The bag was flimsy. The cheap kind shopkeepers didn’t run a mental tally on before giving out. The plastic was so thin you could see your hand through it. It was the color of mother’s milk. Inside lay a single toothbrush that despite its forlorn swaddling was still new and unused. Besides the toothbrush, the bag held only the delicate fumes of polyphenol. The man with the bag leaned against the railing of the ferry. His skin was a dark with sunlines that radiated from eyes and streaked his brow. He looked to be in his late thirties but exposure to intense light can hide a person’s age. His face straddled the line between dreamer and vagabond. Maybe he was imagining his boots striking soiling on the other end of the ferry line. I wondered if he was Moroccan, or maybe Algerian. It was hard to tell and I didn’t want to stare. Something told me that everything he owned was in that bag. He had the look of a man who had seen things that could sour. His hands were workman’s hands, thick with muscles and padded with calluses. I couldn’t help study his hands. The handle of the bag cut across his palm like a lifeline to a future that might yet be. I felt a story pulsing out of him, like a gypsy aura beating a drum. A story without a teller wanting to be told.
