The Grotto

Chapter 1

It was nice coming here. This, Cafe that seemed to be the center of all attention lately. Everyone I knew was tarnished in desperation to seek a foothold in the doorway and luckily, I was the one who managed to kick right.

Walking in, escaping the sirens of an ambulance rushing by I managed to close the door just in time. The bell rang, and a few washed down faces turned their crusted eyes sideways to look at me. They always look at me, but I can never figure these people out. Why won't their eyes stop staring? Their thoughts that become almost visible, like a blank canvas rolled out in front of them and screened with every malicious thought speed spreading outwards.

Working here didn't really change the fact that I was still potentially pregnant to them, but it did give me not just a shield, but also a rusted beam to fight back with. Here, the upper hand is mine, and social rule says I have the last word.

In walked a customer with a foreign tint to his eyes and a blue colour to his hands. It wasn't that cold, and on close inspection it turned out to be tattooed artworks of famous sculptors.

Looking around with a tall head and fallen short hair, he moved slower than anyone else, like the last leaf to maintain a fight with a gripping root, anything out of the ordinary encompassed him with a fine filament. " I'm! Mr. Ryland" he announced as his knees bent to sit down near a window. They paid no attention. They were used to the out of orderly, it was conventional now.

Any onlooker would believe I was the only one who heard him, and as I came over to him he noticed me earlier than most. That stare struck me again, and the distance in his blue quilled eyes was nothing less than shocking, as if he managed to send me a hundred feet under the waves, just where light halts its entry and made me look upwards at the blue rim above, as the sea and the grey sky melted together in a plastitude of enmity.

It was essential to look away, too long here and you might drown. I came closer. "Hello Mr. Ryland.", greeting him with an anxious smile that must've come across as bewildering. "How do you know my name?" he asked, with his arms spread to the edge of the vacant chair beside him, across to the edge of the table. He seemed genuinely surprised, as if I was the one who was chivalrous. "Lucky guess." I said leaving, and he had no choice but to shake it off with a disconcerted interest in the menu. As I stood behind the counter polishing cups and sorting them like architectural pillars, a strange man sitting in front of me eyed me and said " You should be careful with these loonies, you never know, you know? The wick'd foul mouthed creatures that wand'r into the lives of unassuming y'ngsters like y'rself... you should be careful."

I wished his eyes would twist inward so he could look at himself and join the scare, but nothing of the sort was expected. Mr. Ryland was obviously edged on something, but dangerous? Highly unlikely. He did tickle my interest though. Not because he was new, but because he carried himself with an air of a gentlemen somehow succumbed to loneliness. He put the menu away, done, and looked out to the park across us, his tenseness hopefully subdued by the moving greenery. It was important to go talk to him, even something banal might cheer him up, so I decided to act the lady and stretch the boundaries of casual conversation. "Is everything ok?" I said, hoping for a reaction that would fill the gapped question held on my face.

"No actually, everything is not 'ok', my dog died."

So began the story of Mr. Ryland and his dog, but we will save that for a different day from The Grotto.