Today's Cold Miser

Light fills his eyes as he opens them, his first impulse is to bury his head under the pillow. Instead he gets up.  Isaac brushes his teeth with the water from the bucket that’s on the small table at the foot of his bed by the wall.  There is a hand operated pump in the kitchen going through a pipe straight to the floor, that he gets his water from.  The water comes up cold and he has no shower.  If he wants to take a warm bath he has to heat over a fire he makes in the stove in the kitchen; it’s mornings like this that Isaac misses hot showers.

            Isaac is a caucasian male.  He stands at five feet and six inches in height, and weighs about one hundred and sixty pounds; at this point he is around sixteen years old.

It was only a year ago, but it feels like much more.

Isaac had been arrested on an unspecified charge.  During the trial the prosecuting attorney tried to get the maximum sentence possible for all the horrific crimes he committed. 

            Isaac’s main defense was that he did what he felt needed to be done; his lawyer argued that does anybody in the jury feel regret for smashing the mosquito that’s sucking their blood?  Of course these people weren’t sucking his blood, but they deserved everything he did to them.

            That’s when the court appointed defense attorney came up with the idea of using an insanity plea.

            Isaac himself immediately argued against the plea, “I’M NOT INSANE.”

            His attorney pointed at him and told the jury that if nothing else proves it, that proves it.  The most fervent denier, and the last person to realize he’s insane is the insane person.

            The jury agrees.  Within fifteen minutes after they go into their chamber to decide his fate, they came back out with their sentence agreed upon by consensus.  Not only did they declare him insane, but they sentence him to spend the rest of his life in the deepest darkest Hell-hole they could put him in.

Isaac spends the next year in the closest thing the American government has to a dungeon in the country.  That’s when a Collector of souls traded to Hell in deals with the Devil let him, and many other people deemed homicidally insane, free to roam the streets.  For some reason the collecting young man, if he can be called a young man anymore, took no souls.

            The only request that the Collector makes when he lets the insane run free is that he makes the inmates promise to travel far away  from the institution before they do what they do best.

            Promises are easily broken.

            Most of the people forgot what they’d promised and went on a rampage as soon as they saw the light of day, or the dark of night.

Isaac’s one of the few who decided to try one more time at life.  This is a strange new life he’s chosen, but it’s a good life.

            Isaac finds his way to the world below the subway by accident.  This is where many of the city’s Homeless call Home.

            He’s changed his mind about the way he sees the life around him.  Isaac’s gone from wanting nothing more that to hang around the edges of society and hope never to be seen, to wanting to improve his life and everything in it.

The other mental patients from the hospital that were released with Isaac made their way to the city and split apart from each other.  T