Grey Tones (#LitFicContest)

Grey Tones

The notebook hit the pavement with a thud and a splash, the water seeping into the pages at contact. Wide rings of muddy water, filtering through the red and blue lines, warping the clean, white sheets. She could feel the words scrawled across scattered pages disintegrating into puddles of black, ink spilling out in small rivers, spidering. She could almost hear the words crawling apart into nameless blotches, small wells leading to a spring of imagination. Her imagination and hers alone. Her mouth parted in a smile, her lips tasting rain as it fell upon her face, racing down her cheeks, glistening like false tears on the set of a movie. Rain scenes were those sloppy love scenes, where the two lovers embraced in a torrent of rain after a long interval of separation. She brushed them aside in her mind's eye and took up pen to whiteboard. The pen tapped upon the blank page in her mind as her physical writing material lay scattered about her in a ring, in puddles, the rain beating down upon them. Her eyes were closed, her messenger bag in a heap at her feet. Wet, tangled bangs clung like vines to her forehead, to her cheeks, and her mouth opened into a laugh. The sound of the rain pounded in her ears.

A candle flickered on the corner of a wooden desk, the shadows dancing in time to the curling flame. There was no open window, no chill of the evening air that had found its way into the sanctuary of this room. The desk was empty save for the candle, but the seat was not unoccupied. In it sat

Suddenly a downpour arrived out of nowhere. The rain beat against the parked cars, all in neat rows, the water rushing off in torrents like miniature waterfalls. She threw her back and laughed, the raucous noise losing in completion with the volume of the pouring rain.

a figure shrouded in dark material, a thick, navy presence of sorts, like a blanket of the night sky made from strands of fallen stars. Then, from the darkness beyond, a voice echoed, causing the cloaked figure to start in their chair.

"Who dares call my name on this night, the darkest of the darkest, the night of no moon and no stars."

The words left her lips as the blank space in her mind filled with inked words. Her mouth again crooked into another strange smile, when the rain stopped falling upon her face and instead, drummed like pellets upon the surface of cloth. The smile dipped down to a straight line of confusion and she pulled herself forward to turn to see what it was.

"Out here in the rain, again. I shouldn't have taken my eyes off of you."

An annoyed voice left the lips of a figure dressed in a raincoat, rain boots, and carrying an umbrella. From one arm hung a plastic bag, weighed down by some heavy contents.

"Here, I went to buy you more coffee. What are you doing, running on no coffee when you can't live without it?"

"... Coffee." That single word fell from her lips and collapsed in a sopping wet heap into the arms of the figure. Rain continued to drum its fingers along the fabric of the umbrella, the sky bleeding into shadowed wisps of blue and grey tones.