Chapter 1

First, I want to say thank you to all the cool kids (of all ages) who are now following this blog.

Whatever your expectation level is for the contents of the fiction that is about to be presented, I would appreciate you lowering your expectation level several notches.  

“Thirteen” utters a deep male voice as an image showing “XIII” in metallic silver colored roman numerals designed to appear as if they were moving towards the viewer from among clouds of digital fog.  “Military time is one of the few things the military got right” her father used to say.  The image of the roman numerals expands past the boundaries of the screen of her cellular phone.  The screen goes black for a moment reflecting pale gray eyes and a streak of raven black hair cutting across a pale white forehead.  She brushes her hair back behind her ear as the screen brings back the internet browser, which, before being interrupted for the hourly chime, was displaying the entry for “serpent” from the database of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The shoes on her feet feel constricting.  For the last four years she had become far more accustomed to wearing sandals.  Her feet seem to her to have grown larger during that time or at least they are unaccustomed to being constrained.  Now her thoughts began to roam to the Chinese practice of binding a young girl's feet.  Yet her suffering was only minor had nothing to do with cosmetics.  The temperature where she was going would be bad enough with closed toed shoes, making sandals out of the question.

She taps in “binding” to the search field of the OED on her phone as a young man who fills the aisle in the center of the train car walks past her.  She notices that he is wearing a blue Jansport backpack over a black hoodie.  He slouches down into the aisle seat at the other end of the train car facing her.  She notices him using his feet to pinch a large dark bottle that looks small between his large feet as he pulls an iPod out of his backpack.  Putting her ear buds in she starts an album by Adele and skips forward to the second track using her UCSD sweatshirt as both insulation against the hard metal and glass side of the train and pillow. 

She wakes up to the sound of harp strings vibrating in her ears.  Technically these are recordings of harp strings that have been translated by a microphone and computer software into a long string of zeroes and ones, which are right now being translated by the computer software on her smartphone from the language of off and on signals understood by the microprocessor inside her phone to recreate the sound made by the harp in another time quite possibly on another continent.  She pulls the phone from a small pouch on her backpack and notes the time.  She speaks softly into the phone.  “If I have well thy language understood,” begins the deep voice of the Virgil theme for the personal assistant software on her smartphone “you wish to know the weather forecast”.  “Yes” she replies.  The software in the phone has already begun looking up the information and the moment she confirms that this is the information she is looking for, the software displays the dismal news: 43°F is the current temperature with a 30% chance of rain still this evening and overnight there is a 50% chance of snow.  All of this would seem pleasant in comparison to the next day when the expected high temperature would only reach 41°F with a low of 23°F and the chance she would be greeted with falling snow.

Hearing such temperatures made her cold.  Standing up slowly to avoid hitting her head on the storage rack above the seats, she walks to the luggage area at the far end of the car to collect her heavy coat.  Being able to transport two large suitcases in addition to her backpack and a small rolling suitcase made the $103 train fare a relative steal compared to the cost of a one way plane ticket to her new home for the foreseeable future.  An extra $215 for a private sleeping car would have been nice but spending one night in a normal seat would be an experience she could tolerate.  Plus, she reasoned when she bought the ticket, she would be able to spend all of Sunday at the new apartment she had already arranged over the phone from an advertisement on the internet.  While walking down the aisle, the young man plucks his iPod ear buds out with a single yank on the cord and holds a hand over his mouth as he jogs as quickly down the aisle towards her as he can while the train car shakes under his feet.  “Still I want some more, mirrors sideways, who cares what's behind” comes the voice of a man loudly enough through the tiny ear buds for her to hear as she walks past the two seats where the man and his backpack where now laying forgotten.

Carrying her heavy coat back to her seat, she could hear the sound of the man being sick in the restroom of the car only a few rows behind where she sat. 

 

Now it is up to you to choose what should be done next.  Please leave your vote in the Comments section:


A. She uses her smartphone to call ahead to her destination to make sure everything is alright and let the people there know she is on the train and so far all is well.

B. She goes in search of an employee to report that a man in her car is feeling ill.

C. She gets up in search of something to eat for dinner.

In my haste to get the bare bones of the story down in black and white I have neglected to allow my inner editor much time to correct anything more than the most glaring errors present in the first draft of this story.  I suspect that my attempts to maintain the telling of this story using the present tense may have become hindered by my desire to publish this material here by my self imposed deadline of today.  Any lapses into the past tense when not describing memories or events in the fictional world of the story that did occur in the past, as well as any other grammatical errors are the fault of the author.

©Michael Knight 2012.  All rights reserved.