II.
Edgar Vargas had finally gotten off of work.
As he made his way down the curling backalleys, Edgar sighed, his thoughts blurred into dull repetition from a day of filing charts, entering data, and answering phones. Being a clerical worker at a mental hospital was no fun, really, but at least he could catch some interesting bits of conversation once in a while—regular hospitals were stockpiles of death and contagion; at least some of the patients at Edgar's hospital had something to say other than the grating complaints and sobbing of the terminally sane, even if it was mostly nonsense.
Besides, he needed the money if he was ever going to have a hope of paying off med school and becoming… whatever it was that he wanted to become.
He didn't quite want to be a doctor, since his empathetic nature put patients on a level more personal than he was comfortable with, and if he wanted to be truly honest with himself, Edgar didn't feel like he had much of a place anywhere.
He had a nagging suspicion that his part-time job at the hospital was going to last far longer than he had initially anticipated. He would settle down into the clockwork stresses and minimal rewards of employment, foolishly planning his escape from it all until the inevitable day when he would end up in one of the hospitals.
Privately, Edgar would place his bet on the asylum.
He knew what he was good at—he was fairly adept at the violin, though not well enough to make a career out of it, he was a formidable chess player, (albeit an out-of-practice one,) and he could write, but this talent usually manifested itself in the form of one of the more unprofitable genres such as flash-fiction or poetry. He would concede that he was intelligent, but that didn't make him an interesting person, he thought despondently, kicking at a bit of unearthed asphalt.
Edgar went on with his bitter musings for some time; he was at heart an optimist, but his current situation was doing its best to wipe that out.
As did his surroundings, for that matter. The spindly shadows of fire escapes criss-crossed the narrow byways, sparsely illuminated by the moth-coated streetlights which punctuated the main roads, and Edgar shivered as the October leaves that blew in from the suburbs rasped across his path. He turned down a particularly unfriendly-looking alley, daring himself to be a bit more… well, daring.
Suddenly, a blackened streetlight sputtered back to life, transforming the backstreet from its prior subterranean darkness to a more navigable muted grey.
It was soon after this additional light source presented itself that Edgar realized he was not alone in the alley. His anxiety-heightened senses allowed him to detect the thin, guttural sound of labored breathing, which, to Edgar's alarm, seemed to be coming from a dumpster, beside which a suspicious-looking puddle had formed. Despite his immediate desire to flee, Edgar crept forward, tentatively nearing the pile of angular black and red which occupied the space beside the puddle, expecting to find a car-stricken dog.
What he discovered when he reached out toward the shape nearly shocked him into recoiling altogether, and for a few moments his hand rested atop the other's crooked hand which trailed out, no longer human but some sort of failed experiment, a strange hybrid lying folded in on itself, part wounded bird, part something else entirely, a pigeon with ruined wings dragging in the dirt.
Edgar moved to bring the other man further into the dim light (he knew that moving someone in such a state of obvious medical distress was a horrible idea, but he was consumed with morbid curiosity,) and without warning a large grey eye opened halfway to greet him. "Wh…" the other man started, and instantly, Edgar knew what the rest of the sentence was intended to be:
"Why are humans so unpleasant?"