The Summer Of The Storm

Chapter 3

Walking home from working as a janitor at a school with a crazy new substitute teacher. For one in my life, I wish I didn't have this job and was a manager or something so I could squash that maggot, trying to take my frustration out on broom of if it was the enemy wasn't enough. 

If it was a choice between shopping and diving into a swimming pool of cold vomit, I would take the vomit. I'd tie my hair back, get in a bathing suit and dive right in amongst the chunky bits. I hated everything about shopping. I hated the crowds, the queues, and the aching feet. I also took exception to overly attentive shopping assistants, the perky seasonal music playing in every store and all the special deals tempting me to spend even more. I even hated the free food samples, seeing them as ideal flu spreading agents.

I spend more time reading the labels than walking - isn't that modern shopping for you? It's that or buys only single ingredients - rice, wheat, beans, tomatoes, eggs... Ingredients lists are worse than those instructions for experiments in science class, every word as long and complicated as possible. Likely the finest thing about any of these things is the packaging 'pretty in its garish way' and that just adds to landfill. Junk on the inside, soon-to-be-junk on the outside.

But, I get my usual groceries celery, corn, cucumbers, lettuce, carrots, meat, Cereal, Tuna etc. The normal, approximately 20 things, but I don't things every day, but when I get my paycheck, but this week I got more than the typical payday, about an extra $50 but no complaining here, dealing with wild children, teenagers but children and cleaning, but like I said I can't complain people would do anything to get a paycheck. 

Returning home I make a quick dinner, a homemade pizza, better than the last time I made it but, I just wish I had someone to share it with.  Usually every day after work, I lie down on my comfortable couch reading books and watching talk shows no communication with friends or others. Loneliness brings life into another realm, quietness is the new beginning for humankind to think more and think from themselves. 

That Saturday I wake up early, there is only one thing I do when I wake up this early for no reason... Walking down a street I've never taken before I stop looking across the street of this familiar looking girl, maybe in her teens and this well-built man looking at each other as if they fell in love at first sight, how weird. Focused on them looking at each other, I didn't have the efforts or the ability to move then they went their separate ways then they both stop at separate times looking back at me. Somehow... are we... Connected?

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'She just doesn't understand!' I screamed into my favorite screaming pillow. The next thing I knew mom was waking me up, I guess because I have 'potential' I fell asleep. I guess it happens, we eat dinner talking about random things, but then one thing I was curious about, that Saturday she told me that I needed to go over and check out this new bookstore on the other side of town in the morning. 

With each step, I pounded my feet on the sidewalk releasing some of her anger. Why in the world would mom wake me up this early in the morning to go to a damn bookstore? But then suddenly my tiredness overcame me, I was walking unusually slowly, almost robotically, as if my brain was struggling to tell each foot to take the next step. It was as if I were in a stupor; like someone under hypnosis in one of those scooby-doo cartoons.

Walking passed this tall handsome man, somehow passing him I feel protected, somehow I could trust this stranger. But I stop in my tracks and so did he turning around our eyes met.  He looked as if he was sad but with a gleam of hope, as if he was living a dream, my chest tightens and fills with warmth. His beautiful brown eyes were so gentle but his body seemed to have a strength to protect... Protect anyone...  I don't know how long we looked at each other but we went our separate ways but I felt a different pair of eyes on me after I started walking again. I look across the street and it was an older man, actually around my mom's age. Creepy and I started to walk faster than I did before going to the bookstore.

The new paper smell of the book was strangely at odds with it's old fashioned and battered leather cover, the gilded lettering faded and tatty. It fell open with an avalanche of pages, their snowy whiteness bespeckled with a flurry of black ink in poetic lines tumbling down the page.

walking down the isles of books there was one that called out to me. The decrepit book was paved in darkened leather back, there was no telling how old it could be maybe fifty, maybe two hundred. It was withered in its old age and tea stains ran down its pages like a silky black dress. Someone in the distant past had ripped out pages and left a jagged edge page. It held the past... and would hold the future.