Virgil leaned back on the park bench, jacket buttoned against the wind that, rather disconcertingly, went right through him, while the weak summer sun shone on overhead. To distract himself from the faint whistling produced as the breeze invaded his hollow crevices, he decided to indulge in an old hobby of his. People-watching was a lot easier when you were as forgettable as he was. Of course 30 seconds of speculation gave him poor odds of coming anywhere near the truth; but then again, who cares about the truth compared to a good story?
The first one to catch his eye is a man in a very nice suit, pushing through the slow stream of people taking this route. Not a rare story this, but it had enough irony to compensate. Here was high-flying executive, seasoned with the liberal dashes of narcassism and sociopathy needed to pay for those suits. But he is here, and in a hurry, instead of the the air-conditioned interior of some hunk of german metal. Therefore we can presume he cannot access his car, opening up a whole variety of oportunities. maybe it was alcohol, maybe a moment of egotistical madness made him decide that the rules of the road were for little people. None portray him in a particularly pleasant light; but the point of this isn't empathy, it's catharsis. If he wanted to empathise, he'd go and have a chat with the ghost of the expired junkie he'd seen floating around here recently.
He shook his head, and his immaterial lips pulled back in a small, self-depicating smile. No, he wasn't quite so desperate for company that he'd resort to the dead. Besides, the ones that stick around don't tend to make very good conversation. He raised his head from it's introspective slump, and started to look for another interesting person.
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