William Royden

It bunched awkwardly around him and draped down almost to the ground.

He moved only his head, turning it very, very slowly toward the sound of a courting voice.

He looked to be only in his twenties with long, unwashed hair.

Cording spoke to him for almost five minutes.

More and more I noticed how awfully pale the man's skin was, drained of all color, almost a light gray hue.

When Cording stood and walked back towards me and the camera, leaving the man to sit undisturbed, he seemed furious.

He said nothing to me as he passed me.

I got one last shot of the man on the bench and then kept up with Cording.

The man's head was cocked back and he gazed at the sky.

Cording went only as far as the closest bus stop.

He said he had something to do.

A bus came quickly and we got on board.

Cording asked the driver if it went straight down Lawrence Street.

I could have told him that it did.

This was the same bus, the A3, that I had taken home from school sometimes when I was growing up.

We traveled about a mile and then got off the bus in a lower-income residential neighborhood called Glendon.

We walked deep into it, past modular houses and a few trailer homes, until the road simply ran out.

There was a small green house beside the dead end.

Its lawn was overgrown, and no one had yet made any attempt to rake the fall leaves out of it.

Cording crossed the lawn quickly and strode up to the front door.