9:41 Read Free

air filled with the strumming of a guitar. Spanish music filled the air, and the small street was alive with the air of a Spanish Village. The Spanish people, as always, were out on the stoops and sidewalks in front of their buildings, singing and playing their native songs. Across the street, silently sitting, outlined in his window frame was Chris, watching silently, as always, the joys and sorrows of 19th Street. He seemed never to breathe, nor did he stir from his position in front of the window. Chris was as old man, a stern looking old man, who had a countenance that resembled a rock, imperturbable, impervious, ever the same. Chris would sit in front of his window until the very early hours of the morning, just sitting and staring at the people, the music players, and listening to their serenades. Winter would come and give way to the cool breezes of Spring, and thence to the thermal blasts of Summer, thence to the harsh winds that foretell the coming of Fall, but faithful Chris was ever there, grey bearded, and white haired, with a nose that jutted from the middle of his face like an afterthought to a sentence. His skin was white, with a slight hint of color at the cheek bone. It was a very rough skin, wrinkled and aged like fine leather, smoothed through use, and cracking from age. His eyes were steel grey and sparkled like the sun reflected off water. They were the most frightening of all his aspects, and fearsome were they all. They could sear through the most adamant of persons and boil them down to the core of their very being.
    I’d known Chris for years; he had been at that window before I was born, so I’ve heard, and as I grew older Chris was an integral part of my life. Not that I would be with him too often, but he was always near during the early years of my youth, sitting in front of his window to witness the games that we played, the fellows of my youth and myself. He watched us all sprout and grow older and perhaps wiser. He himself was very wise, I knew, for every so often, I, being the most intrepid of my fellows, was friendly with him; a feat which was not unheralded in the gossip of my neighborhood. For Chris was not the most gregarious of human beings, and people feared him as much as they respected him. This friendliness with Chris brought no end of inquiries from all of the people of the neighborhood from time to time. What was he like? Why did he always sit in the window? Who was he? Was he an artist or an exile? Was he insane? Or, as it finally would boil down, just what was this Chris that everyone feared unknowingly.
    During my few visits to Chris’s home, I was treated most cordially, treatment which at first surprised me emanating from the ogre that lived all by himself and stared out at people that passed by. He lived in a small apartment, inexpensively but neatly furnished. As you entered you saw a couch in the corner, well worn, and covered in a rust colored slip cover that Chris had probably made. The couch was the most prominent feature of the entire room, and upon entering it captured your attention immediately. It lay hung in an almost exotic space, emitting a strange, luxurious aroma, that seemed to permeate the entire room. It was shrouded in shadow, and surrounded by shelves and bookcases filled with books, so dusty as not to have been used in a hundred years. It was the focal point of the room, for nowhere was there a space from which the couch was not completely visible. There were no lights near the couch, and yet it was worn so, that one could almost see the outline of Chris’s body lying on it hour after hour. It was a low couch, without arm rests, just a slab, tilted up on one end so that when one was supine on it, his head was raised. Chris would lie on the couch when I went to see him, and I would be granted the special privilege of resting my humble body in that grand exalted place, the place from which so much terror had been hurtled, the chair in front of