Batter

Unavoidable Entropy

There was a bunny against that building.

A fluffy, sweet, white, plump bunny, drifting across the glass...it had a nice little cotton tail and one grayish eye staring off over the cityscape...

A wind caught it suddenly, and it moved faster and faster across the steel, bluish windows, rippling with the strange shapes of that tall, immovable building until it was gone...just like that.

The man who was not a man laid on the cold, muddy ground, hands folded on his stomach, staring dreamily upwards at the tall, scary scrapers, the clouds lightly reflecting on their shiny blinding windows. He was near a busy sidewalk, at a gray, dead park. He could hear people talk now, as they passed by. He remembered words like, "Hello" and "goodbye" and "where are my car keys?"

He knew what the subway was, and where to find a good cup of coffee. That street sign meant yield, and that woman was wearing red colored lipstick. Many simple pieces had come flooding back, but there, just out of sight, were nothing but gray clouds...like the ones floating above his head...

"Mister!"

Our man glanced to the side through yellow grass to see two boys hurrying towards him. In their gratitude for the first bit of unspoiled food they had had in a while, they found him a long dirty coat, and a pair of too-small shoes. They were warm. And a little soggy.

They presented their newest bounty, a small baggy full of brownish crackers.

They had a name.

It was somewhere.

He smiled, splitting the bag into three parts. The two boys pulled him to his feet, and they went walking, munching on their lunches, gazing quietly at the sky.

The small brothers had helped him quite a bit, reminding him of words and letters he had somehow already known. A is for apple, and always sniff for rat poison.

As comfortable as he was with the young boys, there was something...wrong.

The same kind of wrong he had felt days before, a quiet need-a want to be...doing...

A loud wailing siren woke him from his thoughts. The bright red and blue flashing lights appeared far away down the street. One of the boys grabbed his hand and started to pull.

He didn't want to go. He knew those sounds. Those lights. He was supposed to be where they were.

He needed to go where they went.

The second boy took his arm and pulled.

He looked at their frightened faces...

No one saw the man and two young boys as they fled the scene outside of Saint Mary's Hospital. There were far too many important things going on inside.

"...this...is terrible."

Jonathan Crane was still. As still as a flighty gazelle being eyed by a flock of hungry crocodiles near the watering hole. One false move, and...

"Isn't it?"

Chomp.

"...personally, I don't like it..no."

The Joker was sitting on his hospital bed. More specifically, he was sitting -inches- from his prone and vulnerable form, poking through his food with a very, -very- sharp instrument that he could very well turn on his fleshy easily bruised self. There was no escape plan. No burly orderly or policeman or Batman to come and save him. He held his breath as the Clown skewered a piece of what could have once passed for beef out of the cold stew and bit it experimentally.