Joshua Kirby #7 - Shoes

He's bought new shoes, but after they wear out, he keeps returning to the same old pair. Shoe after shoe breaks down and he ditches them at the first small hole. The old pair just feels like home. Ripped and torn beyond the point of any shoe he's thrown away, they're constantly are the butts of jokes. But he always goes back to them, dirt and all. Thousands, literally thousands, of miles over the many years, but he has still never broken a shoelace.

Joshua Kirby #6 - Snowy Path

They walked down the snowy path, mostly wordless. It had snowed the night before, so the loose gravel was slippery. They joked and pushed each other playfully, slipping on the ice. The snow caked up on the fronts of their shoes and crackled under their feet. They weren't going anywhere the path didn't take them, and when it came time to turn around and go home, they made a point of stepping in their original footprints.

Joshua Kirby #5 - Frost

The grass crunched with frost beneath his feet. The crisp air of winter had come early this year and the frost settled in mid November. He got the paper out of the box knowing the ice was here to stay, making itself comfortable until March, at the earliest. The paper's top headline corroborated, and below the fold were stories of black ice related traffic accidents. He turned around and took a different route back inside as to maximize the crunch beneath his feet. He cursed the sky for not snowing, but went inside and made hot cocoa anyway.

Joshua Kirby #4 - Burial

1,203. The dead far outnumbered the living at the ceremony. The latter count being only twelve, if you include the priest. He delivered his eulogy with a special brand of empty reverence, reserved for only this mass ceremony. Every year, thousands of dead go unclaimed, no relatives and no estate to pay for a proper burial. They end up here, to the annual mass ceremony on April 1st. The only mourners are a few county workers and two community outreachers who wished they could do more. Cremated and mixed, they rest together in a large plot, annotated only by a plaque saying the year and the plot's population.

Joshua Kirby #2 - Sonic Dreams

She believed in her heart that she was the first person to ever have a dream entirely in music. There were no pictures, no images. No sights, just sounds. The dream symphony was gorgeous, though, like all dreams, ephemeral. Fleeting. By morning much of it had gone, the composition undone. She wrote what she could remember and patched the cracks, though the larger holes proved impossible to fill. All that ever came from it was a good story and the strange looks its telling precipitates. 

Joshua Kirby #1 - Sidewalk

He sits down on the hard sidewalk, cement warmed by the sun. He bakes under his black t-shirt. He doesn't sit on the curb or against a wall. He doesn't even face the street, instead looking at the buildings and the people passing, back against a parking meter, still twenty two minutes left on it. No car is in the spot. He entire back vibrates after his head knocks against the pole. His legs were at first outstretched, though he brings his feet towards him to allow people to pass. He rests his arms on his knees, now armpit level. The passersby divert their eyes from him they way they would from a vagrant. He doesn't care. He counts the people walking by and the cars behind him and is concerned by the ratio.