Part 7: Encounter

[Once again, this is part of a larger story I wrote many years ago and am just now illustrating. Tell me it's stupid, tell me it's boring, tell me I should be on medication... just tell me something in the comments, please!]

VII. Encounter

When Roger the SweetMan awoke, he began to run. He ran down the cracked and overgrown sidewalk, around the corner and down a narrow, dirty street. He ran and ran until he could run no more, and then he stopped.

Then Roger felt the cold wind, and he looked around him for somewhere to keep warm. He found himself outside the Warehouse Thrift Shop where he had begun his first reincarnation. His only suit was soiled and torn, and all his bones ached.

Entering the store, Roger wandered the rows of dumpsters full of clothes and tables strewn with broken toys, blenders caked with food and torn and soiled books. He roamed around the Warehouse for three hours, watching the customers pick through the rubbish, and wondering what he would do.

While leafing through the second half of a ripped romance novel, Roger was bumped from behind.

"'Scuze me," growled a short little man with a goatee growing to his chest and a life-sized cardboard cutout of the Keebler Elf beneath his arm. The man seemed to stumble under the weight of the decoration, nearly as large as himself, and half fell off his ridiculously tall shoes.

"Oh…Sorry…" said Roger, following the little man with his eyes as he furtively stole through the aisles, picking out odd bits of junk and adding them to a basket he carried on the same arm as the elf.

Now and then the man cocked his head towards the elf and listened, then whispered a few words back, looking around suspiciously to catch any lookers-on.

But the man did not catch Roger, who began to follow him around the store, often turning his back in order to appear to be heading the other direction, sometimes ducking down to hide behind dumpsters, sometimes crawling beneath them to get to where the elf man was going.

When David (for of course it was David) left the shop, Roger followed close behind.