Part 6 - Brown and Yellow

When Imogene got to work, she could tell that the weird poster guy had been there. She could always tell, because whenever he had come, the posters were arranged by date, then by size and finally by color. She mixed herself a latte and looked to see which poster was newest. He always gave his poster, the one he had been putting up, a primary location on the upper left, but not the top. That was his style. She read the Stamp Lickers poster, and wondered if the poster guy designed the posters, or just put them up. A lot of the time they had kind of gruesome imagery on them, severed heads, demons, bleeding eyeballs. For example the Stamp Lickers poster had a picture of a spiked boot stomping on an eyeball. Imogene didn’t really like looking at the posters for this reason.

She had seen the poster guy, and she didn’t think he designed them. He didn’t look like the type who was into bleeding eyeballs. He looked more like the type who had a full set of unopened Star Wars figurines in his attic, and a brown and yellow zigzagged acrylic fiber afghan on the back of his couch. She figured that his apartment, if he didn’t live with his parents, probably had brown and yellow smells, too: faint smells like onion skins and natural gas and damp garbage and old men’s chairs. She wasn’t sure of course. She just figured that the sort of person who would wear those ridiculous oversized mittens would live a brown and yellow life.

The first time she had seen the mittens, she had commented on them, because they kind of stood out. She had been making cocoa for a mother and two kids when the weird poster guy had walked in, or tried to walk in anyway. He stood fumbling at the glass door for a few seconds, with mittens the size of oven mitts on his hands. Then he had taken off the mittens, and carried them under his arm, with as much dignity as he could, to do his poster work. Walking by the bulletin board to serve the people their cocoa, Imogene had commented that those were quite the mittens. The weird poster guy had turned red all the way up to his earflaps, and whispered “Thanks.”