The street lamp flickered over head. A man, clad in a battered and beaten windbreaker, jeans that have seen the passing of years without wash, and a sweater that consisted more of holes than material, stood in the glow of the lamp. The wind struck him bitterly. His gaze slowly roamed over the street, as he sighted a group of revelling college students, drunk off of the empty bottle of tequilla that the tallest member of the group of five swung in his hand. The sound of their laughter was even more bitter than the cold. That had been him once. He once had everything he could ever want. Friends, money, a good education, they were all his for the taking. He had seen through the self-perpetuating lies of the world that surrounded him. He saw it all, and he knew his place. Despite his grim exterior, he smiled as the group passed him by. He knew they were blinded by society, by what they had been raised to see. For all of their rebellious tendencies and desires, those students were the creation of their parents. Their lives have been nothing more than a slow indoctrination into a world of beauracracy, not so for the man with the windbreaker. He was always different. As a boy he had been in a mobile family, moving from city to city, country to country, following the occupation of the father. Wherever the man ended up, he was surrounded by people who had inhabited the area for all their lives and who were unwilling to accept this stranger into any of cliques. Those youths were blind as well. The man had learned, through this period of exile from the only society that mattered to him, that one can not come to understand anything that one is a part of. How bitterly he had laughed when he realized that. It was a wisdom that had to be learned and that could not be taught, as none cared for the ramblings of a pariah. Yet his knowledge, his sight where all others were blind, came with a price that he was barely able to pay. For all of his wisdom, for all of his years of exile, for his hard countenance and grim determination, he was still lonely. He walked a long and cold path, and he did it alone. That, in all of the hardships of his life, was the only thing that made him cry in the middle of the night and crouched down in a corner of an empty alley. He knew that the material was not important and that his ephmeral self was the primary issue at hand. He knew that he merely followed the path that Fate had fortold. What he did not know was why Fate had decreed him to be denied what mattered most in his existance. A car drives by the street light and flings forth the half-eaten remains of a fast food hamburger out onto the pavement. The man in the windbreaker surveys the area quickly before making a sedate walk over to the point where the poorly cooked meat had contacted the ground. With a sudden gesture, the hamburger dissapeared from the ground into a pocket of the windbreaker, with a small piece going directly into the mouth of the man. With a final glance around the area, the windbreaker encloaked man retreated into the shadows of the night.

Zachary Cole Annex sat on his bed, watching T.V. in the middle of the night. A fellow of approximately nineteen years, dressed in casual slacks and a semi-formal shirt, his stubble covered chin contrasted sharply with clothing, but mixed well the empty bottle of powerful licquor that lingered in his hand.