CAUTION

[ReDSeX]

Old man Thomas had been dead for more than a week and no one knew about it until they took some yellow tape and bandaged his door frame like an open wound.
I like yellow tape. Especially the ones that have the big bold letters -- the special kind that the cops use to ward off anyone trying to take a gander of whatever the tape is hiding. Its impenetrable. I've never seen a strip broken or torn; it has that presence about it. They get a bright, piss-in-your-face-yellow, and they expect people to ignore it. To walk by it completely unphased by that black omen, CAUTION, only to have it beckoning a bystander to take a look.
10 days! Isn't that unbelievable? You'd think someone would've noticed sooner from the stink. From what I knew of him, Mr. Thomas was a lonely man. A loser. A dead beat with no relatives or children. No one cared about him, but as soon as that tape flies up on his door, everyone pretends to give a shit.
"He was such a nice person."
"What a great fellow."
"Poor bastard. . ."
And they'd all trail off as if they knew him, looking down at their feet trying to look sympathetic, trying to find something nice to say just cause he's dead. Maybe they knew that petty crap, like his favorite color was orange or that his favorite animal was a Giraffe. Or maybe that he enjoyed walking down the streets of the suburban neighborhoods at night, reminiscing about the good times of his life. Sometimes he and his wife took their kids to the park to play football.
Me and the rest of his neighbors look down the hallway leading into his apartment, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever treasures lay in wait past his front door. They're all thinking about what dark secrets Mr. Thomas might have. Something sick, like a severed limb. They don't see the memories hung on the walls or the ones framed atop his desk. No one sees the pictures of Richard Thomas the night before he shipped off to Nam. Him and each of his buddies have a cold one raised in farewell. They're in some bar in Tahiti, smiling for the camera, caught in the last moment. His neighbors don't see the pictures of him and his wife and how she smiled as he held her tight in her arms, or how his children climbed on his shoulders trying to monkey their way into the photo.
I want to say that I was the exception. The person that knew better. I want to be the person that could confidently say that Richard Thomas was a veteran and a hero; a good father; a good husband.
But no one takes picture of how Richard Thomas lost his wife to a man armed with a beer bottle. I'll never know that his children never bother to call him - that they don't want to admit that their father is this broken hack of a man. I couldn't say that Richard Thomas was a shameful piece of shit and that the world is a better place without him.
I can't, cause I'll never know. I can only stand on the outside of apartment door, held at bay by a flimsy piece of tape, trying to get some carnival glimpse of a dead man. It must be so easy to break the barrier, to peer into their private asylum. Pathetic. It takes a tragedy to know a man, that stranger in the street that's lying half dead on the pavement. But we don't notice him, do we? We don't want to know him.
Its only when I'm standing at the edge of a yellow strip of tape, beckoned and held at bay by CAUTION, do I finally care.