Here we go with the inaugural story of Fabulous F**king Fiction. I like the tone of it, but I don't know about the story as whole.

Enjoy!

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No Particular Intimacy

It is cold. The sort of cold that turns people into prematurely aged caricatures of themselves. People trudging down the streets tonight hunched over, backs bent. Arms folded across their chests and walking in shuffling steps down the sidewalks. Snow crystals from the afternoon's falls swirl in the wind around a particular couple, as if trying to attract their attention. They are university aged and they walk close to each other, shoulders brushing the other's; though with no particular intimacy, but merely in an attempt to conserve a bit of warmth. The boy glances up and takes hold of the girl's arm with a mittened hand.

"That's the number seventeen. That's our bus. Let's run."

He breaks into a jog, weaving around other people on the sidewalk, making it a few steps before he realizes his companion isn't keeping pace.

"C'mon, we're going to miss it." He jogs on the spot until she catches up.

"No need to bother."

"What do you mean?"

The bus pulls away from the curve and heads down the road away from them.

"The seventeen runs every eleven minutes this time of night. We need to transfer at Hargrave and Fourth onto the twenty-four, which'll be there at 8:40. It's," she peels back the sleeve of her heavy coat and the sweater underneath to expose her watch, "7:55 now, so we can catch the next one and then only have to wait a few minutes for the transfer."

He shrugs falls into step beside her.

While the girl has many talents, public transit perfection is something she takes special pleasure in. When she was little she would play with her older brothers' cast-off train sets, planning and constructing elaborate routes across their basement floor. Her love of transit is a keepsake from that childhood and something she keeps mostly to herself. Her friends find her peculiar enough already.

The number seventeen bus is sparsely populated with the detritus of nighttime activities. It's late enough for most people to be at home, but not late enough for the bar crowd to have spilled out onto the streets. And in this weather, more people wait it out to the bitter end. A woman around the couples' age with white headphones and a battered textbook balanced on her knees, drawing lines with a highlighter. Two drunks at the back of the bus talking far louder than is really required. A man dozing, his tie loosened and a leather laptop case on the seat beside him, a limp hand resting protectively on top.

"How many exams left?" The boy has removed his mittens and is rubbing his hands together.

"Two, and an essay."

"That's not too bad. Going home for the break?"

"Nope."

"Don't get along with your family?"


"No. Just no real reason to go home."
"All of my brothers and sisters are bringing home their significant others this year. An aunt, uncle and three teenage cousins are also coming. You can see why I'm staying in rez. For Christmas."

The girl nods without looking at him. Instead, she sits with her feet up on the seat in front of her, hands interlaced and wrapped around her shins. She's wiggling her toes inside her boots, testing to see how well they've warded off the cold.
The two of them have worked at the same shop for the last three weeks - a seasonal store selling Christmas decorations (the store also boasts a tiny Chanukah section toward the rear, but the owner balked at the boy's suggestion of adding shelf at Kwanzaa items). They also were in the same lecture for Introduction to Sociology last semester, a second tenuous connection that the boy had to remind the girl of. On the nights they both have the closing shift, they'll bus back to campus together.

Conversations tend to be a somewhat one-sided and initiated by the boy, although on this particular night, after the last stragglers had been shooed out and they can begin locking up, the girl said, "I have something to show you after work."

She gave no other details. The boy sincerely hopes this is a date but he is not so audacious as to turn the hope into an assumption. He's spent the past three weeks trying to find a way to crack through the girl's shell of - not indifference, but more akin to lack of reaction. He frequently relates stories about his roommates and his classes and she will usually listen with a serious, interested expression but he rarely receives an emotional response from her. He can't remember if he's ever heard her laugh. He thinks he must have, but can't remember a specific time. The only other occasion they've hung out outside of work or crossing paths on campus was two weeks ago when she helped him study for his calculus midterm. She has a knack for formulates, variables and transformations, which he only learned because he had his calculus text open on the counter at work and was cursing it while working through some min-max problems.

"If my parents lived somewhere warm," the boy adds, "I'd definitely go back for Christmas. But down home it'll be just as cold as here."
The girl nods again and then, perhaps feeling obligated to contribute to the conversation, offers to the boy: "My parents' place is old and drafty. My bedroom is only warm in July and August."

"Your family isn't big into Christmas?"

"My mother is. Our tree will already be decorated but she'd have had to force dad to help."

They ride in silence for a while, the girl looking out the window and the boy reading the advertisements. Eyes on the window, the girl asks, "How's calculus going?"

"Not too bad, actually. I've started to get the hang of things. Thanks again for your help."

"No worries."

"We start integrals soon so I'll probably need another tutoring session."

The girl nods.

After they transfer onto the number twenty-four, they ride until they are downtown, amongst a collection of warehouses and old offices buildings that were built between the 1920s and the Second World War. Busy during the day, this part of town is a ghost town after six in the evening. The girl watches the intersections until she presses the button to alert the driver their stop is coming up. She begins to bundle up.

"Almost there?"

"We'll only be walking a couple of blocks from the bus stop."

The boy pulls his toque down and puts on his mittens. They exit the bus and begin walking down the deserted sidewalk, past telephone poles covered in stapled-on posters and brick buildings that are mostly three to eight stories tall. In warmer months this area is home to a large population of homeless people, although even they must have found shelter somewhere on a night like tonight.

"I like this area," says the boy, voice slightly muffled because he is covering his face with his hands, "These older buildings have character."

"If it hadn't been for the Panama Canal, all the buildings would have been torn down and replaced with modern ones. This city used to be a major shipping hub before they built the canal. It was cheaper to ship overland than to send ships south around Tierra del Fuego. But the canal put an end to that and the district was pretty much stagnant for six decades. They're heritage buildings because no one wanted them for so long."

It's the most words he's ever heard her say all at once. As they walk, she gives him a history lesson of the district and they boy is pleased to listen to her. The girl checks her watch, speeds up. After a while, she leads him into an alley. It hasn't been cleared of snow recently but many footpaths have already been tread though. The boy is passing thankful that it's winter; the alley doesn't smell near as bad as it might in the height of summer. Dim light leaks from a ground-level window, which is where the girl heads to. She crouches down and the boy follows suit. The light comes from a basement room. Storage? He sees boxes stacked along the wall. Snow has dusted the window but as he reaches to brush it away the girl smacks his hand down, shoots him a glare. He shrugs and hunkers down to see what might have brought them here.

He jumps a bit when a man walks into their view. He's old; the little hair that remains is grey and even indoors in the warmth his gait resembles the people shuffling down the sidewalks. He sets down the brown cardboard box he was carrying and opens it, his back to them and the boy can't see what he's doing until he stands slowly up and begins to lay out an extension cord. When he moves, an old record player - similar to the one his parents used to have - is revealed. The man disappears out of their line of sight but returns moments later carrying the upper half of a mannequin under his arm.

"What's he doing?"

But the girl shushes him, although the old man can't possibly hear them.

He sets the mannequin down and from the box produces an arm full of wigs. He proceeds to consider each wig, glancing between it and the mannequin. Rejects are tossed back into the cardboard box.

"He does this every night, near as I can tell. I think he's the janitor," whispers the girl. "Watch."

He decides on a wavy blond wig and places it on the mannequin, adjusting it carefully. The hair falls down to the mannequin's shoulders. He next retrieves a vinyl record from the box and plays it on the record player. The boy can't make out the tune. It sounds jazzy but he either doesn't know the song or the window dampens too much. The boy has to stifle a laugh as the old man picks up the mannequin and begins to dance. He glances at the girl but she regards the scene with a serious expression and appears to be deeply focused on her voyeurism.

The old man's hesitant, slow walk is gone as he twirls and spins the mannequin. One of his arms around its waist, the other entwined with its stiff, straightened fingers. His eyes are closed but the boy can't look directly at the couple. He can't stand to make eye contact with the mannequin's dead, empty expression. When the song is over and the arm of the record player lifts up and returns to its resting spot, the old man packs up the wig and record player. The mannequin appears to belongs there because he leaves it leaning against some other boxes. The boy is shivering now and is relieved when his companion stands up and starts retracing their steps out of the alley.

"This is what you wanted to show me?"

"He's there every night."

On the bus back toward campus, he covers one of the girls mittened hands with one of his. She says nothing, but withdraws her hand out from underneath.

12 responses to "Week #1 - No Particular Intimacy "

jess wrote: Monday, 10 Dec 2007 01:08 ooooh, nice start, dana! can't wait to see more of your stories. :)

D.J. wrote: Monday, 10 Dec 2007 13:40 Very nice! I was wondering where you were going with it, but it pulls together to a lovely ending. :)

karen wrote: Monday, 10 Dec 2007 13:44 ooh! i like it. very intriguing and, yes, not particularly intimate.

Jo wrote: Monday, 10 Dec 2007 19:49 excellent! very serious for you, but then, i've only ever read your NaNo stuff which is not always serious!

Deb wrote: Monday, 10 Dec 2007 22:01 I like the ending :)

Britt wrote: Monday, 10 Dec 2007 22:23 I like it. :) Especially the bit about her and the transit...

Victoria wrote: Tuesday, 11 Dec 2007 10:39 After your NaNo excerpts, I was expecting humour... and this isn't that! I like it. It leaves more questions than answers... and I'm not certain I'm comfortable with the characters not having names or with the degree to which things are left open-ended, but I'm curious and intrigued. Looking forward to reading more in the next few weeks!

Ginny! wrote: Tuesday, 11 Dec 2007 21:43 Interesting. Good stuff.

Erinn wrote: Wednesday, 12 Dec 2007 09:00 Very nice, Dana. Don't ask me why, but I was expecting magic, what with how everthing was set up. The line "the girl has many talents" made me want her to be special, in that way. Maybe I read too much Gaiman. I liked her though, regardless. I want to be her friend.

j wrote: Wednesday, 12 Dec 2007 16:00 um...well, it's a good story, but your tenses are not constant, some of it was too wordy and repetitive, and you missed a few things; the boy grabbed her arm when he saw the bus but it doesn't say he let go when he ran... but i look forward to reading more...

Justin wrote: Thursday, 13 Dec 2007 01:02 painting with words, good job

Ruth wrote: Wednesday, 09 Jan 2008 16:51 I liked it Dana! There were missing words in a few sentences but the story flowed very well together. Its funny how at the end I felt both very grim and sad for the girl, and yet smug for her at the same time. I think the boy missed a test there altogether.

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