{i miss paper letters}

Barry was incapable of trust.  He trusted no one.  And as a result, people found it difficult to trust him.  Relationships were rough, and most of the girls who’d shown any sort of interest in him had been given the brush-off because he never trusted the reasons they gave for liking him.  Nobody knew why he was the way he was, and it was in all likelihood that Barry himself couldn’t even remember.  But he was “an old dog, and would not be learning new tricks any time soon”, never mind that Barry was only twenty-eight—he didn’t.

Barry liked to take the subway all the way from Flushing to Coney Island.  In order to avoid traveling through Manhattan—which he avoided at all costs since he didn’t trust Manhattanites—he would hop the G, and then transfer to the F at Church Avenue.  For a while he’d halted this practice, due to a traumatic experience during the Mermaid Parade, but he’d eventually gotten over that, though he’d since added mermaids of all kinds to his growing list of the “untrustworthy”.

On this particular day he’d emerged from the train in a remarkably good mood.  It was one of the first nice days (he didn’t trust nice days; they usually turned bad as soon as you got the chance to enjoy them) and he was determined to spend his time outside.  He walked along the avenue, trying to repress his hatred of the “new & improved” amusements.  He recalled reading somewhere that the rides from many of the now defunct parks were to be sent down Mexico and reassembled, probably to much less stringent if any safety regulations; Barry didn’t trust the Mexicans.  But enough about that now, the sun was warm and there weren’t too many gulls around . . .

Barry had enjoyed a Nathan’s Famous just before it he did it.  The others standing around along the boardwalk could later offer the officers no leads as to the cause of what had occurred.  One lady said he had been yelling at the top of his lungs, but she hadn’t caught what he’d been saying.  A man who’d been behind him in line at the hot-dog stand said he’d seemed perfectly normal while interacting with the teenaged cashier, though he did seem a little paranoid.

I just took him for a man suspicious of his head, the rubber-necker stated for the record.