The Book of Winshire

Autumn: Chapter One

Outside this one cosy, superseded coffee house in the middle of a diffident-looking town, the scene was ironically gaudy. The trivial bellowing and hailing of the children in the school bus passing by, for God’s sake, it wasn’t impossible that they had wakened the whole neighbourhood up in the finger-snapping of three, tw—wait.

There were these handsome males and elegant females, in suits and blouses respectively paired with trousers, trying to race with their spaces and times as successful as they had picked up with the buses and cabs on the road. The mobility motto of the town is: ‘Carpool or bus? Neither. Take the tube.’ But honestly, the residents thought carpooling is even more frugal than driving alone, or any of the examples mentioned.

Whilst on the other side of the hectic (that was this pavement just outside The coffee House), an older male, possibly a grandfather to five grandchildren, was peeking in to the paper bags he had taken out. He glanced at the sight and chuckled at the subsequent beings. When he was around their age, he was having his year-of-life days. The rolled newspaper under his sleeve was tossed upwards, and his eyes proudly tailed the motion as a young lady walked past his flashback.

As for the lass, she didn’t look exactly happy about life at this very moment. Her face and the impetus of every pace her feet took, they brought a clear bang bang swerve my presence’s warning.

Anyone could tell if her head was completely spinning, and confusion was reigning over her, because her face was telling the rigidity of her attempt to muse and stay on what she was reading: be it with the dots of writings in the gazetteer (she still couldn’t believe that they had one for this place) in her in her dainty hands, or the sound of words raging before her ears.

*

Patiently fighting the urge to tearing off the book she was carrying, she half-tossed and then shoved it in to her wide-opened sling-bag. A sigh of freedom killed the grimace upon her face. In the middle of taking another step, a familiar scent of an enemy abruptly negated her intention to independently wander.

It wired her who disliked caffeine even at its best, if a cliché grandé of macchiato mightn’t hurt. Perhaps it would be just at the effective stake to keep the weary-eyed human that was her, to stay absurdly awake, even though it was already half-eight in the morning.

But despite her grandiose moment of standing in the doorway and blocking people, none of those options managed to be an utter rusher for her to just go ahead and hold on to a three-hours-of-headache later at night. Instead, she gawked through the clear-glass panels and hesitated.

*

Inside, a feature of a busy elfin fellow was seen mixing powders in a teacup. September had always been occupied, but it made him happy because it indicated that before the end of this year, he’d get to buy something more on Christmas for his family and friends than what he could afford since. The owner of the place he was currently working at had promised him a better pay when he last visited it there for some renovation early that week.

 (The owner: He had two of the same business which one, indeed, was his second shot that ran in a sophisticated city where he chose to live with his family and newly-born second daughter. But it was always acknowledged by the dwellers of his effort trying to make more time for his workers here as more than just the ‘employer-employees.’ He once joked that if he was unmarried or unengaged to any particular relationship, this town would be his choice of his solitary lifestyle. He couldn’t deny if those gentlemen who served at his house had attracted quite an amount of customers whom he had never known were living in the same town. In fact, some of them even came from states he had never heard of, all just to try their lucks on his house’s statements. By any chance, he was precisely the lucky one in his own story.)