The True Poor Man

For sale through ARTSHARKS

by Fathi Afifi  

Things have gotten worse now at the bank, my uncle tells me. The great building once echoed with the whispers of flapping paper money being counted, with the squeak of clean black shoes on a clean creamy floor, with low manly voices that were trained to balance perfectly between the octaves of sophistication and financial intelligence.

Now, he tells me, these sounds have been replaced. The floors are scuffed with the shoes of unhappy men and women who leave a labyrinth of footprints on the floor, all leading to nowhere, all ending up in front of columns or desks or walls or—even worse—economic dead ends. Sometimes there are animal paw prints or tire marks; people don’t have the heart to leave their dogs or bikes outside where they may be stolen. The voices rise and fall like waves, with irregular storms and occasional lulls in the storm, although as the days pass the storms become more common and more violent. There is no whispering except that of the unhappy tellers behind the desk—there is no more whispering of money.

My uncle wants to leave this place. It’s not just the lack of money that has emptied him—though he himself is more than well off. He had wed the bank, wifeless and childless and friendless and hopeless as they both were. He can’t stand to see now the down-trodden voice-echoing skeleton of his former utopia. Richer than he knows and haunted by a better past, he has become the essence of a poor man.

"Angreek87"