THE BENCH

Rain is the ultimate inevitability in New Orleans, even moreso than tourists and the smell of urine. It knows no mercy. It can't be bribed or bargained with, especially by myself. I had very little to barter with and couldn't even mortgage the bus stop bench where I resided. What little I owned was stuffed in a backpack and wrapped around my neck for fear it'd be stolen if I managed to sleep. The shivering, however, usually remedied my slumber.
The bench was your typical concrete and wooden slat style bench found at most bus stops in New Orleans. Because of many years of precipitation and humidity, the wood had become gnarled and splintered, almost cruel to the touch. It could seat two uncomfortably, three even less comfortably. It could fit one very uncomfortable homeless catnapper.
Though I initially hated and resented the bench, it was the only reliable thing in my life at the time. It seemed no amount of rain could move it; it was as inevitable as the regular showers.
A few years later I learned the rain finally won. A hurricane scraped it up with its windy claws and cast it through an apartment window across the street. Garbage men carried away its corpse. I wasn't notified. I remember going back to see the iron rods that once anchored the mighty bench poking through the sidewalk, like arthritic earthworms, still shocked the bench was gone. I was also shocked that it upset me so, and unusually shocked it had been my home for so, so long.