Here's my first short story (1,917 words) that I finished yesterday. It's the first piece of writing I've ever put on the internet.
I'm working on a commercial style conspiracy thriller (my first serious attempt) and I am about 12K words into what will be around 80K-90K words once complete.
As a writing exercise, I've decided to open an account (not soliciting on here) where I will use short filler characters from the book, ones that won't actually carry the book, to expand on the world I've built in the present time, focusing on short side stories of their life, who would not otherwise get the chance.
This story is one day in the life of Maria.
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A Small Mercy
A standalone story from The Fracture Years.
Maria grabbed her keys and headed for the door of her fifth-floor studio apartment.
The babysitter had been five minutes late that morning, and by the time Maria turned the corner, the MTA bus was already waiting at the curb.
She picked up speed, weaving through the bodies packed along the sidewalk.
As the last passenger stepped onto the bus, a man in a sharp blue suit came past with a cell phone pressed to one ear and a leather bag swinging from his hand.
His shoulder clipped hers hard enough to send her down onto the pavement.
You gotta be kidding me.
The man slowed just enough to make sure there wouldn’t be a lawsuit, but not enough in any way that mattered.
Then he disappeared into the morning crowd.
By the time Maria got back on her feet and brushed the dirt from her palms, the bus doors had folded shut.
She watched it merge into traffic.
The E train station was two blocks away, and Maria didn’t have time to wait for another bus.
She rummaged through her bag and came up with three dollars and sixty-four cents.
Just enough not to jump the turnstile.
She bolted down the sidewalk as the crowd thickened around her. Men and women shifted in and out of her path, all of them moving with an urgency that said their lateness mattered more than anyone else’s.
At the station, she hurried down the steps, fed her money into the machine, and watched the last crumpled bill spit back out.
She smoothed it against her thigh and tried again.
The machine rejected it.
Again.
Rejected.
“Come on,” she whispered.
A security guard watched from the corner, looking more amused each time the machine spit the bill back out.
On the fourth try, it took.
Maria dropped in the rest of the change, grabbed the card, and moved toward the platform.
She scanned the benches over the heads of the other commuters.
Full. Full. Full.
Then the crowd shifted.
One open spot.
A man sat at the far end of the bench, folded into himself, his clothes torn, his shoes split at the soles. His head hung low enough that Maria couldn’t tell whether he was asleep, drunk, sick, or some combination of all three.
She inspected the seat, then sat.
She pulled out her phone.
Lucas smiled up at her from the lock screen, sitting cross-legged in front of the television in his dinosaur pajamas.
6:34 a.m.
She just might make her seven o’clock shift.
“Hello, sweetheart.”
She looked up.
The man at the end of the bench was staring at her now, his crooked smile showing the dark spaces between his teeth.
“You got pretty eyes for someone in a hurry.”
This isn’t happening.
Maria stood too fast, turned, and ran face-first into the chest of a man wearing a bright yellow reflective vest and hard hat.
“Watch it.”
She lowered her head and moved around him.
A push of air rushed through the station.
The E train came to a halt.
Finally.
As the train filled, Maria scanned the car for a seat.
A gray-haired woman sat near the doors with a pair of knitting needles, a ball of red yarn, and a small bag on the seat beside her.
She looked up at Maria with a soft smile.
Their eyes met for a moment.
Then the woman moved the bag into her lap.
Maria smiled back and sat down.
“Ever tried the Estonian lace pattern?” the woman asked, holding up the half-finished thing in her hands.
Maria smiled again, this time out of politeness, then looked away.
“The trick is to keep the yarn loose while you make your loops, and then you just purl the nupps together like this.”
The needles clicked away in front of her.
Maria had never knitted a day in her life.
As the train neared the JFK connection, Maria grabbed the pole and stood.
The gray-haired woman looked up from her knitting.
“Wait.”
Maria turned back.
The woman reached into the small bag on her lap and pulled out a finished scarf, folded neatly into itself. It was the same deep red as the yarn in her hands.
“For you.”
Maria stared at it.
“Oh, no. I can’t—”
“Please,” the woman said, pushing it closer. “You look like you could use something warm today.”
The doors opened.
People began spilling onto the platform around them.
Maria looked from the scarf to the woman, then to the doors.
“Thank you,” she said, taking it.
The woman smiled and went back to her knitting as if nothing unusual had happened.
Maria stepped onto the platform just before the doors closed.
As the train pulled away, she looked back through the window. The woman was already bent over her next pattern, needles moving steadily.
She stuffed the scarf into her bag and rushed toward her shift at the airport.
“I tell ya, girl,” Olivia said, staring at herself in the locker-room mirror. She turned to Maria. “If Marcus doesn’t pop the question soon, I swear I’ll just marry one of the maintenance guys.”
Maria looked up from the bench as she fastened her sneakers.
“That would certainly broaden your options.”
“I heard Manuel is building a house with his dad.”
“Yeah, well, Manuel doesn’t like to shower, either.”
Olivia looked back at herself in the mirror and adjusted the name tag over her breast pocket.
“That can be corrected.”
She headed for the door.
“See you at lunch.”
The door shut behind her.
Maria stood and moved to the mirror. Her uniform was straight. Her black hair was pinned. Her name tag sat where it was supposed to.
Still, something looked unfinished.
Her eyes shifted to the bag on the top shelf of her locker.
The red scarf peeked out from the zipper.
She reached for it, closed the locker door, wrapped it loosely around her neck, and left.
By eleven o’clock, Maria had been yelled at twice, had slapped four LIVE ANIMAL stickers onto various carriers, sorted through one mysteriously changed flight, and required the help of two others to pull a piece of luggage so heavy she thought it deserved its own airplane.
Her phone buzzed inside her vest pocket.
Do you think they’ll end school early?
Maria frowned.
She typed back:
Why?
The reply came almost immediately.
Another power outage.
Maria looked up at one of the muted televisions in the terminal.
A reporter stood on a street in the South Bronx and waved a hand behind him, as if heralding the whole district.
The red banner along the bottom of the screen read:
POWER OUTAGES ENTER SECOND DAY ACROSS NEW YORK CITY
She looked down at her phone again:
I hope not. Keep me posted.
By three o’clock, faces had blurred together, animal carriers felt like any other piece of luggage, her supervisor was one word away from receiving a resignation letter, and hunger filled the pit of Maria’s stomach like a hollow drum.
She looked over at Olivia, who stood behind the next kiosk with her bright red lipstick gleaming under the terminal lights. A family with large cameras Maria would never spend the money on crowded around her, asking about the best places to visit in the city.
“You just have to check out the Superhero Supply Company in Brooklyn!” Olivia said.
Her red lipstick widened into another perfect customer-service smile.
Maria clocked out and caught the bus, this time with both feet still firmly on the ground, and found an empty seat directly behind the driver.
She walked up the block toward her apartment, lost in her own thoughts. The traffic on the sidewalk was no longer the condensed chaos it had been that morning, and she wasn’t the only one moving slower than before.
She passed a church she had been inside only once, back when she had tried to find some meaning in her and Lucas’s Sundays, before her supervisor changed the schedule. A deep, resonating bell tolled above its steeple four times.
Maybe we could try the evening Mass, she thought.
“Give me the bag,” someone in front of her demanded.
Maria looked forward.
For a second, she wasn’t sure if he was real or some trick of exhaustion.
“Come on!”
She looked down at the bag pinned beneath her arm.
“Now, lady!”
The man lurched forward with both hands and grabbed the strap.
Maria’s instincts kicked in. First fear. Then fight.
She tugged back.
He tugged harder.
They wrestled over the bag as the sidewalk moved around them. Someone gasped. Someone else kept walking.
Maria’s name tag slipped loose from her uniform and dropped into the subway grate beneath her feet.
Air pushed up around them as a train sped below.
She kicked him in the shin.
The man’s face changed.
He kicked her back, his hands still locked around the bag. The strap tore loose from her shoulder, and Maria fell hard against the pavement.
Another thud.
A moment later, he was gone.
Maria stayed where she was, staring at the grate.
Her name was gone too.
Maria climbed the steps to her building with her keys pressed between her fingers.
By the time she reached her apartment door, her shoulder ached, her palms burned, and the knees of her uniform were gray with sidewalk dust.
Before she could get the key into the lock, the door swung open.
“Thank God you’re back,” the babysitter said. “You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had.”
Maria stared at her.
“Was Lucas okay?”
“He’s fine,” the babysitter said. “He’s been drawing for like an hour.”
Maria just wanted to get past her.
“A nine-hour day is a hundred and eight bucks,” the babysitter said.
She waited.
Maria didn’t move.
“You were technically late, which would make it another twelve.”
She paused.
“But don’t worry about it.”
Maria looked down at her side where the bag had been just moments before, then back up to the babysitter.
“Can I get you back on Friday?”
The girl looked at Maria, then rolled her eyes.
“Fine.”
She stepped into the hallway and headed for the stairwell.
Maria went inside, pushed the door shut, and fell back against it.
Then she slid down to the floor.
Lucas was in the living room, half-hidden behind the small kitchen island that divided the apartment.
She looked around the kitchen.
Unopened mail on the counter.
Lucas’s dinosaur cup upside down in the sink.
The frying pan still on the stove from the dinner she had cooked the night before.
She dropped her face into her hands.
Maria didn’t know how long she sat there.
Twice she had fallen that day. Twice she had gotten back up. She had been screamed at, leered at, threatened, robbed, and stripped of her own name.
Olivia’s bright red lipstick flashed through her mind. The babysitter’s eye roll. The man in the blue suit. The man at the end of the bench. The name tag disappearing through the grate.
Then Lucas stood in front of her.
“Look, Mommy.”
“Give Mommy a minute,” she said, her face still buried in her hands.
“I made a picture for you.”
She looked up.
Two stick figures, one smaller than the other, stood beneath a crooked sun in the green scribble of a park.
Around both their necks were red scarves.
“I made you warm, too.”