These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Everyone who walks by stares at him, as much for how out of time he appears as for the dried blood on his face. He puts in his coat pocket the paperback dropped by the teenager. He’s still a day or two from the revelation that this battered book, which he knows well, which all of the Twentieth Century knows, its literature having begun with this book, in fact will not be published until 1922.