Richard was leaving a shopping center carrying two bags of groceries when he noticed a man about seven-foot-tall, but his height was minimized due to a horrible slouched over posture and a hunch in his back. The man was digging through a garbage inches from his car and pulled out a moldy piece of bread.
“Disgusting.” Richard mumbled under his breath and climbed into his car. The man slammed the bread against the driver’s side window. With his other hand, he knocked his knuckle on the glass.
“Trade this with me for what you bought good sir?” The man said. His face was covered with the hood of his black jacket and thick wire-like strands of black hair, but Richard was able to see his skin was eerily transparent enough to see the veins on his forehead.
“No thank you.”
The man smiled. Despite his outward appearance, his teeth were straight and white. “You won’t be sorry.” He said once more and pressed the bread harder leaving green and brown mold stains on the window.
“I said no. Get out of the way.” Richard shouted and turned his car on. The man’s smile vanished. His deep brown eyes surrounded by bloodshot scleras grew wide.
Even if he had to run over the man’s toes in the process, Richard put the car in reverse and quickly peeled out of the parking lot. “Damn buzzard.” The way that man glared at him sent chills throughout his body and sweat under his pits.
Once Richard made a good distance from the grocery store parking lot, he exhaled a sigh of a relief and called his wife. He told her she was on his way home and it was a good time to start preheating the oven for dinner. On the other end, she heard something off in the sound of his voice.
“Sounds like you were being chased.”
Richard was the first to stop at a red light. “No. Some buzzard crept me out earlier.”
“Oh really?” His wife said with a laughter. “What did he look like?”
Richard’s heart nearly beat through his breastbone and a sharp gasp cramped his right lung. Across the street, standing on the corner and digging through a garbage can was the same man from the shopping center parking lot. No one around him seemed to even notice what he was doing. No one except Richard. The man pulled out a molding apple core, turned towards Richard, and waved the rotting fruit in the air.
“Trade me!” The buzzard shouted and started out in the middle of the street. “You won’t be sorry!”
Richard slammed on the gas pedal. He didn’t see the semi-truck coming at him from the side and with a power force in speed and the impact killed him instantly. Some pedestrians screamed while others ran to assist. Witness from their cars were frozen at the intersection. The man ate the apple core and walked off.
