The Seventy-fifth Day

The old man struggled to push the wobbly shopping cart west along Mill Street. He wheeled the noisy cart to the north on Lake Street and under the city’s ancient arch, before turning it west again on the tiny street of Bell.

He’d heard that there would be trouble that night, so he wanted to set up his place on the sidewalk before it got too heavy later on. With a kind-of state-mandated quarantine in effect, life had become somewhat harder and he did need it to become anymore difficult.

“Certainly,” he thought, “This spot’s got no value to those looters and rioters.”

Quietly and methodically, he pulled the cardboard box out of the cart and set it up against the nearby building, a closed bar. It would serve as a place to rest his head during the coming storm.

Over it, he spread a well-worn blue plastic tarp across the box and his cart, affording himself some form of privacy. Then the old man crawled inside.

Now he began the important work, he laid out his several dirty blankets, used and reused over the years. Lastly, he withdrew his cheap 22-caliber rifle still wrapped in a blanket and slid it in against the inside corner of the box, covering it with more blankets.

It didn’t take him very long to fall asleep, after finishing.

Late afternoon, and the old man was awakened. The sound of voices, yelling and screaming, “Fuck the police,” had brought him out of a dreamless sleep.

Raising up on his elbow, the old man looked beyond his feet. Nothing. The street, though now in full shadow, was empty of people and vehicles.

He turned and looked west, through the square opening he’d prepared when he first found this box. It was an opening where the flap should have been, but wasn’t, because he’d removed it so that he might be able to see out if need be.

Here was that need.

The old man watched as a large crowd of young men and women gathered in front of city hall. Then it began, the vandalism, the looting, the arson and the beating of an innocent passersby.

Rolling over he found his rifle and attached the homemade silencer he’d fashioned to it’s muzzle.

“My precious little chihuahua’s tiny, but she’s gotta ferocious bite,” he chuckled.

It took him very little time to bring the rifle around to his ‘gun loop,’ and find one of the marauding and unsuspecting targets through his 4-by-32 scope. He had 13-rounds before needing to reload.

The old man planned to make each one count as the report of the rifle went completely unnoticed.