Story: Tourmaline (part three)

Tourmaline

(part three)

That anyone would speak or shout, that any of these colorless bodies clad from the rag bin would uncouple from the train and lose their place…meant, of course, that they had all lost their places. Meters ahead, out of sight but screaming, someone found herself not next, but first…if she would wait out the night, be queue-leader bright and early.

Or at whatever hour the door opened again.

They were a mob now. The snaking line compressed and throbbed. Anton flung a hand and was struck in the diaphragm. He felt a shoe ram the back of his knee; he sank but could not come to rest, the crowd so dense he was jostled off and onto his feet.

The wave carried him uphill. The voices fell away, people hunching, shrinking. Dispersing.

The sound was sub-audible, but hairs that transmitted sense to nerves in the ear told the target he was being yelled at, by a stern father. The effect was a terrible unease.

“My advice, Anton, is the same as always. You are not you. You have a friend who writes under a pseudonym. I could accept your politics if I were willing to publish lies.”

I have a friend, Anton thought. Why is he saying it? This pedantic speaker, this old man, was signaling him. But someone his age who walked with the group answered, “Yes, threaten them a little. Then be reassuring. We are in the rebuilding phase now.”

A woman danced in front of Anton, to lay a hand on his sleeve. On the fingers were rings, silver rings stacked, two set with green stones. I am being mocked, he told himself.

The sound cannon left off. The rings glinted. A tin of metal glinted.

“You deserve it, don’t you?” she said. “They had no business beating on you.”

He nodded, dropped the tin in a pocket. Viewed by some other Anton and the old man, he could say nothing back to her.

“Come on, Dad.” She turned to the wharfside. They might be wrong, and he ought not to trust them.

“No,” he said. “Wait.”

The other Anton, a thin young man with dark-circled eyes, sheared off; he had not bothered, even, to peer face-to-face at his doppelgänger. Anton found there was a second girl. She came out from behind the old man’s raincoat.

He said…to this one…deep in awkwardness because she held his gaze, “I have raisins and juice in my room. We might make a meal of it.”

He patted the tin. “All of you.”

He added, “I don’t mind.”

He minded intensely. Being cleaned out of store…just to learn if they would rob him properly, once he was alone with them. Or they might not rob him, but he would starve for obligation anyway, and could not send the distress signal to Palma. Why he would not fend for himself, if it were only food he needed…fend for himself! Like the others did.

3

Tourmaline

Tourmaline (part four)

(2016, Stephanie Foster)