Fiction: I Felt

I felt sorry for him, so I turned back. I walked back up the block and god damn it there they were, the both of them still bothering the guy. I gripped my brown bag tight.

            “Gimme your wallet,” one of them said. “Don’t make me tell you again.”

I felt goosebumps prickle down my back, ice cold like little hail stones tumbling from my shoulders down into my boots. They saw me coming near, and looked at me askance, aware of themselves, of me, of him, of the occasional car rolling down the city street, aware of nothing else but right now, the hyper present.

  I felt myself shivering, sweating. My brow furrowed and itched under my wool hat. I walked slowly toward them. One of them crouched next to the poor guy, sat back on his heels like a summer camp counselor: these are the rules, and this is what you get for breaking them, young man. This is your punishment. The other one just stood there. Good. I pulled the brown glass bottle out of its bag, held it by its neck, and brought it down like a hammer over his head.

I felt the bottle become weightless as it exploded off his skull. I felt the serrated cap bite into my palm and tear down across it deep. I felt my hand become like fire and I brought my fire hand up and lunged at the other guy so he could feel the fire worse than I did. He saw the blood in my eyes, the blood on my hand, my fire hand, and he staggered to his feet, with something like a close cousin to horror in his eyes. He stepped back, and I fell over, I twisted and fell backward onto the poor guy I was rescuing and we fell back together.

I felt the back of my head bounce once against the pavement. I looked up into the sky, it was starless and pitch black. Once, I was trapped in a tent that my brother zipped closed from the outside. I screamed until I had no voice, then I cried for hours until, finally, the darkness was all I had left. When my mother pulled me out, and held me close, I quietly hated her for taking it from me.    

I felt the poor guy pull out from under me and run away. I heard them all run away; the incongruous smacks of their sneakers hitting pavement were a smattering of applause, fading to silence. My feet were so cold, my hand rested in a thickening lake of its own blood. I used my other hand to pull my wool hat off my head because my head itched fiercely. I felt warm all over. So warm. I fell asleep.

 I felt someone's hand resting on my shoulder.

“I think he’s homeless.”

White lights burned into the backs of my eyelids.

“Yeah, I think I’m gonna double-glove it. One sec. You took care of the hand, right?”
"Did what I could, but I still want Carnes to take a look."

I opened my eyes and saw two of them. One stood with his back to me, the other stood over me, and met my eyes. I looked back at her, the one star in the night sky, and felt scared to be alone in the dark again.

“How do you feel?” she asked. She leaned in closer, and her breath, that sweet scent of cheap bodega jar gum, was like a reward from God. “How do you feel?”