In the foreground, Kaitlyn ambled down the esplanade with an itch in her step. It might have been her fuzzy pink coat, or her sense of impending something that was causing her delicious grief. Most often this itch wormed out of her skin in disappointment, as it was rare that anything happened to her. That’s at least how it had been for some time.

She rested her arms on the balustrade and took in the sparkle of the windows across the water. Not so high highrises reached up into the darkening sky, their blocky shapes dotted with green lights and empty mischief. Bridges sprinkled across the water as far as the eye could see, a mass of rusted metal and concrete of all colors weaving in and out and over one another.

A city full of bridges and nowhere meaningful to escape across them. Just a sad half-itch and a loneliness that seeped cold and wet into the space between her synapses.

She turned around and leaned back, beholding the warehouse district within which she worked four days a week. It was all rust and chipping paint, wails of trains and people, broken glass and graffiti. She had become a slave to the place, but still found herself longing for it in the way that kidnap victims were told to have longed for their captors.

It was in the warehouse district that she had lost her spirit.

She even remembered how it happened. She had been on one of these walks on another fuchsia evening, and she had accidentally looked down an open manhole. Her eyes fixed on a reddish sparkle in the water, and then her soul had sucked out with a whoosh, falling in like rushing water then splashing at the bottom. She remembered being surprised at having felt no pain, nor any shock at the little sparkle of teeth grinning from a reflection in the glistening sewage. She looked up; no one was standing over her shoulder.

Then she realized the night had suddenly turned black. And thus, without any ado at all she stepped away, put her hands in her pocket, and went home.

This was the first time she had recalled the occurrence, and the sudden appearance of the memory startled her.

Or could it have been what was happening two benches down from where she was standing?

A homeless man was nestled in the corner of the bench, drawing his dirty blankets up about himself at the onset of a brisk wind. His plastic bags rustled, and his shopping cart twitched, bumping into a metal slat on the bench. Standing over him was a hunched and spindly thing of a man.

She couldn't see his face, but she could see reddish brown hair spiking off in a multitude of swirls and points... And could those spikes be horns?

Before she could register her shock, the lithe figure circled the old man, his ghostly white face coming into view and glowing in the purplish light. His sinewy impossible stretch of a mouth was contorted in thoughtful concentration. He held a tool aloft, slender, metallic, glistening with the reflection of his scarlet hair.

A knife? She inched forward with anxious anticipation, afraid to move too quickly, but afraid if she did not move that something terrible might happen.

Just as she did, the wire man's eyes darted aloft, taking her in. The whites of his eyes were black and his ivory irises encircled a little spot of a pupil. His grin twisted upward maliciously, curling into a spiral at the edges. His lips parted like a curtain opening over a tragic comedy, revealing two rows of perfect, white teeth.

She froze. The dark picture of her demise flashed across her mind's eye, sticky wet blood splattering across the rough pavement.

But the man just went back to his affairs. He twirled the instrument around the homeless man's head with purpose, as if he were gathering noodles around the end.

Kaitlyn's stomach sank as she realized the homeless man, nor the multitude of passers by, even saw the spindly man in action. But she did.

Her curiosity got the best of her, and she inched forward, step by itchy step, watching in amazement as the tool revealed itself to be a shiny, silver pen. And what the man was collecting was a stringy series of sentences, all oozing out of the homeless man’s cranium.

With purpose, the gangly man collapsed like a sack of satin to the floor and began to unravel the words on the pavement. As she looked on, she realized that the words were not in English, but in a rune-like script that glowed and pulsated.

Certain words were larger than others. With his pen he sucked up the larger words, one by one, then pulled out from the waist pocket of his vest a spiral notebook. He casually flipped it open, revealing a clean black page, then proceeded to jot his collections down with the silver pen.

That same grin flashed across his countenance as he looked down on the page. With his head still turned down, one eye meandered to the side and looked at her, the impossible smirk twisting up next to it. Her body became rigid with fear.

A loud crash caused her to jump, and she turned her head to see that the homeless man had leapt from the bench, knocking the shopping cart over in his flurry. He ran past her, overcome with emotion, ripping his clothes off article by article. She spun to watch his journey as he ran down the embankment, rolling ungracefully down rocks and dirt and dead branches, completely nude save for a dirty pair of underwear. Then he jumped into the Willamette River, splashing and shouting like a little boy.

When Kaitlyn turned to see if the wire man was still there, she was greeted by an empty spot on the sidewalk. Except, there was something left behind, a glowing word on the concrete.

She ambled toward it, while everyone else rushed past her toward the balustrade to watch the homeless man reclaim his inner child.

The word on the ground was a name, and it was in English.

Mephisto.

This was not the last time Kaitlyn would see him in action. And even from the very beginning, for some reason she could not name, Kaitlyn felt responsible for his mischief.