The Girl Who Was Afraid of Waves

Behind the Tracks

The train took a sharp right on the tracks, much to the dismay of the suddenly-disoriented commuters who were on the seven-twenty. It was Friday, and everyone was begging  for the day to finish. In the same crowd stood Michael Sanchez, a twenty-something desk editor for a small, yet moderately-known publishing company, crushed almost at one side of the train cabin that led its way into the central district. He had always dreamt of becoming a writer, but found himself starting as a clerk in the firm in a year’s time, after none of his articles were deemed appropriate, or the least politically correct, for the lowly publishing house’s conservative board of senior editors. It was a blessing he thought now, that he was given editing jobs the least, to make use of what he knew about writing, after he graduated with a degree in English from the local university.

                It was Michael’s last day of work, having resigned just a few weeks ago. His editor, Mr. Sebastian Torres, found it amusing that only after a year of working for the company, this young man had rashly decided to pack his bags. He knew better when he was younger; he worked for a few years as a clerk in the company before he got his first break as a copyeditor five years later, when the youngest among the pool of editors, Louise, who was forty-five then, had a heart attack and Sebastian, having learnt the ropes of editing through him as his apprentice and substitute desk editor for the past few years, took over his stack of articles on the day the middle-aged bloke had to be rushed to the hospital, complaining about chest pains. Louise never made it to the hospital, and Sebastian got a job offer the following print run, and never looked back. Heck, he didn’t even attend Louise’s funeral.

                Michael, on the other hand, could never have been happier with his decision. He grew up in a lowly suburban pueblo that told itself it was a suburb, only to realise later on that it was actually already the outskirts of the city he went to school at. Michael never really liked his teachers; all of them drummed tons of routinely structured exercises down their throats, never batting an eyelid even though one or two of the children would not keep up with the dictation drills all day long. Today was his happiest day, Michael thought. No amount of train schedule delay, or inundated cabins to say the least, would stop him from enjoying his last at the office, not even Sebastian, who would probably be breathing at the back of his neck for the entirety of this Friday.

 Sebastian was a privileged child, to a certain extent. For one, he was a city boy, having had lived in a small two-room flat at the heart of the city. The building stood a towering fifteen storeys high, and shone a harsh crimson glow over the street, partly due to the semi-polished bricks that had eroded as time whipped the building’s walls. In the morning, his block was filled with the bustling sounds of cars honking and children complaining about going to the nearby school, and at night, prostitutes ruled the sidewalks, shouting profanities to passersby and prospective customers, as they cupped their breasts to entice the men who flocked the streets with liquor at hand and money at their disposal.

                The son of a bank accountant and a seamstress, Sebastian was an only child. Lanky and awkward, he felt it was his duty to keep the house sane, not only for himself, but for his parents who quarreled more often than his mother made dinner. His father’s drinking and womanising had reached their own zeniths more often than not, much to the dismay of his mother. Because of the constant quarreling, Sebastian’s parents often took him to his Aunt Lucia, a spinster who had more money than Sebastian had in his emptied mayonnaise bottle which he turned into a piggy bank of sorts. She was a towering wrinkly woman, as Sebastian could remember, and she lived atop a towering building three blocks away from their flat.

                Her house was nothing unusual, except that her flat had its own library, that stretched from one corner to the other, wrapping an entire room with pages of accounting, physics, Greek mythology, Jules Verne and romance. Sebastian found himself humbled by these pages; with these, he believed himself to be privileged, regardless of whether this aunt asked him to sweep off her silver hair scattered on the kitchen floor, or scrub the bathroom walls while she was still in the toilet bathing, whenever he dropped by to read.