Cadet at the city of Metropolis' prestigious military academy, Dusk Lancaster on the outside was a man to envy. Yet, behind his uniform, a beast having lost his compass thrived on the thrill of bloody duels, whilst the orphaned shoeshine boy he once...
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February 23rd 549 days to the miracle. Out in the street.
“Dang it’s freezing!” Frost heard someone saying. Bystanders grumping over the continuous downturn in weather conditions.
Putting on the scarf the Madam had made her, the girl waited by the sidewalk, the way she always used to, waiting for him with an angst filled eye. Dusk whose silent sickness surfaced every now and then, seized by a violent coughing fit. Stooping against some car parked along the curb, gripping on his chest, before his strength he summoned back. His parka he zipped and tightened around the neck, breathing some warmth in its faux fur lined hood, their walk they resumed.
The early morning peak hour had just hit the roads. The snow ploughs raced against time, sprinkling brine on the ice-covered asphalt.
“Don’t think we’re gonna make it on time!” mumbled the girl, after five minutes and counting of steady scamper for the nearest bus stop.
“Right!” groaned he. Late as usual. Knowing it was hopeless, their bus they won’t catch on time and the next subway station miles away so that too, was out of reach, leaving them with the taxicab for a last resort, as usual. All her doing he thought. Took her double it took him to get dress and prepared. Then to top it off she had to remind him acting all innocent. While it was on him to pay the price, his pocket money to sacrifice. So without arguing back, he waited, waited for the cab.
“There! there’s one!” cried she out, once she caught sight of the first to go by.
Dusk straight off blew a two-finger whistle hailing the speeding black and yellow taxi. Taking a sharp U-turn at the first intersection the car came back for them, without delay, pulling up right at their feet.
Cab No. 744. They got in.
The irksome smile he routinely threw at the face of every new customer, before extending his hand to shake theirs, as if an old acquaintance of his, gave Frost that gut feeling, she didn’t know why, there just was something about the man behind the wheel that screamed trouble—their ride was going to be a painful one.
“Well, well,” drawled he. “Look at who we got here…” Glimpsing through the rear-view mirror checking them out, he blurted out in a way sort of lending self-proclaimed credence to his assumption. “The military school, bingo?!”
“Here we go! This is not my lucky day!” telling himself before proceeding. “Yeah, exactly! The military school.” Dusk barely uttered in response to the man’s absence of reserve. Just so that after a while the cabbie, snoopily threw another at him.
“I suppose,” went he on. “You gotta be wondering how the hell of a cow?! You obviously don’t remember me, do you?” said he sniggering.
“Yeah I definitely did, let it go over my head!” Bluntly but taciturnly, exclaimed he. He knew exactly who the man was and where the conversation was going, which apparently he couldn’t avoid so to save himself the embarrassment of the situation. The taxi driver wasn’t the kind to take the hints after all. “So what’s that you know? Met there before?”
“Ah! close, but no cigar!” The driver, with a legendary capacity to gabble on and on and on, set forth in a spree of tireless blabber. “Say a month ago, same hour, same place, must’ve been you the young man in uniform, asking me to drop him off by the military school! I picked you up only to tell me later, you hadn’t gotten enough money on you, so it was on me! Being nice to broke cadets you know...” chuckling as he spilled the beans. “But hey, guess it’s just me and my photographic memory! Big town small world!”
“And that’s exactly the kind of scenarios I despise about this city!”
“Really!” Offended by the disdainful reply, the man grumbled the two syllables, no extra balderdash.
And so Frost, disappointedat the morning she was granted, out of her schoolbag pulled out a handheld music player together with a batch of mini-cassette tapes—a popular vintage trend amongst those her age—making her choice was easy. Putting the earbuds on, she at once shut off from everyone and everything, the sound of music filling her head, her whole being, was pure bliss. She looked at the driver, his lips in constant motion yet no sounds came out. Smiling, Frost sat back, her eyes rolled and closed and suddenly nothing else really mattered.
Soon after the hassle-free drive through the highways and tunnels, the cab promptly made it to the other side, the Enclave—the oldest borough, the blue-collars’ home ground, stagnant in time—the driver now had to call all of his driving prowess into action, as the car penetrated the warren arteries of the old town. Streets interlaced in washing lines, helter-skelter manifolds of tenement houses some of which were built on bridges, crisscrossing the neighborhood in the fashion of medieval times. There appeared to be little space between the houses stacked along these bridges that crisscrossed the canals of wastewater, while other bridges arched over the streets, standing on columns, with an underpass floor beneath the abutting houses, allowing for pedestrian or vehicular use of the bridges.
The tenement houses on ground level were characteristic of the iconic and sensational Art Nouveau architecture, or as it was more commonly known there in the Cosmopolis, Jugendstil. Most recognizable in the jutting-out roofs of the bronze-clad conical spires, the arched doors and curved windows of stained glass, which often reminded one of the Fenoglio-Lafleur house in Turin, the Lavirotte Building in Paris or the Casa Battló in Barcelona, and even calling to the minds of others the Municipal House in Prague. The asymmetrical tenements out of whose steep roofs, an array of grimy flues stuck out, some of which their tops the stork nest sealed. While the scattering of dingy chimneys the storks had spared, breathed out columns of charcoal smoke coiling up into the air, before falling back sprinkling, the red-brick walls on its way down staining, tinting the reliefs of fiendish figurines, entangled in intricate foliage patterns decorating the cathedrals’ cornices. The sculpted devils, the gargoyles, their smog-tainted faces they ashamedly buried into their hands, others, their ears they held shut, as though in aversion to the belfries’ bells over their heads, ringing the start of another day at the Enclave, the historic metropolis.
As the cab persistently wormed its way through the winding streets, Dusk lowered the window, inviting a chill puff of air that seemed to bother the man in the front. Been a while since he exchanged little to no words with him.
Looking out the window, Dusk attentively studied the modest men next to crestfallen women who swarmed the flagstone footpaths, same as they had done every other morning, in their pursuit of hope against hope for a better tomorrow, at the canned crab factory. Which for as long as they could remember, was the only Atlas around willing to carry weight of the struggling economy of their enclave on its stinky shoulders. Almost a third of the people of the old town lived off the crab factory, a great many had relied on it to sustain their indigent families. Albeit it might be said their biggest problem was, their own crab mentality.
Down the same sidewalks, the school boys and girls en route to their temples of knowledge, appeared not to give a toss about the adults’ concerns and trial, as they gathered around the refreshment stalls spending whatever dimes they’d been given by a grandmother or an uncle; or as they recklessly jaywalked across the shrinking road on which a myriad vehicle squawked in a cacophony of honking horns.
“Lovely mornings shan’t be wasted like this! Wasted among the gridlock? jeez no!” someone had to say it. Filling the clutch, thrusting the shift stick and hitting the gas, freaking his client out, the taximan forthwith set to zigzag a passage out of the mishmash of traffic jam, doing so in impressive sinuous moves.
Quarter to eight. At last, cab 744 resurged out of the old town just on time, and from there on it was a straight drive to their destination.
