CAW13-10 The Feral Homeless Gentleman of the CGIP

Apparently there was once actually a town here called Cambridge, with its own post office & everything. But sometime in the late 70's the Industrial Park opened on the grounds of an old cherry grove. And it grew & grew until the entirety of the town was encompassed. Slowly, but surely, the houses, the shops, everything gave way to sterile office complexes, giant warehouses, & brutalist distribution centers awash in pale fluorescence. Natalie was just starting her sixth week at a job with Infinite Business Futures Ltd. It was all very vague what their company actually did, if anything, but her job seemed to involve one part simple data entry, three parts staring wistfully at her cubicle walls & the ceiling. Even though it wasn't what she went to school for, the pay was okay & in this job market, she was thankful just to find something.

A memo came in one day over email, "Re: The Feral Homeless Gentleman." Natalie clicked & read on. "Other businesses have reported that the feral homeless gentleman has returned & is wandering throughout the Industrial Park. The management of Infinite Business Futures would like to recommend our employees take certain precautious to ensure the safety of themselves, fellow coworkers, & Infinite Business Futures as a whole. If you see the homeless gentleman, avoid eye contact, or engaging the gentleman, & simply report the incident to a supervisor at your earliest convenience. -MGMT" Weird, Natalie thought before  trashing the message. She didn't give it a second thought until that night, as the 5:01pm mass exodus flooded into the parking lot. The fall evenings were giving way to a darker duskiness than everyone had been used to over the summer, the lights were slowly warming up even though the sun had already gone down.

"Oh great." She heard a coworker say. "There he is. The Homeless guy." Instinctually, everyone seemed to avert their eyes, staring down at their shoes or b-lining straight to their vehicle. But not Natalie. Curiosity got the better of her & she looked up to see the silhouette of a tall, slenderish figure, covered in layers of tattered clothing waiting at the edge of the main road. As a bus passed by, the man's long spindly legs dashed quickly to the center of the busy street, crouching down to collect something hurriedly before the next car started coming. "Is he gone yet?" Another coworker asked. As Natalie looked closer, she could see that the homeless man was scooping up the remains of a roadkilled rabbit & greedily eating it raw. Her initial disgust quickly gave way to horror as the headlights off an oncoming car gave her a better look at the man. The first thing she realized were the appendages it was using to shovel through the bunny remnants. Loosely bandaged, instead of five fingers, they came to three broad, scythe-like claws. On closer inspection, they weren't attached under the bandages, like the bones in a hand, & between the gaps wriggled out tiny black tentacles. With one final swipe, the man scooped up the rest of the roadkill & sprung back to his feet. Natalie noticed an unnatural bend where the man's calves should be, almost giving the impression he was walking on his haunches. In two large strides he was clear of the road just in time for the car to whiz by. That's when Natalie realized the "man" was now staring back at her. Or at least seemed to be. Under the hood of a sweatshirt & brim of an old ball cap were two brightly glowing orange orbs. They seemed like eyes. Natalie at first recognized them as eyes, but then she realized one was bigger than the other, with the smaller of the two sitting much lower than where it ought to have been. They flickered in what seemed like a blinking motion before the figure turned & bolted for a row of pine trees, almost as if it was frightened.

"Something's wrong with him." a nearly paralyzed Natalie finally mustered, realizing she had slowed to almost a halt among the stream of fellow employees on their way home.
"Yeah. It's called being homeless." one of them said. "And it really isn't polite to stare at him like that. You might hurt his feelings or worse, get his attention!"
"But did you see him?" she asked. "I really don't think he was... human..."
"That's awful! You can't talk about them like that!" Another said, not breaking pace for their car.
"No...! I mean... He was..." Natalie tried to put the words together to make sense of what she had just witnessed. But she couldn't. Her coworkers obviously knew of the man, but in their hurry to look away, did they ever actually bother to pay attention to him? What was he? Some kind of weird experiment gone wrong? A demon? Was he human once, or just something that came close? And just what was he doing here? In this office park of all places? That was on the day that Natalie started trying to track down the Feral Homeless Gentleman of the Cambridge Grove Industrial Park.




This guy I did kind of on a whim. I don't know what the inspiration was really, other than a healthy disdain for giant office parks. I was just gunning for some kind of creepy horror creature in a mundane setting. Came together relatively quickly. Only wish I made the eyes more clearly off center & uneven. As it is here, they just give the impression his head just looks tilted a little. Otherwise I like the desaturated look, the long limbs, & the goofy name that's a sentence long.