45 Votes
2520
Views
Views
Chapter 1:- ONE
Collecting them was never the intention. No, it was nothing like that. He simply didn’t have time to read every single article in the paper before the morning crowd shuffled in with their germs and their loud voices, searching the chalkboard menus for the one magical variation of coffee sure to change their day to something almost liveable
Chapter One:
Percy looked with tired eyes through the window as the greyed concrete buildings of the small financial district whirred by. In the quite hours of early morning downtown Brunswick was empty and lonely like an elderly spinster kept companion only by stray cats and subjective memories.
Nothing about the city ever changed and yet, somehow, nothing really stayed the same and it was this strange continuum that lured Percy's father to the Atlantic seaboard. Anna couldn't stand the small town life and left for New York as soon as she turned eighteen. Percy's father grew homesick for a country he could never return to and so went to the next best place to make a fortune peddling drugs to Americans -- Mexico.
Percy stayed behind.
He liked the quiet and the quaintness of the little city, the lobster shacks, the white washed houses and the oat grass sprouting straight from the sand.
Percy even liked the crappy cafe's -- if you could even call them that -- that lined Mary street, next to the shopping disctrict. It was here that Percy could find a decent cup of Columbian roast and a place to read his precious newspapers.
Collecting them was never the intention. No, it was nothing like that. He simply didn’t have time to read every single article in the paper before the morning crowd shuffled in with their germs and their loud voices, searching the chalkboard menus for the one magical variation of coffee sure to change their day to something almost liveable
When the morning crowd started in – or the office drones as Percy called them – it was time to leave and head to work.
Simply put, there weren’t enough hours in the day to rightly and fully finish a paper. But it’s not like he could throw them out yet. So they piled up in the back of his Saab, and eventually moved to the foyer of his Oceanside condo. Sometimes he bundled them with twine in neat stacks if he knew it would be a while before he could read every article. Sometimes he left them loose on the floor or in the coat closet. He wasn’t a hoarder or anything. He just didn’t like to waste. Throwing a paper out before reading it front to back was a waste.
Ironically Percy worked as a landscape writer at the city’s major newspaper, The Brunswick Times. He couldn’t even remember how many newspapers he had pinched from the copy room. He pulled into the communal parking lot and shut the engine. More like the peasant parking. He eyed his boss’s reserved spot and balked at the shiny new Porche contained within it.
His boss, Randall Sullivan, was much too fat for a car like this. Percy laughed at the mental image of Randall behind the wheel.
