3WW #27

Welcome to Three Word Wednesday.

Each week, I will post three (or more) random words. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write something using all of those words. It can be a few lines, a story, a poem, anything. This is a writing exercise. It doesn't have to be perfect. The idea is to let your mind wander and write what it will. I'll also attempt to write something using the same three words.

Leave a comment if you participate.

This week's words are:
Hoarse
Bended
Downtown

As Grant strode down the sidewalk, downtown was coming alive. Music from inside the bars wafted out into the avenue and blended with voices to create a spirited feel. Yet it was all just background noise to him, save for the occasional boisterous laugh or someone yelling a name.

Grant had never liked the lights or the crowds before. But now they represented a distraction. An escape from the loneliness and deafening silence of home. Something to take his mind off of her. But it never lasted.

Eventually, thoughts of her would return. And he would remember the last night he saw her. The fight. Her voice hoarse from crying.

Then he would remember how they began. He didn't understand how something that seemed so perfect could turn bad. How black and white become gray, straight becomes twisted, and clear becomes murky. And he had never been any good at putting things back together once they came apart.

He had come here every night for two months. Either to remember or to forget. He knew the streets so well, he could walk them with his eyes closed. And sometimes it seemed as if he did.

He passed O'Malley's, Jupiter, The Bended Elbow, and the tattoo parlor. Then on the corner was the old man who was there every weekend, always wearing the same winter coat, even though it was June, telling anyone who would hear him that Jesus was coming soon.

Some nights Grant would think, "Not soon enough." Other nights he would pray for more time. But he always dropped a dollar in the old man's bucket. Just in case.

"My shadow's the only one that walks beside me. My shallow heart's the only thing that's beating..."