Against the concrete-faced wall he leaned in torn, worn, jeans belted with a disintegrating leather belt, his feet sandaled and tanned, blackened asphalt dust caking the creases between his toes, their nails thick and hard, the lightest aspect of his person. Short and lean, sleeved in a red t-shirt with a tobacco company icon covering his sunken chest, his forearms are crossed over his knees, ending in intertwined hands thick with callouses, the joints swollen with wear, nails half-trimmed and black under the ends. The thick arms narrow above the elbow, terminating in narrow shoulders, from between which grows a lean. brown neck, stretched with leathery skin turned dark under the waterfront sun and lacquered with a patina of nicotine.

The head that tilts up to inquire as to the compassion of the passerby is large for the frame upon which it is mounted, topped with a weedy growth of light brown hair falling featherlike to the ears and halfway to the brows despite seeming a week unwashed. Henry would have hair that women would envy if only it were clean, and the beetled eye-brows below did not house such a dully pained gaze. Eyes gray-green and bloodshot, a nose broken twice, once high on the right, once low on the left—the latter leaving a dimple like the one pocking his small chin under his wide, unsmiling cheeks—Henry looks up at the passerby as if the person might be the benefactor of another Henry, in another time, in another place, in a log ago-slain world where men yet looked at one another and saw their reflection.

The door swings open in Henry’s face and falls inward as he remains outside the human race.