I haven't posted any of my original writing for a while. I'm currently writing a novel with which I've seriously fallen in love. Anyway, this is nothing to do with that; it was something I wrote for a competition earlier in the year. Now that I know it's unsuccessful, I'll post it here. I don't particularly like it (writing for competitions is to win; but I've since learned to go with your instincts and never change compromise your own expression for anything). Any feedback is welcome and appreciated...
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Of all the places in the world, of all the hours in of air at that very moment in time and space, their lives seemingly unconnected and irrelevant to each other.
Five in the morning is never the most favourable time to sit alone on a damp bench on an abandoned waterfront, your teeth clattering together and your blue hands grasping anything in desperate yearning for warmth. But then again, there wasn’t any obvious sense to be found in walking about at that time either, your eyes oppressed in their darkened, sullen sockets, and your head aching and throbbing like sleepless heads do.
Sitting on a bench, damp with morning dew, sat a young woman of a tragic disposition. All the world’s lament and misfortunes had been absorbed by her fragile frame all at once. She’d been through everything, and yet had experienced nothing. Her brittle, shapeless cheeks hung heavy with dry tears, and her chin trembled with frightening vigour in the chill of dawn. Her slight whimpers broke the surrounding silence without an inkling of an echo left behind. She wore a pitifully short skirt, which was unseen due to her long, leather jacket, under which she could have been wearing anything and everything from nudity to a bomber jacket. Her despondent eyes stared morosely into the motionless river before her.
Walking without hope or direction along the quayside, not more than a hundred metres away from the bench, was a very much worn out man, walking and walking and walking without any possibility in the world in finding what he sought. His bloodshot eyes didn’t waver from their gaze upon the pavement. He was a man without hope, utterly exhausted, though even his own mind was too enervated to realise it. The Wanderer. Completely unaware as to where he was or how he got here, oblivious to the existence of the flowing river parallel to the path along which he staggered.
The fog was heavy, grasping at the ankles like a coiling snake, constraining visibility. Seagulls circled overhead and out of sight, their whines epitomising the tragedy of the lost souls below them.
Then he saw her.
“Lisa,” he called out, suddenly frantic. He’d not spoken for hours, and his cry jerked out with a cacophonous croak. “Lisa,” he called again to the woman on the bench, clearing his throat. She didn’t look up, and for a second he thought she was dead. He ran to her in growing desperation and relief. And when he finally reached the bench, and saw that the woman was not at all the Lisa he thought she was, he was flooded with confusion.
The woman looked up without moving her head, seemingly unaware of the oddity of encountering another being at this unearthly hour. Then her whole head shot up after a long impassive measure, and at once the man saw the fear upon her mascara-stained face.
For a moment he was lost for words, taken aback from the distressed anguish with which he’d been confronted. “I’m sorry,” he said in a muttered tone. “I’m so terribly sorry…”
“Who are you?” the woman asked with unpolished dryness; she too had not spoken for hours. “Who are you?” But he could answer her not, for he was too dumbfounded by the fact she was not Lisa, his benign and benevolent Lisa who only a second ago he’d spotted on a bench. “Why are you out here?” the woman went on. “What brings you out here?”
“Do you know the time?”
She looked down with a sense of remorse. “Time does not matter anymore. Time is the only thing between now and…” she trailed off, assuming the man would know.
But the man didn’t know. “And what?” he asked, curiously. “And what?”
“The end.” He shuddered at her answer, for he knew she was right.
His body fell limp in acceptance of the woman’s words of doom, and finally took a seat beside her on the bench. Fishing into the pocket of his overcoat, he fetched out a cigarette. But for the dim orange glow emitted from his lighter, the deathly quiet scene was a mere blur of greys. They and the bench were dark greys, the sky almost a white shade, and the horizon and surroundings were colourless in the fog, all blending into a unity of harmonious, disquieting dread. The two of them sat on the bench without a word, he smoking and looking about into the murky abyss beyond, she in the same position she’d sat for the last decade, her gaze fixed firmly on the ground, her mind far from this moribund world.
She grimaced and shook her body about on the frosty seat. “It’s cold,” the man remarked to her, “how long have you been here?”
Her answer was long in coming, as if she hadn’t even heard the question. “Like I said, time means nothing anymore.”
It was cold enough, the man thought to himself, without having to hear the truth. “Why are you here?” he asked her.
“The same reason as you.”
And that too, sent another chill through his body, for this time it wasn’t the truth, he was sure. “Believe me,” he told her, “you don’t want to be here for the same reason as me.”
“I don’t know,” she admitted, “I just might yet.”
“Why are you here?” he persisted again.
“Why are you here?” she shot back.
“I’m lost.”
“And why are you lost?”
“My wife…” his voice trailed off in misery.
“She left you?”
“Perhaps.”
“Perhaps?” she repeated, finding herself aroused for the first time in what now seemed an eternity.
“She’s gone. She’s missing. I woke up without her—she’s missing,” he looked down, leaning forward on the bench to escape the woman’s scrutiny. He sighed. “I woke up without her. She’s gone! Missing! She wasn’t there!” He was too exhausted to break down. His eyes spawned a distant tear, which trickled down his cheek without interruption.
“Haven’t you called the police?”
He shot her a look. “No! No police. I mustn’t involve the police.”
“Why not?”
He grabbed her bare thigh with the icy palm of his hand, penetrating her frightened eyes with his frantic own. “You mustn’t call them!” he cried. “You mustn’t! No police!” She realised his torture and despair immediately, perhaps for the first time. His whole jaw was blanketed in stubble, and his hair was uncombed, flowing this way and that in a jumbled mess. His bloodshot eyes held a balance of tragedy and trauma and grief and loss, and the woman, in spite of her own very serious troubles, felt an urgent need to care for the man with great, soothing comfort. She cautiously edged her chilly hand towards his neck, sliding it through his long hair to find the nape. He didn’t acknowledge it, instead looking down in the same desolated state as before.
“I’m lost too,” said the woman. The man looked up, wanting her to elaborate. “I’m lost up here,” she went on, pointing to her head. “I don’t know where I am, where I’m supposed to be, or if I’ll ever get back.”
“Get back where?”
“Where I’m supposed to be.”
“And where’s that?” She shook her head, quieting him, not wanting to answer. Her hand was still caressing his neck. She was already feeling a great connection with her fellow-lost drifter, and his emergence from the fog like some heavenly being had lifted a great weight off her shoulders. The man was degenerated in both physical and mental state. His mac had experienced the very worst of the elements through the night; it was damp, cold, and dirt had patterned the back with randomly violent splatters. His trousers were no different, and his shoes were nothing more than lumps of mud. It seemed to the woman that he’d quite literally searched for his wife high and low across the planet, through rivers and forests, over hills and mountains, across bridges and lakes, in cities and fields and the seven seas. And all without the police. His vain ventures had resulted in a clearly tortured soul, and it was at that point when she remembered his first words to her only moments ago, as he’d emerged from the morning haze.
“Lisa is your wife?” she asked. He nodded, looking up at the sky, as if reminding God of her name. “Why haven’t you called the police? What is wrong with the police?”
The man hesitated before answering. “It’s too messy. It’s out of control. Nothing the police can do will help my wife now. Only I can find her. It’s too messy. Believe me. You don’t want to know.”
“But why?” she persisted. “Tell me. Let me help you. Maybe I can help you.”
He brought his whole body to attention on the bench, shrugging her hand from his neck and turning to look at her in the face. “Why?” he asked with abrupt caution. “Why are you so curious about my wife?”
“I was wondering why you weren’t involving—”
“Why I’m not involving the police then. Why are you so interested in that?”
“It just seems odd, that’s all,” she replied at once with a genuine plea of innocence. “Everybody calls the police when somebody goes missing. That’s all. I just found it odd—honestly.” He realised that the urgency of the situation had magnified his paranoia, and he allowed his caution to diminish somewhat, relaxing again. He shivered in the cold, and reached nervously again into his pocket for another cigarette. After lighting it—with a trembling hand—he offered the woman a draw.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Neither do I,” he confessed. “You look like Lisa. From a distance anyway—and in fog,” he added, smiling. He waited a while before going on. “When you lose somebody close to you, it’s like you’ve lost yourself. I woke up yesterday morning and she was gone. It’s probably a whole day since she went missing. I haven’t closed my eyes since.” He talked in a monotonous drone, staring into the river before them, unflinching under the intent observation of the woman next to him.
“You’ll find her,” the woman offered with naïve reassurance.
“No,” was the simple reply. “I won’t find her. She told me I’d never find her.”
“Who? Who told you?”
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to you.”
“But it does!” she insisted. “I can help you. I can, I really can. We’ll look together.”
“I’ve looked for a day now. I’ve searched all the places she could be. She’s gone. I’ll never find her. Not even with you,” and with that, the woman now looked as dejected as him. He sensed her deflation. “Haven’t you got your own problem? Why are you here, anyway?”
“Somebody is searching for me. Looking for me. I am on the run.”
“From whom?” She shrugged, too fatigued to torture herself with an answer.
The fog was clearing now, expiring like a vampire at sunrise, but the cold stayed, slicing into the flesh like a ravenous predator, producing more and more condensed clouds with every puff of air from the two lost souls, as they sat there as if in wait of the apocalypse.
It was a scene of oddly ironic circumstance. The man, the wanderer in the mist, had vainly searched for his wife, and had momentarily replaced her with the lonely woman on the bench. The woman had been running and running, and knew fine well she wouldn’t be able to stop, yet had discovered, mystifyingly, great comfort in being found by a stranger just a moment ago.
With the mist clearing, the river was now visible, and the place was given a sense of life, albeit a tranquil one. Distant hums could be heard on the roads far behind them, as commuters started out for the day ahead. Dark were the low-lying clouds, engulfing the entire site in a wrathful abyss of foreboding.
The man on the bench had asked questions and answered them, and likewise for the woman, and now they sat with an equal share of the shattering muteness enveloping them, pondering in deep thought regarding their respective doom. One by one, the seagulls had abandoned the skies, sensing and abhorring the approaching storm overhead. A lifeless log floated downstream, accentuating the stillness of the world. A cyclist rode by, deep in concentration, convinced that he would beat his personal best this morning, not noticing the two lost, forlorn bodies sitting on the bench he passed. The man, smoking yet another cigarette, panned his head to the side as the cyclist rode by, watching him until he was out of sight.
“What’s your name?” he asked the woman.
“Mary,” she answered, and, after a pause, “like the Virgin. The Virgin Mary.” She announced it with great pride and insecure conviction. She was lying.
“Aren’t you going to ask mine?”
“Ask your what?”
“My name.”
“Names don’t matter. A name is for somebody with purpose, somebody with a sense of direction and where they are going in life,” she paused. “Besides, if I want to call you anything, wouldn’t it be more interesting if I called you something else, something I chose and not you?” He looked at Mary, not quite following. “I don’t know you,” she went on. “I’ve only met you. I don’t know where you live, who you are, whether you’re a father as well as a husband. I know more about your wife than I do about you. And your name is the last thing I want to know. But to avoid confusion, I shall call you Henry.”
“Why Henry?” asked Henry, genuinely perplexed.
“If there was a reason then that would give the name a purpose.”
“Where do you live? Or doesn’t that matter either?”
“Far from this place,” replied Mary, “but that won’t stop them.”
“Stop who? The people chasing you?”
“Do you recognise this place? Do you live far from here?”
“I’ve been here before—on the waterfront. I live over the river somewhere.”
“Aren’t you hungry?” asked Mary of Henry. “When was the last time you ate?”
“Hours ago. Many, many hours.”
It seemed odd that such a character who made a fuss over a question regarding a name was suddenly so curious about her new acquaintance’s last meal. Yet, unsurprisingly, Mary’s questions did indeed have justification, for she too was hungry. “I have all my savings with me,” she told Henry. “It’s not much, but it can last me a day or two.”
“I have little money on me.”
“I’m hungry,” she went on, not listening. “I need to find somewhere to eat. I’ll pay, as long as we find somewhere quick.”
“What’s the time? Nowhere will be open at this hour.”
“Time doesn’t matter. I’ve told you that.”
“Nowhere will be open.”
“Well, I’m not dying of starvation, so we better find somewhere. Come on. I’ll pay.”
“I have enough money for food.”
“I haven’t asked you for money. But I did say we need food. Both of us.”
“Where are we going to go?” Henry asked.
“Whatever place we find. Come on,” and with that, Mary stood up, wrapping her coat around her and folding her arms tightly to guard herself against the harsh morning frost. She stood there a while, waiting for Henry, who sat there hesitating, thinking of his wife and the time she was putting between herself and he right at this very moment. Mary began to walk away, in search of a diner or café or any place that sold hot food. Henry watched her for a moment, not knowing whether to follow or not. Who was she? Where did she come from? Who was chasing her, and why? What had she done? Murdered somebody? Was she wanted by the police? The police! He shuddered at the very thought. Mary was far ahead now, not looking back. What was she thinking of him? And so he began to ask himself, empathising, as many questions of himself as he did of her. Who was he? Why was he searching for his wife? What had he done for her to go missing out of the blue like that? Mary could probably tell him more than he could himself. So, he finally concluded, he was as foreign to Mary as she was to him, with just as many questions unanswered. Standing up from the bench, he felt the sharp stinging of the cold hit his rear and envelope him.
He began to run after Mary. He was hungry too.
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Thanks for reading if you've got this far.

Mick

i like it. very nice and the style is excellent. however, in my opinion your dialouge is weak. good show however

You've got be one of the fastest readers ever to have lived.

Mick

Great prose Capo. But I felt that you have used too many adjectives, sometimes simple sentences can help in not getting distracted from the story.

That's also my main problem with it, svsg. My style is very minimalistic and stream-of-consciousness now. Totally different to this.

Thanks for reading,
Mick