I should have known better, but I wanted to touch him in some way, make him know I was alive. I grabbed him and shook him by the shoulders, and there was a whoosh and as I might have expected he collapsed like the insubstantiality he was.
There was a stick figure of a man left before me, an economical skeleton supporting the shell of a human being and two-thirds of a two-trouser suit.
Hide.
I went into the first shop I came to—Milady's Personals.
Appropriately, it was a false front.
A neutral-colored gray surface, too smooth for concrete, stretched away into some shadows. The area was littered with trash.
Cartons, bottles, what looked like the skin of a dehydrated human being—obviously, on second thought, only the discarded skin of one of the things like the one I had deflated.
And a moldering pile of letters and papers.
Something caught my eye and I kicked through them. Yes, the letter I had written to my brother in Sioux Falls, unopened. And which he had answered.
My work.