The smoke rose in the early dark and hung there beneath the sodium lights like something summoned. He stood on the sidewalk over a grill no bigger than a suitcase and watched the meat char and spit. The coals beneath glowed the color of a dying sun.

Traffic passed. The light changed green to red to green again. No one stopped.

He turned the skewers with his bare fingers and did not flinch. His hands were calloused and cracked and he had done this ten thousand times before and would do it ten thousand times again. He wore a Lakers cap pulled low and his breath plumed white in the cold and vanished. Behind him the strip center stood half dark. A laundromat. A botanica. Steel grates pulled down over glass.

A woman crossed from the bus stop carrying plastic bags that strained at their handles. She stopped and held up two fingers and did not speak. He pulled two skewers and wrapped them in foil and she gave him folded bills from her coat and walked on into the dark.

He did not advertise. There was no sign. The smoke itself was the sign. The smell of it carrying across the boulevard like a message from some older world where men still cooked over fire and stood in the cold and waited and asked permission of no one.

He spat into the gutter and turned the meat. The coals shifted and sparked and sent up a constellation of embers that rose and died against the black.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​