Portland, OR - Fiction - 500 Words or Less

The morning after, the bartender sweeps dust out the doorstep. He looks at me as I open my umbrella in passing, just as the rain starts. The sidewalk is covered with leaves and the ghosts of leaves. Marks like little brown hands ground into the pavement. The door shuts and some object slick with new rain turns a leathery wetness. A wallet forgotten from the night before. I pick it up, open it.

Some bills and change, plus shopper's club card, bank card, credit card, trojan, and a Pennsylvania driver's license for a pimply-faced college kid with a last name I'm too Anglo to pronounce. Joshua K-something.

I look around, experiencing finder's guilt, the suspicion I'm being tested to do the right thing before I can even figure out what it is I want. I count out the money. Seventeen dollars and twenty-three cents. Three fives, two ones - both minted in Chicago - three nickels and eight pennies. I put the money back. I try the bar but the door is locked. I could hold onto it and bring it back at three when the bar opens, or turn it into the police, but there's only so much loyalty I feel towards Joshua K.

I open the wallet again, take out the credit and bank card, and throw the rest of the wallet back in the leaf pile. Let someone find it who is more desperate for the money than me, or who has an excuse to use the condom, or some samaritan in need of the satisfaction of a good deed, or Joshua K himself, who after mentally retracing his steps of the night previous, rises from bed in panic, searches the walkway, then crawls on hands and knees outside the bar, praying and believing in a protective mystery if not God as he finds his own pimply self. My soul has done enough good. I slip the cards in my jeans and go on with the day.

That night, I light the woodstove and burn them one by one. Black smoke rises from the spitting plastic and the DNA code of Joshua K's finances bubbles, melts, and is forgotten and the karma fllows on.