Shadow.

Not posted in a while. Doing too much reading, not enough writing.

This is the first section to a short I'm currently working on about a telekinetic in future

Stamford, CT.

            He always felt a slight sigh droop his body as he detached his mind from its physical form. The world spiraled and unraveled around him. His body slumped into the rocking chair in his one-room apartment. His energy fled through the room’s solitary window. It was already open to the night.

            Rain lathered on the fire escape. Dark, roiling clouds hung just above the rooftops, blocking out the night sky. Street lamps burned sodium-orange glows up at the storm. The city shone to him in a dim evanescence. Lowering his thoughts into the complex’s back alley, he spied a homeless man shrouded in sopping clothing, half protected by an exit door’s overhang. Looking at the sleeping man, he forced a thin sheet of his concentration overhead, covering his remaining parts. The man turned over fitfully in his sleep, shrinking farther into the doorframe’s corner.

            Keeping the man sheltered from the downpour was simple. He did not need to concentrate deeply, but he could feel some energy expended in his thoughts, like the nagging tug of a name unable to be conjured up.

            Deeper in the alley, he brushed fingers that weren’t there and spooked a cat off the dumpster with a hiss. The waterlogged contents still clung with the smell of warm decay.

            The cold and the rain had fallen on the city for years. The cold had crept into everything. Some tried to explain the weather phenomenon; others merely called it “God’s wrath”.

            The rains had started the day she died.

            For six years it has rained. Frigidity crawled through the concrete and steel; into flesh and sinew. It soaked the city to its rusted bones.

            Into the air he shoved. He found that he had to travel further each night to crest the cloud cover. The storm simply whirls through, regroups, and without missing a beat, whirls through again.

And still, they continued to build, he thought.

            Each night he flew; past the tallest skyscraper and tower, rising miles through mist and angry fog. Slipping his way through pockets of electrical energy he burst out to gaze upon the stars. The moon was waning into a sliver of brilliant cerulean light that bore into his essence. Amidst the stars he didn’t linger for long, it was simply so he could see them again. It was nice to have a reminder that they were still there.

Back to work.

He slipped back beneath the rolling cloud cover. Red and blue lights bounced off the dull grey walls and obsidian sheen of glass. Above them all, he scraped the surface of their lives. He never entered another’s mind or body.

Never fully, he allowed.

He simply observed; jumping from place to place.

Shift.

He was a balding man sitting on a diner barstool. He was there to watch as the man poured oily, black coffee down his throat though it was nearly three in the morning. The bald man eyed the greasy cook toss something on the grill to sizzle. The waitress was middle-aged gone sour, and may have, at one point, been attractive. That time had passed, the years grossly unkind.

“Wanna refill?” she offered in a thick raspy voice, sloshing the pot.

He waved her away.

He sighed.

Shift.

He was a city bus driver, grumbling halfway through her shift, already weary from looping the same circuit for hours.

At least it’s warm in here, the driver surmised. Through her eyes he glanced at the four passengers staggered in the rear-view mirror. She ground to a halt at the next stop. Two passengers: a gray man and a plump woman, disembarked into the rain; a single rider clambered up the tall steps, shaking off the cold. The driver’s ebony hands were cracked and callused leather that clung to the steering wheel.

“Swipe right to left, please,” she repeated to the newcomer. The card machine chittered as it received the wireless transfer from whoever’s account. There was a slide and chime like an old lever-action register that reminded her of Pink Floyd and better days.

She reached out to close the accordion door, sealing in the heat. In the rearview the new rider shuffled further away to find a seat. There were three passengers now. The closest was a soggy-looking hood, his head slowly bobbing as sleep won him over. She sighed and put the bus back into drive.

Shift.

He was a cop staking out an apartment complex that housed a small-time gang and plenty of innocents.

Innocent enough, the cop muttered darkly in his brain case. The small group of youths had been peddling Coke and dishing out beatings in their neighborhood, but thus far, no one had come forward to help put them away. Their leader was a twenty-six year old schemer who always wore a cowboy hat.

He scratched at the back of his neck trying to shake the feeling that he, the Watcher, was himself being watched. His partner was an hour into his sleep shift, purring softly and fogging up the passenger side window.

He looked out into the night at the brick tower that clawed toward the clouds. The cup of coffee he had purchased from the dead-eyed, diner waitress was long since cold. He sipped anyways, grimacing and squinting out into the storm.

Can’t see shit, he thought. He turned over the car’s battery, attempting to enlist the help of the defroster; to no avail. He sighed.

Shift.

He was a drop of rain in mid free-fall. Together with billions of his cousins he was collected in drains and ditches. From there they were pumped to the series of steel-framed, aluminum-sheet sided warehouses in a place called Research Park; the only other occupants of the area was a scrap metal yard and a gritty strip club named the Hideaway, which the patrons called “The Office”.

The water was purified through an inventive indoor storm creation technique utilizing scalding steam and air-conditioned, temperature-controlled atmospheres. Thrice the water circulated through the system and then was bottled, packaged, shipped around the country.

If nothing else, the city of Stamford had been trying to take advantage of the downpours.

Shift.

He was a dog; curled up at the foot of a weathered couch to the sounds of the Late-Late Show and his Man’s sleep growls. He blinks a pair of russet colored eyes set deep in Irish coffee colored fur. His front legs stretch, paws splayed, as though grabbing for something.

But you have no thumbs, a voice in his head whispers of a long ago memory.

His ears twitch involuntarily at the wail of a passing police siren. He follows the sound around the apartment until it fades into the deafening downpour. Years of rain had made him restless, had made his smell more potent. He yawns a wide mouth of jagged, yellowed canines, lulled to sleep by the hum of the television.

Shift.

He was out in the rain again, as himself, sweeping his essence down nearly-empty city streets. The storm picked up.

Then he sees her.

Down the front steps of a hospital’s emergency access turnaround, she glides. In his ethereal state, he sees her soul shimmer a fiery gold, illuminating her steps. For a brief moment, he sees his long lost Lily. His ghost heart flutters. She pulls up the hood of her goldenrod rain slicker and scoots toward the bus stop.

An elderly man creaks up the steps and the door closes with a pressurized hiss.

She’s running now, but the bus driver can’t seem to see the golden figure sprinting alongside the vehicle. The bus lurches forward and sends a sopping splash up at her; she’s howling for them to stop. She slows her run when it becomes obvious she’s not going to catch anyone’s attention.

But mine.

Her feet came to rest in one of countless puddles that litter the sidewalk. The grease and oil resting on the water’s surface reflect and twist her radiance. Droplets cascade and vibrate her reflected image, twisting her face into snapshot smiles and grimaces.

He watches.

She starts back to the bus stop, but pauses to check her watch.

The subway, he hears her think. She begins splashing down the sidewalk at a leisurely stroll, as though the cold had no effect on her whatsoever. Beneath her slicker hood he could see a thick auburn curl fall and begin to collect water. She rechecked her watch and swore aloud, pushing herself to a full sprint in just four strides.

He followed.

The giant clock steeple at Trump Tower chimed three times. The bells were barely audible beneath the blanket of rain, but he felt their vibrations. He dropped below the streetlights, sweeping behind her sprinting form.

With a miniscule brush of concentration he parted the slick puddles in her path, drying the sidewalk. She rounded a corner at Tresser Boulevard and Washington, pushing herself faster as the subway entrance came into view. At the corner, she spots an unmarked police car, parked outside a tall, brick apartment building. One of the officers inside was asleep; the other caught her eye briefly, and then looked away.

The tail of her sunbeam coat whipped behind her like a cloak of vermillion flame. She took care on the steps to the subterranean station; one at a time whilst fumbling through her purse.

He felt the whoosh of heat press through the underground tunnels.

The train was leaving.

Frantically he tried to Shade into the subconscious of the train’s operator. Muddled clouds, heady and sweet, blocked his influence. He could taste the bourbon on his own lips; the man was drunk, deaf to the urges he tried to plant.

She slid her found Stamford Transit card through the given slot and cranked through the turnstile. Pounding onto the empty platform, she was just able to see the rear, red lights disappear down the tunnel like a pair of retreating demon eyes into utter blackness.

She turned and walked to a nearby bench, sitting with a huff. Taking deep, calming breaths through her nose, her eyes slipped closed. He read her surface thoughts; saw the twelve hour shift she had just pulled at the hospital flicker by in a sped-up series of snapshots. She was an ER nurse, and the evening had been disturbingly ruinous. Despite the doctors’ best efforts, more than five of the serious cases they’d received had expired upon the operating table, spilling crimson life force on white tiled floors. He felt a painful twang of his own memories.

Acrid wisps of cigarette smoke swirled among the pillars that held the terminal’s ceiling from crashing down.

He realized that she wasn’t alone in the station.

His focus had been on trying to help her get the train, now he wondered if he had helped the lamb to its place in the slaughterhouse.

There were six of them, lingering in the shadows of the walkway that led to the opposite platform, breathing heavily. It smelled of piss and rat farts. Their hoods were pulled up over their heads, except for the would-be leader who wore a thick-brimmed cross between a cowboy hat and a fedora. He sauntered ahead of the others, still hidden in darkness, hands in his denim pockets, a half-burnt cigarette clung to the corner of his lips. He read their thoughts.

This is gonna be messy.

“Well, well, well,” he spoke with a voice like his tongue was swollen, the cig muffling half his mouth. She stood and wheeled toward him, both hands clasped around her purse handles. “What’ve we got ‘ere, boys?” A plume of smoke coiled from his nostrils, phlegm colored tendrils rippling around his head and into the shadows he once occupied. The others spread behind him, their palms sweaty, jaws slack. He could see them in the undercroft walkway, taking pulls from a bottle of whiskey and taking turns bumping keyfuls of cocaine up already-powdered nostrils. “Little kitty lost her way?” he purred as he stepped closer. Her grip tightened and her eyes flickered toward the staircase leading up into the rain. “Don’t you fuckin’ think about it,” he warned, snapping open a shimmering blade.

The blade itself was thick, partially serrated at the grip, with a single valley knocked down its center to allow blood to run off easily. He could see past experiences when the blade had been used. Most recently it had carved up a hobo who had intervened as the group had repeatedly raped a lady of the night in some forgotten alleyway.

He had to do something, and quickly.