There was something mostly feral about him.

Perhaps not really, probably not really, but he had small prune-pit eyes in a spreading marzipan of visage, and a mean little mouth, clenched like a dog’s anus, a kind of mouth that was quite alarmingly out of scale, opening out of his flaccid face.

He was sitting across from me in the subway car and he was contending with a book. As he concentrated on his page, which happened only sporadically, he pursed his mouth into a tense little knot. His eyes, already lost in the uninflectable vastness of his face, grew somehow smaller and tighter. He skulked and scowled over his book, as he were a dog just given an old bone: his book seemed not so much a prize as simply a possession. It acted as if he didn’t want it very much, but now that he had it, why goddammit, he was going to keep it close.

I was naturally curious about what he was reading, and shifted and leaned a bit in my seat in order to try to spot the cover. He seemed somehow to know that I would do this and looked up angrily, his eyes narrowing, his eyebrows raised, quickened by something like alarm. He was like a hungry but guilty animal maniacally guarding its kill. I quickly pretended to be looking at something else, and, mollified, he returned to the agon of his book.

Intent now upon knowing what he read, I tried once again to see past his beefy fists to read the cover. He looked up again just as I craned my neck to get a better view.

Then he stared at me malevolently, knotted his features, tightened his mouth even further. His eyes grew small and yellow like peanuts. And he growled.