Lit Skits

So she crouched to pick up her bag and left him there. Her heels on the marble floor were nothing in the crowd but all he could see was the swing of her hair as she walked away, then the blank faces passing between them, one, two, a family, then the crowd had her and she was gone. He stood for ten minutes with the same thought in his mind and the same expression on his face. A police officer touched him gently on the elbow and he looked around, innocently thoughtless, as though waking.
“You’ll have to move along, sir.”
“Right, sorry.”
A few slow steps in no direction at all and he stopped looking after her. The departures board wasn’t showing the details of her train any more. A couple of pigeons fluttered to ground between him and the red brick wall and scattered instantly as a heavy man with a rolling suitcase paced through the gap. James looked up at the roof and down to the ground and took up a place in the movement of people, between a small woman in a scarlet sari and a scruffy teen in a velvet jacket. He made his way around with the slow-stirred flow of the station and stepped out of the wide doors into the cool grey air of the evening.

Her head rises and falls with the turning pages under the yellow lamp and rain pinks, rhythmless, on the window. All the sounds are soft; the rain on the glass, the shifting of the clock hands above her, the passing footfalls on the carpet. She moves gently, with reverence, as she slides her finger between the resting paper; she writes and sketches; she inks in lines with a ruler on her fingertips. A curl of hair swings into her eye and she flicks it sharply behind her ear. The wind lifts the branches of a tree outside and spatters drops harshly on the glass and she pauses, distracted.

The only attention he received was such a cold, impersonal form of human contact that when they left the cell he was grateful to be alone. Once a week three guards came in with a chair and ordered him to sit. It was never a clean shave; the electric razor they used ran on tired batteries and Mekul could feel the dull blades tug at the skin of his scalp. Each day a panel in the door was unbolted from the outside and some bread was thrown down, or old leftovers in a flimsy plastic bowl.

The gas was running slow even when Jacob opened the valves all the way, so he was careful to wait each time to make sure the flame had caught. Normally it was a race to finish by sunset, but the sky was clear and on the bridge the posts were close enough together that Jacob could see work by the light of the last lamp. At the same height above the cobbles, the driver of a cab nodded to Jacob as he passed, steam rising from his horse’s flanks. The flame was low, but steady. Jacob closed the glass door of the lamp and climbed slowly down the ladder.

She had been beautiful once, but she had always been stern. From her earliest days as a teacher she had cultivated a sense of moral certainty n every one of her actions, and as she rose through the ranks of the school it hardened and split into a set of near-military convictions. She was old and her sharply curving jaw had lapsed into straight lines and angles, and her skin was dry. It was hard for her, bit she maintained a regimental manner in her movement – she moved as though the children’s eyes were always on her, even in her flat, in her solitude, in her retirement.

When he walked into the shop I could tell he was foreign. As he moved he looked around at the bookshelves and the bottles in the racks and the signs above the aisles, but he was doing it so fast that it was obvious he wasn’t really reading what he was seeing. It was a quiet afternoon, mid-week is always the same, so I thought I’d go and ask him if he needed help.
He looked at me the instant I moved from behind the desk and stared with widening eyes as I crossed the shop floor towards him.
“Can I help you, sir?”
He flared his nostrils and opened his mouth and I could see his teeth, tiny little teeth, stained brown and curving around his tongue as he made a theatrical gesture to dismiss me, shaking his head in slow arcs and waving his hands back and forth.
“No, no, no.”
I backed away and returned to the cash desk, the freak. Those teeth! He vanished into the back of the shop and I watched him slowly pacing through the Travel Section on the little security camera for a while until I served someone. Let me tell you, people are shameless - that girl bought a photographic Kama Sutra, and a couple of bottles of Beaujolais. Like people don’t care if you know what they’re up to. By the time I’d finished with the Kama Sutra girl something was up with the weird guy at the back of the shop. When I looked at the camera he was kneeling in the aisle of the travel section with his head in his hands, so I locked the front door before going back, because it’s just me and Mike on weekday afternoons and he was upstairs in the office and I didn’t want anyone taking advantage. As I walked back he started moaning, a loud wailing sort of crying and I heard the thump of books being thrown. I buzzed up to Mike and slowly peered around the middle bookcase.
“It’s not here!” he shouted and heaved a row of Rough Guides onto the floor. I heard Mike come down the stairs out the back.
“Clarissa!” Mike shouted as he came out onto the shop floor.
“It’s okay, I’m fine, over here,” I called.
Mike was already in his bouncer mode when he reached us and the guy on the floor started sobbing.
“Sir, I have to ask you to leave.”
“Not here!” said the crazy guy.
“Sir.” Mike put his hand on the guy’s arm.
“No!” shouted the guy and lay down on the floor, crying, with something in his hand.
Mike picked him up by his shoulders and heaved him into a sitting position, and the guy didn’t resist. He just went limp, and Mike had ot pick him up properly, and dragged him towards the door.
“Not there!” said the guy, only whining this time, and I ran ahead and unlocked it. Mike stood the guy up by the door.
“Come back again and we'll have to call the police,” said Mike, but they guy didn’t react, just stood there. “Go on, go,” and Mike pushed him, just a bit, mind, and the guy tottered off down the pavement, crying all the time, real tears and everything.
“Are you okay?” asked Mike.
“I’m fine, really,” I said. “He was only here for like five minutes.”
Mike manned the front desk while I put the travel section back together, and when he went back upstairs to the office I noticed something on the floor near the Bestseller Racks. It was a photo, of white mountains and muddy plains and stuff, the sort of view you always try to catch with a camera but never comes out. I mean, I figure it belonged to the weird guy, but it's not like he's coming back, and it was nice, so I pinned it to the message board in the break room.

They say accepting your age gets easier as you get older. Someone once told me that all of the days you've lived are remembered as a fraction of your life, so the longer you live, the shorter the days seem compared to your whole memory. To the young, a day is a large fraction of their total life and seems long, but when you are old each day zips by. I'm not too sure. I am seventy-three and I have a still have a real problem with Wednesdays.

The evening sped by and left Benjamin standing over Lisa on the grassy patch of riverbank along from the bridge as she slowly pulled her dress back over her shoulders.
“It’s colder than I thought,” she said, smiling.
“It’s not that bad,” he said. He hadn’t undressed.
“What’s the matter, Ben? You leapt up like I bit you,” Lisa’s voice was high.
“Nothing’s the matter I just wanted to stand. There is a bit of a wind coming in, huh.”
“It’s October now Ben, going to start getting cold,” she said.
Ben nodded with his hands in his pockets. He started to shift from one foot to another, like he was waiting in line.
“Am I keeping you from something, Benjamin Collins?” Lisa stood up.
“No, no, just you said you was cold, so…thought you wanted to go.”
Lisa stood in front of him with her arms folded and her head to one side. Lisa was a skinny girl, built like a bird, all delicate ribcage and thin limbs, not bony, just slight, but her hair curled and shook out long as it fell down her back and the way she carried it when she moved made it a part of her and she, her frame augmented by this mass of moving color, seemed more real, more substantial. Her hair was a mess from the sex.
“You were standing up before I even got my dress on,” she said.
“Don’t know,” said Ben. “Just felt wrong to just lie there just then.”
Ben wasn’t looking at Lisa any more, but she was staring at him, willing him to return her attention.
“We can go if you like,” said Lisa.
“Yeah, okay,” said Ben. He turned away from her and started walking and Lisa followed him through the bushes.
Ben reached the car before Lisa and when he looked back along the path and couldn’t see her he realized he had been walking fast. Six foot three inches tall, was Ben, and his normal stride would have outpaced Lisa on any day, and right now he was nervous. He stood by the car. He saw her hair through the leaves, then the print of her dress, and then the movement of her arms as she walked. She said nothing as she approached him.
“Sure you’re all right, Ben?” she said,
“Yep,” said Ben.
Lisa walked around to the left hand side of the car and opened the door with her keys.
“It’s open,” she said, and Ben gratefully pulled the handle on his side.
Lisa didn’t say anything until they were back in the town and a few blocks from Ben’s apartment building.
“I had a nice time,” said Lisa, looking across at him for a moment.
“Me too,” said Ben, but he kept staring through the windshield, and didn’t say anything else.
“It’s around here, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yeah, just past that tree,” said Ben, and he pointed.
Lisa stopped the car by the tree, heaved at the handbrake and turned to look at Ben, who was still staring straight ahead like a child about to be told off.
“Well Ben, I had a real nice time.”
“Yep,” said Ben.
“I can’t say you didn’t freak me out, cos you did, but hey. Them’s the breaks,” she said. Her elbow was on the steering wheel. She looked at him and she could tell he was itching to open the door.
“See you around,” she said, releasing him, and he popped the door and got out of the car.
Without waiting to see what he was doing she started the car and pulled away, accelerating past the speed limit in her frustration. Traffic was light in that neighborhood after midnight, so she kept on the gas, frowning.
A light turned red and she stopped, not wanting to. She shook her head, tapped the steering wheel and looked around the crossroads and sighed. The light turned green and she floored the accelerator. The tires protested for a second and then she was off, laughing, laughing. Laughing in the dark.

Penny tired and cold; her feet the first touches of dew through her shoes. A mist over the grass too, a ghost of it against the treeline. This morning because of her desk and her work. The light and a sense of elation the night and finished. A few hours before the deadline, but before that.
Twenty minutes before from the window of her room the mist over the grass down towards the lake. The geese, their necks over their backs in the grass, and the walk.
The tops of the trees up the hill the beginnings of the day’s sun but the cold in her feet; now in the small of her back; real cold. A bench on the path around the side of the lake and dew as well; a moment of this morning air, around her after a night of caffeine and sugar and a mound of textbooks. Penny her eyes and the worries of the night in her mind.
Along the path by the lake her breathing, of the feeling of her fatigue in the muscles of her back and her legs and the tiredness of her eyes, but all nothing; the success. Faster, the trees and out again next to another university residence, and the cold of the shadows the grass from the path again the first sun. Quiet: no sound but her, only her feet on the grass, only the colours and feel of the sunlight, of victory, of winning.

Cedd knew they were a long way from the nearest town because the stones in the ruts of the road were broken and in one or two places they passed as the evening wore on there was only mud which was thick with the white dust of masonry ground by long years of passing wheels. It was a roman road, eighty or ninety years old at least, and the boroughs kept the roads in good repair where they could despite the loss of the legions, and you could still count on good roads around the big towns. Cedd had never taken the Londinium road before, and he was surprised to find that despite the fact that they were only one day out of York, the six carts his father had entrusted him were coming to the ragged edge of the civilization he felt so sure of. Cedd was sitting in the second cart, holding the reins.
“Bowden!” shouted Cedd, and the shorter of the two horsemen at the head of the convoy turned in the saddle.
“Yes?” Bowden was the more senior of the two mercenaries Aolwyn, Cedd's father, had hired for the trip.
“Is it much further to the wayhouse?”
“An hour, no more,” said Bowden and turned away.
Cedd didn’t like Bowden at all, nor his partner, the dark bearded lumbering Ceawlin. Cedd was young for the trip, it was true, but he felt as though he was in control of everything except the mercenaries, who paid him only the minimal amount of deference and went their own ways a lot of the time, riding ahead and leaving the trail, making Cedd nervous.
Since leaving the sight of the walls of York, there had been few people at the roadside. It was Autumn, the harvest was only just past, and the fields were taking their breath. In the hours between the city walls and the start of the forest, Cedd had seen only three people other than his father’s men, and it heightened his sense of isolation and fragility. He wasn’t even allowed to ride in the leading cart. At his father’s pleading and tales of robbers on the road, he had accepted, but it was a bitter taste in Cedd’s mouth – his first caravan and he did not have the seat of authority.
The road curved up over the brow of a hill between the trees and for a moment the forest was laid out in front of them. Bowden and Ceawlin had stopped, one on either side of the road and were looking out over the valley.
“We should make camp tonight,” said Bowden. As Cedd’s cart pulled past him, Bowden eased his horse into a gentle walk.
“We shall make the wayhouse,” said Cedd.
“Stop!” cried Bowden, and to Cedd’s dismay Alfred, the lead cartsman, did so. The complaints of reined-in mules came sharply from the carts behind them.
“Master Cedd,” said Bowden, leaning forward in the saddle. “How are your eyes?”
“Fair enough,” said Cedd.
“Well, train your fair enough eyes on the lap of the valley.”
Bowden’s glove waved, and Cedd saw the reddish glow of fire in the tops of the trees in the distance.
“But…but…how far is the sea?”
“Seven miles or so, hereabouts.”
“They’ve come inland.”
“They’ve been roving inland for nearly a year. This far south, they'll have had a long journey. A few miles’ walk won’t stop them.”
“Was it a large village?”
“No,” said Bowden.
The sun was setting and Cedd was frightened.
“Are they likely to come along the road?”
“The village wasn’t tiny, lad. They’ll be satisfied for tonight. In the morning I respectfully suggest that we turn back to the fork and take the longer road inland.”
“Yes,” said Cedd. “Yes, all right.”
The carts pulled off the road and bunched together and the men began to unhitch the mules for grazing under the trees. Cedd took no part in the making of camp, but sat on his cart after his mule had been taken, facing the valley and watching the red of the fires in the twilight, wondering what it must have been like before the raids.

I overslept.