Okay, so you can read this separately if you don't feel like going through and reading the rest of my "novel." Or if you like it you can read the whole thing, Prologue and all. Basically, it's up to you. Rest assured, the story develops slowly but the action needs a little time to get rolling.
To set the scene if you don't know what's going on: Our MC is hanging out in his garage in Chicago, where he has lived for a short time.
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Borrowed, perhaps, but it didn’t belong to anyone but the unlikely pair that inhabited it. It was long-abandoned, a decrepit companion to a once-coveted building on the outskirts of downtown Chicago. It could hardly have been called a home, even during those first, gloriously naïve years that flashed by after it was constructed. Now, it was a truck stop—a resting place for travelers and drug dealers and the occasional blurry, nondescript gentleman who gambled alone and traveled with a rooster.
It was cozy enough, furnished sparsely with a few necessities. Or, rather, the card table, the chair, and the rooster, who was perhaps not a furniture item, but certainly not an ordinary inhabitant.
Nicolai sat down again, then leapt to his feet with sudden urgency, knocking the chair to the ground and eliciting a bemused glare from the corner, where Aitvaras, the rooster, preened his feathers delicately. Nicolai shot the animal a glance, one that would have turned the room silent and frozen, and stalked toward the garage door, which served as his only connection to the outer world. He leaned down, pressing his shoulder into the metal as it caterwauled its way to a more open position, exposing a slice of concrete and smog. The man held his breath as he exited, loathe to take his first breath of city air.
Solid, heavy footsteps echoed behind him, curving sideways and ricocheting off the boarded windows. Nicolai chewed on the city air, pensive, remembering the garage as they had found it. When he had first scurried lithely across the concrete into the empty shell, it had been bare and clean. There were no gasoline stains on the floor, no scuff marks or bicycle treads. It had been, by all accounts, unused. It was a husk of something that never existed: an empty cocoon that had never held a butterfly.
That pleased Nicolai somewhat. The press of humanity was always louder when he encountered the quiet pieces of peoples’ lives. He wouldn’t bring himself to empty a tattered house of a calendar, a child’s toy. The contact was unbearable, the reminder of his isolation sharp and virulent as it touched his skin. The big things were less painful—cars, the houses themselves. But when Nicolai encountered something truly loved, he would be pressed to leave. His palms would itch for escape, and so he would run until he stopped, and then he would rest and live for a while until he was set to running again.
There was a pop-psychology lesson there, somewhere. A fear of commitment, perhaps, hidden beneath his otherwise unmarred psyche. He snorted.
The wind flickered and then screamed down the sidewalk with renewed intensity, qand Nicolai paused on the curb, craning his head and leaning back on his heels against the gale. It lashed his face and pulled the lapels of his jacket back and forth, tugging furiously. Nicolai smoothed them, then dipped his head into the chill. The construction site rumbled contentedly in an early-morning hum at the edge of his awareness. He turned toward it, opening his mouth as tasting the acrid smell of torn asphalt and the death of a street under the jackhammers.
Their newest site was a pipe replacement, or a sewer replacement, or something important. Nicolai didn’t care, much, as long as someone told him where to dig. But this street bore the disdain of the city on its broad shoulders, as residents exchanged money and glances and flesh. It was the noise or the smell or the men: the disruption of the routine or the snarl of the pavement as it was torn open in a vaguely pornographic exposure of the city—inside out. People hated or loved this place—Chicago—but the glimpses of the monster beneath their homes seemed to be too much. The workers, Nicolai and his companions, were left to themselves.
Invisible certainly suited Nicolai, but as the foreman raised his glittering, rose-colored head from his clipboard, Nicolai’s obscurity slipped sideways, skittering off into the depths of the city. The foreman’s mustache quivered perilously, and he drew himself up before bellowing at Nicolai in a toned-down version of his normal speaking voice—which was a shout.
“Five minutes late,” he roared, stepping closer and pressing into Nicholai’s face with a satisfied whoosh of expelled air. Nicolai could smell the donuts on his breath, and a passion driven by greed and self-loathing was nestled comfortably in his voice.
“Four minutes,” Nicolai corrected blithely. Arrogantly. His lean, angular frame dwarfed that of the foreman, but the man made up for his size in the power of his voice, and the generally competent manner in which he operated his site. His workers respected him, as far as it went.
“Bullshit four minutes!” the foreman snapped, but not loudly enough to turn heads. He made it sound like one word, and Nicolai repeated it to himself. Bulshifominus. The foreman turned his bald head back to his writing, back to the blueprints and technicalities that meant little to him but which he enforced with a vengeance. It was a concession, and Nicolai moved past him toward the active portion of the site, where the equipment whined and screeched in the morning light.
They didn’t quite brush shoulders—Nicolai was a generous sort, and not one to force confrontation at the dubious cost of his invisibility. Nonetheless, Nicolai felt the other man draw back, away from the tilt of his shoulders and the twist of his jacket. His breath caught Nicolai across the neck, making him shudder. He disguised it roughly as he zipped the jacket and leapt blindly into a rent in the asphalt.
People should have scattered, really. Nicolai dropped from the road and landed heavily in the pit, where shovels twitched melancholically and people blinked continuously as the salt plagued their eyes. One man grunted, unidentifiable except for his knotted neck and gritty face. It seemed that this man had come from the opposite end of the construction site—as Nicolai and the others dropped down from the sky, this man scurried up from the depths to replace the city’s battered plumbing.
It was for this reason that Nicolai had named him Mole. The other workers, to him, were indistinguishable from one another, perhaps because they carried such similar burdens. Each pair of shoulders was identically bowed, as though pulled to the ground by the weight of its owner’s sins. But Mole’s shoulders were straight and slender—not, Nicolai thought, for want of sins, but rather for want of conscience.
A thick rumble greeted his arrival, a spike in conversation that was not comprehensible, nor directed at him. It was a cluster of meaningless words that blended into a staccato rhythm that complemented the jackhammer’s screams and the four sets of breaths that steamed in the air. Silence was unlikely here, but so was good humor: Still, a few of the men made jokes. Fewer laughed.
Nicolai didn’t mind, particularly. The physicality of the work was what drew him from the garage, not the company. And so as he threw himself into their task, the details of which remained indistinct, the world blurred and spun. The burn of his shoulders, his back, his legs, stifled the dull ache that resided behind his temples. At twenty two, he still easily avoided the ache and the grinding of old age. He was too preoccupied with the present to be concerned about the future.
He moved with the work, leap-frogging between construction projects. Chicago was full of revitalization efforts, and he had been happy here from the start. But the lurking sensation still tugged at him. He wouldn’t stay for much longer.
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As with most of my stuff, it's raw and skeletal. It hasn't been edited.
Anyway, please let me know when you post more, because I enjoyed it most heartily. It's not everyday that I find a piece like this on here that I can simply tell the author I thought the story was great without finding a horrible malpractice of grammar and a story line that rambles more than my grandmother. So, thank you!