The man in the cashmere coat cast a great fuzzy shadow because the coat was much larger than him. Larger than life. Than his life. Inside it, he squirmed like a snail.

Sometimes the coat was this shell of security. Sometimes it was a cage with iron bars thick as his wrists. The man slithered rather than walked; a pseudopod with a thin turkey neck that left a coiled round hump of shadow and a thin silver slime as a trail.

He thought of the woman in the elevator and how badly he needed her now.