Before the Rooster Crows

As far as he knew, he’d never been the type to show up in the wee hours and bang on the door, begging for one more chance. Or cornered anyone with dull conversation. Ignoring their eyes’ pleas to stop. Never’d scrawled poems on scrap paper while huddled in the bus stop, running away towards some half-thought-out hobo fantasy. Nope, to the best of his knowledge and memory he was a fine upstanding person, with faults for sure, no one’s perfect. But nothing as deplorably awful as the things he overheard his friends saying, when they thought he’d finally passed out.