Fiction

A Poetic Start

The rays of sleepy Sol, orange and pink and shades of red, shone like a blanket of tulips seen from afar, waving ever so gently, caressed by zephyrs in the gathering dusk.

Pink tinged feathers of clouds striped the fading blue of the sky, as the momentous day began its slow descent into night.

The bar was warm, noisy from the clink of glasses and murmured conversation. The lights were muted and the patrons sat slumped in their seats or slouched over the bar, their hands balancing the weight on their shoulders, the head bowed, eyes staring, unseeing, into the despair at the bottom of their glasses or mugs.

Wally wasn’t there. Ever since that fateful night, the last night that Jack had been at the bar, Wally had refused to show up. His bar was run, efficiently, by Susie, her tattoos rippling across her muscles, built up through years of body-building exercises. She had Mel, the cross-eyed blonde, who had no tattoos and a brain as sharp as a butcher’s knife, and Devon, whose every scar was a long story of a fight he had won.

A Novel Finish

The bed was soft and warm, even though the air in the bedroom was, deliberately, cool. Images flashed through my head as a I slept, unaware of the workings of my brain, as it sifted through the collection of images, feelings, thoughts, sounds and smells I had experienced sometime, somewhere, somehow through the days when I had been awake. Or, was I awake now and had what had passed before been merely dreams, nightmares and perceived sensations that had no connection to real life?

Dreams are when the brain initiates the process of archival, sorting and filing all the experiences into neat recesses of the mind. The feeling of déjà vu is when an experience triggers the opening of a drawer of the filing cabinet and a memory card falls to the floor, oddly related to the incident at hand.

I sat up with a start.

I knew now, why Desmond had visited the library, why Estrella’s car had broken down and why Jack, poor Jack, had to die.

All of this could wait, because I had to sleep off the excess of bourbon I had indulged in at Wally’s Bar last evening. It could wait because Jack was dead, Estrella innocent and Desmond wasn’t going anywhere, anytime soon.

Tomorrow, I would collect Estrella, collect the files, collect the last few threads of evidence I needed to close the case, convince the cops and convict the criminal.

I lay back, pulled the covers over my shoulders, which were cold from the air in the bedroom, closed my eyes and gave myself up to Morpheus