Wow, it's been a while, eh? I'm a little rusty but I've warmed my fingers on this one. Let me know what you think, should I give up writing? You want more of The Builder? You want more flash fiction pieces? Let me know. Drop me a line. I've missed you people. All of you. Yeah, you, just you, just my one and only reader.
***
One could say it was frigidly cold, one could say it was it was just windy – she really couldn’t tell what it was when it came to talking about the weather. Really, one could just say it was fucking cold and move away from the whole awkward situation. She wished, if only for a minute, she had studied meteorology and knew all the buzz words linked to the weather. She often asked herself if anyone had ever really mastered the art of talking about the weather.
Completely absorbed in her own thoughts about the weather, almost like an autistic, she walked down the crowded street, ears plugged with earphones blaring techno music with her head hung low and her back pack pulled high to give her a hunched, almost ogre-ish gait. She travelled alone most of the time and knew all the tricks, how to make herself look like a homeless person, how to appear menacing at the worst of times, how to look bigger than she actually is, fooling one into believing she was actually a man – she knew it all.
Underneath the ugly, tasteless and worst of all, heavy jacket, she was really quite beautiful; a sharp nose, perfectly straight teeth, high cheek bones, inquisitive brown eyes, shoulder-length black hair and a shapely body to boot. She bordered on breath-taking. When she wasn’t pretending to be a ghoul men had walked up to her and told her that she was gorgeous, and if they didn’t, they looked their fill and gave her approving glances. She felt their eyes on her – every time.
Most girls should be flattered, they should be proud to have men look at them with such adoration. She was flattered, really, but not while she was commuting home. One could never be too careful. It was still early in the evening and orange clouds were slowly turning purple. She knew every inch of the path she walked; each crack, every crevice, the mountains of cigarettes that either grew or shrank depending on whether or not the cleaners had cleared them – she knew it all.
As she turned the corner, the corner she had turned hundreds of times, she felt the sizzle in the air. Something was different about it. She was drawn back to her schizophrenic ruminations about not being able to describe the weather accurately. She felt herself shiver and knew it wasn’t the weather that had changed. She realised today would not be like other days, today something would change.
Pulling her frayed collar closer, her eyes darting around furtively, the sound of her footsteps softening; she tried to feel out the cause of the sudden interruption of peace. Nothing. Almost as though it was the scene from a movie, the trees had suddenly stopped waving around in the breeze. She found herself on the home stretch – she was in suburbia already. The air crackled with some nameless of tension. It seemed the crowd she had started walking with had shrunk, and eventually one by one the pedestrians had walked away or diverged.
She knew better than to wave this feeling off, the air was crackling with some strange tension. If only she didn’t live so far. The bus stop was close by. She figured she’d stop walking, take the bus and somehow change the course of events that could possibly happen. What evil lay waiting for her on the road home? She wondered if skipping the walk and having the bus drop her off a little closer to home might help. She dug her hand into her pocket and turned the music down low – before deciding to shuffle the songs over and listen to something a little less raucous.
A sad song started playing as she rounded the bus stop and perched herself on the metal bench. It was just so quiet. It was so deserted. She knew something was about to happen, but couldn’t, for the life of her, figure out what it was. She likened it to the feeling you get when you’re just about to ram your car into the car in front of you at the traffic light. You know you need to stop but you keep going anyway – until something happens. Laughing at the thought of a minor vehicular collision, she relaxed a little. The previously orange-purple sky had now turned dark. A small streetlight lit the immediate area around her. The air smelled like rain was about to fall, like grass had just been cut, like children had played nearby.
The bus was not due for another twenty minutes, but she didn’t want to tempt fate by continuing her walk home. She would wait for the bus, where it was safe, where there was a street light, where there was a playground nearby, where there was a strange form moving behind the trees...
