New Hope For Small Men: Chapter 3

The people in his building did not notice his size, or if they did they had their own problems to worry about and had no time for registering dismay over the small man lugging a bag of groceries up the steps.

They kept mostly to themselves and to their own lives, and on some days they became invisible, with the only evidence of them the smell of bad hot-plate cooking wafting out beneath the cracks of their doors.

Once, when Robert had just moved in, an old woman who smelled of beer and perfume had tussled his hair and called him by the name of what he imagined to be her son, a son who had grown up and become embarrassed of her existence and so never visited or even called. He had been disconcerted by this attention, and further, by the sight of her cleavage as she had bent over him. The peach-colored housedress she was wearing drooped open in the front and he saw the line her crepe-like flesh made down the middle, and smelled the odor that rose from it like the foul water at the bottom of a ravine.

That night he had masturbated in his bed not thinking of the drunken old woman who had mistaken him for her son, but of all the women he had passed in hallways and entrances — better hallways and entrances than these — and of their fresh smell, and the smoothness of their flesh and the dew and freckles of youth and promise still upon them.

He finished and then slunk from his bed to the sink, his sins still dripping from the palms of his hands.