So much happened within that single minute.

Within that minute, as I walk downhill towards the fourth Starbucks I passed that day, a man with an umbrella at hand crossed the street while looking skyward. I said hello to him only to be answered by a fearful glance. Big pale blue eyes looked back at me in fear as if I were the devil himself.

The man wore a top hat and a suit while I wore slacks and a dress shirt. He smelt of the pearliest soap while I stunk of the magical clouds from marijuana. The words he had said made my life turn around. “Be gone, minion of Satan.” He said as stood in the middle of the road. A white beard touched his chest covered in a white undershirt. He looked as if he were dressed to go to a funeral but there was no funeral home around for miles.

I put my hand up, a sign of peace to many foreign people. I opened my mouth to correct him and tell him he had me all wrong.

A bus barely missed him and sat still in front of him. I covered my mouth in cowardice and backed up. The man stood still, staring into my eyes. It felt as if he had laser vision, he could have stared right through me and my entity.

Another distracted driver was shocked to see the man standing in the middle of the road. The brakes were stepped on too lately and slowed to a halt with the finely dressed man pinned behind the truck and the taxi cab.

He sat on the ground with his umbrella scraping the asphalt. His blue eyes closed in rest and a trickle of blood made its way off of his left lower corner of his lip. Yet the car was still going. The driver was frozen in fear and shock.

I watched with fearful eyes. I had the eyes of a newborn deer. Yet I was drawn to watch the outcome. I was a teenage boy finding his fathers’ playboys for the first time in the closet. I couldn’t pull my eyes away.

His face turned incarnated and almost purple. His head popped like an unwanted zit on the face of a teenager soon to go to prom. An eruption of blood spurts forward and splattered the black of the bus and the windshield of the taxi cab. A few specks of blood stained my clothes.

I jumped back and tried my hardest to shake free of the droplets although they had made their home in my shirt. I didn’t want this dead guy’s blood on me.

I took off my shirt and revealed to the world what paleness the sun had evaded since summer. I danced the wave of goose bumps that had overtaken my body. Every miniscule stub of beard stuck right up. I backed up.

A few witnesses that had seen approached the scene, drawn to the sickly exposed innards of the old guy. None paid attention to me. They were like relentless orange ladybirds drawn to heat light.

The old guy sat there, lifelessly with his skin sagging like an old rag. I was afraid. Was I really a minion? I felt myself growing queasy and ran to the closest place where I could sit down – Starbucks.

The workers looked at me, utterly confused and awkward to serve me. One unaware of the recent occurrence. Even had the nerve to say, “No shirt – no service!” The other licked the whipped cream off of her fingers. The third looked at me with suspicion.

I ordered a coffee and instructed them to make it as dark as possible and flinched whenever the bell jingled, signaling a customer’s entrance.