looked down and saw the long dark smear on the concrete and the matching silky brown paste along the sides of his scuffed black dress shoes, he knew, immediately what it was. Of course it was. What else would it be? Today, of all days, of course he would step in dog shit.

Derek looked around for a discarded newspaper or unattended patch of grass or weeds that he could use. The house he had been forced to stop immediately in front of had a nice little half-yard where lovely red flowers were blooming. There was a wealth of absorbent-looking plants growing just a couple feet away. An old woman in a floral-print dress, holding a “Retired and Loving It” coffee mug glared down at him from inside the large front windows of the home, and so Derek continued his search.

Just a bit further ahead on the sidewalk, green scaffolding had been erected over the sidewalk in front of a large building in the process of being renovated. A metal ladder leaned against the scaffolding, gleaming in the morning sun. Derek limp-walked over to it, keeping the toes of his right foot in the air so as to prevent the ball of his foot from stepping down and mashing the shit onto his shoe more than it already was. Once at the ladder, he very carefully scraped his foot across the bottom step of the ladder, then awkwardly turned his foot to try and scrape the residue that had squished its way up the side. It was impossible to remove all the excrement, but it was as clean as he could possibly get it without being able to do a proper scrubbing.

“Hey, what the fuck, bro?”

Derek looked up in alarm and saw an orange-helmeted man peering down at him, disgust and anger writ on his face.

Derek smiled and waved. “Sorry!” Then he let out a little chuckle, shrugged, forced out a smile he hoped was not too manic, attempting a kind of this is an unfortunate but perfectly normal occurrence demeanor.

“You’d better fuckin’ clean that off before I get down there or I’m gonna beat your ass.” The man swung himself onto the ladder and began to descend.

“Shit.” Derek said, unsure if he meant it as an explanation or exclamation. “Sorry! I’m really late!” Then he turned and kept walking, even faster than before.

“You’d better fucking come back here, you piece of shit!”

The irony of the insult was not lost on Derek and he choked out a laugh that sounded a bit too much like a panicked yelp than he would have preferred. Glancing back over his shoulder, Derek saw the man was already on the sidewalk and, alarmingly, beginning to run toward him.

“Get back here, asshole!”

Derek was now moving as quickly as he could without running. Running would be something a guilty person would do, and he didn’t want to seem guilty. This was all just a big misunderstanding. He tried to remember how the speed walkers did it. Feet in as straight a line as possible, elbows out. His hips waggled exaggeratedly from side to side and he nearly hit himself in the face with his briefcase, but felt he was no making good time, nearly to the crosswalk. He wondered briefly if the man chasing him would notice his odd walk and make fun of him for it. Ahead of him, the street light had mercifully blinked from red to an inviting green light that beckoned him to cross and put all this unpleasantness behind him.

Instead, he felt a large hand clamp down on his shoulder. Derek realized then that he probably should have just run. The man spun him around and Derek braced himself for what he felt sure would be a very painful blow to the face. He’d never been punched before. He didn’t really want to find out what it would be like. Lamely, he lifted his briefcase up in front of his face and was distantly aware of some sort of high-pitched moan that was coming from him.

The man knocked the briefcase out of his hands and grabbed Derek by the front of his shirt.

“What the fuck is your problem?” the man demanded.

Panicked, Derek let out a deep, primal, wordless sob of despair. What had presumably started in Derek’s brain as words tumbled unintelligibly from his mouth. The man holding him quickly let go, the rage on his face flashing into a look of pity and confusion.

“Jesus christ…” The man looked around to see if anyone was staring at them. “I’m not going to hurt you. Look, just go back and clean that shit off my ladder. Fucks sake, bro.”

Derek tried to stop crying, but instead only managed to blow a small bubble of snot out onto his upper lip before the sobbing resumed. He nodded and began to head back in the direction he’d come from.

“Pick up your case, dude.” The man just sounded exasperated now, a parent trying to get his kid to eat vegetables.

“Sorry,” Derek said again. He turned around, bent over, picked up the briefcase. He hadn’t grabbed it by the handled and now for some reason it felt like it’d be weird to have to stop and readjust, so he just clutched it in both arms against his chest like he was smothering an infant, and walked limply back toward the ladder. He tried to do his deep breathing exercises to stop his crying. Against his chest, his phone began buzzing once again, but did his best to ignore it. There was no point in answering anymore. Everything had gone wrong. The world had been against him yet again. Derek tried to sniff the snot back into his nose while also wiping his eyes dry with the shoulders of his jacket without having to let go of his suitcase. As he approached the ladder, he realized dimly that he wasn’t sure what he was going to clean the ladder off with.

* * *

Half an hour later, he sat in on a stool at a bar half a block away from where his morning had come crashing down. He was wearing his white undershirt and pants, his jacket hung lopsided on the backrest. The blue button-down, now smeared brown, was nestled comfortably in the trashcan just outside the bar.

Derek stared at his still mostly full cocktail, the bright multi-colored straw drawing an uncomfortable contrast with his gloom. His phone lay on the counter top silent now, having ceased its buzzing ten minutes ago.

Derek blew a long, steady breath through his lips. “Shit.”