A Bit of Story

Happy Thanksgiving, Friends!

I was exploring in Word and found a snippet of fiction I thought it would be fun to post. I've never done this on my blog before, but there's a first time for everything. This is from a WIP (entitled Isabelle Tuesday) that is currently on hold while I'm working on something else. Isabelle is not one of the point-of-view characters-- she is more like the stone that makes the ripples in the lives of the others. Here is the POV of one of those lives, Taggart Pike, professor:

My goal was to change the world. I was never one for underachieving. I recognize it now as an ego-centric goal—assuming I could somehow save humanity and all that. But I was young, and my world was big, and I was still under the impression people wanted to change.

I’m sitting in the dingy light of an all-night taqueria on Independece Avenue, writing my story onto the empty side of a stack of paper placemats. I bought them, along with a burrito and a cerveca, forty minutes ago from a confused slip of a girl—Honduran, I’d guess, No Anglais—for twenty bucks, keep the change.

The place still smells of cigarette smoke, even though smoking is no longer allowed in Kansas City restaurants. To me, it is the scent of desperation. Mine, not theirs.

The words have suddenly stopped flowing, and it occurs to me that I’m even failing at my own confession. I want to put my pen down, to rip up the things I’ve already written, to come up with some answers instead of all these questions. But if I stop now, will I ever be able to begin again?

A slow Spanish love song begins crooning over the stereo. I glance up at the jukebox, where a woman leans provocatively against the side. She shifts her hip against the machine and lets one thin strap slide a bit down a round shoulder that, by any appropriate measure, should have more covering it. Her eyes catch me looking, and she inclines her head. Void of make-up except for penciled-in eyebrows and darkened lips, she is of indeterminate age and race.

I look down at the table in front of me, focusing on the grip my hand makes on the pen. I refuse to let it go.

I feel, more than see, the woman cross the room. It’s something in the way my chest tightens—not with desire, but disgust, apprehension, the very sort of self-righteous disdain that made Isabelle leave me in the first place. In my peripheral vision I catch the woman sliding into the booth opposite mine, crossing a bare leg, bouncing a high-heeled foot. I turn my head the slightest bit and watch her foot, browned and misshapen with too much time walking in shoes that don’t fit. The foot stills, and I glance up to find her watching me, curiosity and probably greed lighting her eyes.

“You just gonna watch all night?”

I look away, as if somehow a scant four feet away, I hadn’t heard, and take a long, tasteless drag of the now-warm Mexican beer. I shouldn’t have come. I scrape up the makeshift papers and stand.

The woman slides forward a little as if she plans on joining me.

“No,” I say, though I wish I could say more, could say what Isabelle would say. Have I learned nothing in all this time?

The EXIT sign glows red, the same way it did thirteen years ago when Isabelle Tuesday walked out that same, scarred door into a world that didn’t deserve her. The night she said she couldn’t marry me.

This night feels darker though, like it’s shaded by the weight of a world I can’t see. Because finally, I am beginning to understand why she went.