Tea lights

He had bought the candles in the two euro shop. He'd spent weeks fishing jam jars out of rubbish bins to put them in. Now he sat on the pavement, surrounded by half a dozen flickering tea lights, and a certain peace fell about him. He watched the moths, bobbing like puppets out of the gloom towards the flames. Closer and closer they came, until their dusty little wings were cremated and they fell to their frazzled deaths.
How many weeks had he been sleeping on the streets now? He couldn't tell. He'd stopped scratching a tally on the flagstones. The other street folk knew him by name now (though not his real one) and he knew some of theirs too. He was able to match their weathered faces to the nicknames: old johnny, smiler, butters. Soon, he thought, he would become one of them: he'd take on the same scraggly beards, the same downtrodden, hardened demeanour. He already had his own patch, in the doorway of the post office. It used to belong to one of the oldies, Jim, but one morning when the staff came to open up for the day there Jim was, cold and lifeless on the concrete.
He had his own routine now, too. He got up at dawn when the seagulls flew in from the shore to the rooftops. He'd pick up the cardboard bed and blankets and stow them away somewhere safe, a bush or an alley way. Then he would wind his way through the back streets of the old quarter of the city, where the tourists went out at night. There, he knew of several restaurants whose bins he could raid for food. If he was lucky, he'd find the fat off a steak, or a spud. On a good day there'd be something sweet, a piece of sponge or the corner of a waffle.
Meanwhile the day would be breaking and the windows of the buildings, so ghostly at night, would begin to reflect the peachy tones of sunrise. People spilled out of trains and buses onto the streets. Cyclists swerved to avoid them. Shops lifted their metal grilles and blared their music out to passers by. Offices hummed to life and their inhabitants sipped on burned coffee and wished they were still in bed. Or at least he imagined they did.
He'd had a job once. And even a car. And now, as he watched the world wake up, he wondered what had come of it all.