Toby woke with a start, sitting bolt upright in bed. His face and chest were covered in a cold sweat. He had to… had to… had to do something he was sure, Had he been dreaming? The memories were wispy, and when he tried to grasp them they fled. The alarm by his bed blared into life and he jumped, slapping it silent in irritation. He dragged himself to his feet and headed for the shower. Monday morning. He had a class to get to.

The lecturer was late. Again. Toby picked a seat at random, wishing he had stayed at home in bed like most of the class clearly had. His bag made a halfway decent pillow on the desk, and he was just getting comfortable when he heard someone sit down next to him.
“You can bet if he was here on time and we were late he’d kick up a fuss,” a female voice said.
He assumed it was talking to someone else, maybe even itself, and didn’t open his eyes.
“Second week and already people are giving up on Monday morning classes. It’s just us left,” it continued.
Toby opened his eyes and looked around. The voice was right, the few stragglers who had been here just a few minutes ago had clearly given up and gone off to seek greener pastures. Or at least softer ones.

He turned to his left to see a girl sitting on the desk of the row behind, her legs dangling over the edge. She looked familiar.
“Have we met?” he asked.
She smiled a private smile. “Doubt it,” she said. “I only just started here. I’m Ashlyn.”
“Toby,” he replied, and shook the hand she offered.
“I thought someone should tell you it doesn’t look like he’s coming before you fell asleep.”
“I think I could have used the sleep,” he laughed. “You too, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“Rough night,” she said. “Anyway, if you go back to sleep who’s going to come and get a cup of coffee with me?”

She sat on the shore, arms wrapped around her knees. As he saw her, he let out a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding. He picked his way across the rocks to her.

“Hey,” she said as he sat behind her. She didn’t turn her head, but settled back into him as he wrapped his arms over hers.

“I didn’t know if you’d come,” he said. “You don’t, always. Sometimes it’s monkeys, or work, or I’m late for something but I don’t know what it is. Sometimes it’s nothing at all.”

“But you still try?” she asked.

“Every night.”

“Good.”

Clara sat at the small table in one corner of the room, shivering slightly. She felt dirty every day in this place, but it rarely got to her anymore. This was different. She hurt all over and though he hadn’t actually hit her or spoken a cruel word, she knew he realised and enjoyed it. He hadn’t spoken any words, actually, not since he had closed the door behind them. Only grunts. He was still making tiny grunts now. She could see him from the corner of her eye in the small mirror standing on the table, see the sweat on his back, dripping down onto her sheets. She was glad, not for the first time, that she didn’t sleep in that bed.

The small, discreet clock by the mirror told her he had twenty minutes left. She wanted to toss him out, but knew it wasn’t wise. Dale hadn’t taken it well the last time she’d done that, and apparently this one had been sent by Marcus. It was even less wise to piss Marcus off. In the mirror she saw him stir and her skin crawled at the thought of him touching her again.
“Marcus was right about you two,” he sat up against the headboard. “Had her last week, she’s the spit of you. Younger, ‘course. Nastier, too.”
“Excuse me?” she asked, genuinely confused, looking at his reflection but not turning.
“Your sister.” The grin that came to his face was so vile she reached out instinctively and slammed the mirror flat on the table so she didn’t have to look at it. It shattered into large pieces, the size of her hands.
“My sister is dead.” There was a roar growing in her ears. “Has been six years, now.”
“She has a hot little body for a dead girl, then. Marcus must treat her real special.”
The roar in her ears seemed to take her away from herself. She saw her hand pick up a shard of mirror, saw the room spin as she stood, turned and leapt in one motion, saw his blood on her hands and her sheets, but she did not feel any of it.

Weeks later, after all the dust had settled, I still had one question. One question that I doubt I’ll get an answer to now. At the time it didn’t seem to matter. At the time my fourth whiskey was reduced to a glass of ice and the bartender was too busy chatting up some lawyer at the other end of the bar to care, so when the dame walked through the door, took one look around the room, and came straight to the seat next to mine, I didn’t ask her why. I didn’t even ask myself why. Maybe I was just thankful that she’d turned the bartender’s head long enough to get her a Long Island and me my fifth whiskey.

She lit a long, thin cigarette and proceeded to tell me her troubles. I didn’t want to hear her troubles. Not then. I wasn’t five whiskeys deep because I had no troubles of my own. When my wallet proved too bare to buy a sixth I had a change of heart and told her what I did for a living. She wasn’t surprised. I fished a slightly dog-eared business card from my wallet and slid it to her.
“Fisher Private Investigations, 9-5 Mon-Sat,” it read.
I eyed the row of glasses in front of me on the bar, then took a pencil from my pocket, leaned over, and changed the nine to a ten.
“The address is on the back,” I said, standing up and turning to leave. I took a few unsteady steps, then looked back over my shoulder. “Better make that ten-thirty.”

“How did you know?” he asked.
“You wrote it in a story once,” she smiled.
“I wrote about dragons in a story once,” he said. “You didn’t get me one of those, did you?”
She smiled again. “I could always tell which ones were stories and which were real. You know that.”
“I know,” he squeezed her hand tightly, before letting go and stepping into the room. “I guess I’d just forgotten that I’d ever written this down.”

She followed him through the doorway and sat, curling herself up in one of the leather chairs to watch. She didn’t have to ask if it was right, she could see the look on his face. “Go ahead. Open one.”
The wall in front of him was filled with drawers. They were all shapes and sizes, but the dozens of tiny ones excited him the most. He turned back to her, her meaning just now sinking in. “Wait… you mean there’s something in them?”
“Every one.”
“That must have taken you months!”
“Years.”
He bent down to kiss her. “I love you.”
“I know,” she said. “Now go on, open one.”

“Let’s play a game,” she said.
He glanced out through the balcony doors. The cobbled street below wound away down the hill, lined on either side by tall houses, leant against each other for support. In the distance he could see the harbour, then the ocean, then the sun, sinking slowly. “Do we have time?”
“We have time. So the way it works is…”
“I’ve never played before, but I think I know how strip chess works,” he interrupted.
“The way it works is,” she continued, “every time you take off a piece of clothing, you get to take one of my pieces.”
“That’s not the way it works.”
“I thought you said you’d never played?” she raised an eyebrow.
“I haven’t, but…” he trailed off.
She sat back in her chair, stretching, one hand moving to the buttons on her shirt. “The carnaval starts in an hour. Do you want to play or not?”

She loved food. He liked that.

A lot of people loved to eat, loved taste, loved indulgence, but not many could be said to love food itself. He would catch her looking hungrily at cookbooks in shop windows as they passed. Hungry for the lovingly prepared presentations on their glossy covers, and the ideas contained within.

She loved it best when someone suggested cardamom ice-cream, or roast pork with peach gravy, or roulade of beef with whipped potato and radish cream, and she got to taste, in her mind, something she had never thought of before. Could tell how it fit together, or laugh at the absurdity. He loved that laugh.

The second pass of my novel edit is finished. It’s an improvement, definitely, which is something I was a little concerned about, having grown so used to how it was before. I think the distance I had gained from not reading it for a year and a half helped. Plus, even though I still wasn’t writing much in that time, I feel that my writing improved a lot. It’s not a technical proficiency thing, it’s an attitude thing – one that I can’t put my finger on exactly, but I feel it when I write now. There is still the chance that I’m so attached to some things there to see that they need to be done again from scratch. These edits weren’t structural, because I don’t feel that structural edits are needed, but I could be wrong.

So.

If I’m being honest, an external editor is needed. Not because there is necessarily anything wrong with what I have, but because I know I have blind spots and I have to allow for that. I’ve had a few offers. I don’t need someone to read it to offer opinions or check spelling, though, I need someone to read it with scalpel in hand, whilst still understanding what this story and these characters mean to me. I only trust one person with that job. Which means that, for now, I’m going to tag this one as work in progess. Don’t give up hope, the novel is closer to seeing the light of day than it ever has been, but I want this done properly.

* * * * *

I’m not sure if anyone’s following this show or not, but if you are you will have noticed that the new website layout is up and going strong. Categories have been purposely separated into ‘Blog’ and ‘Stories’, so you can just track one or the other if you wish, and the story blog is getting (so far) a post a day. The only restriction I’m putting on myself at this point is that at least one hundred words get posted to it every day, but for now that schedule is just for me, not any potential readers I may or may not have. Some of the pieces fit together, and are categorised as such. Some don’t fit together yet, some never will.

On that note, I have a story post to write.

In 2046, mankind struck out into space. It was not the thrill of adventure that drove them, nor the quest for new horizons. It was fear. Satellites and space stations were rafted together to form the foundations of Orbit 1 and first governments, then the rich, then anyone there was room for boarded shuttles and moved off the surface. The surface was no longer safe.

Something had been disturbed. Something which had lain aslumber for countless aeons, dreaming in the deep. People began to go missing at first, and then it was towns – gaping holes rent in the earth where once had been streets and buildings. It was clear, before long, that this was no natural phenomena. Things were burrowing, beneath the soil, tearing through rock like water. They could not be tracked, and so could not be fought. More towns disappeared, then cities. Mankind turned, in terror, and fled.

Clara picked up the bottle and two empty glasses from the dresser and followed the man out the door. She leaned against the railing of the balcony as she watched him make his way down the stairs and across the saloon, stepping over drunks and around fights, until he was out the door and into the dusk. He didn’t look back.

She had stopped asking why it was that the man paid for a service he didn’t use. Stopped seeing it as a rebuke, and started appreciating the hours, once every few months, away from the pawing hands of those brutes below.
“Clara!”
Dale had seen her standing idle, and she fully expected to be punished for it. At least he didn’t take it in trade.
“You’ve got a customer!” he called, a leering grin splitting his face as he gestured at a sweating hulk of a man sitting across the bar from him. “Marcus sent him to you ‘specially.”
She shuddered inwardly. The man did not look kind. But, if Marcus had sent him, there was little she could do, so she composed herself and started down the stairs.