Portrait

Like a bird he was, like a long-limbed bony bird. 

He sat on the edge of his sagging recliner, peering into the TV. A constant flash of images flickered across the screen, and from his rapt concentration you would guess he was beholding the Burning Bush. 

Light glowed and played across his face. It dipped across wrinkles that had sunk silently into the boy's cheeks over long years, after hot summers and frigid winters and long decades that passed like episodes in a ceaseless marathon. 

His hand dipped into a Bojangles box and pulled out a piece of fried chicken, his fingers like claws from age. A gold ring still hung around his thin left ring finger, placed there in some previous century by a girl who since had wrinkled and faded from sight altogether. 

His teeth bit into the chicken, nose still sniffing at the faint smells it found, eyes never leaving the screen except once, when they glanced minutely at the chicken leg as he turned it in his hand, and bit again. A bit of grease was somehow on his shirt, and his cheek. He wiped a napkin across his cheek, but didn't notice the stain on his shirt as he leaned back at last, breathed a deep breath, and closed his eyes to sleep.