The rain is pouring down from the sky
in an icy shower, soaking me through completely. I can feel the freezing droplets running down my spine, chilling me to the bones – it’s been a long day. I’m hurrying past the dark windows of closed shops, an occasional car passing by, its headlights making the wet pavement sparkle reflectively. I trudge tiredly onward, my head bent against the strong wind, wet hair sticking to my cold cheeks. Suddenly, my eyes fall on a patch of bright neon reflected in a puddle in front of me, and I look up – it’s a blinking pink sign of a 24-hour bar. “Oh, whatever, after the day I’ve had – I deserve a drink” I think to myself, pushing the door open.
She’s the first thing I notice as soon as I enter. I don’t know why, but for some reason my eyes go immediately to the slender figure facing away from me at the bar. The dull overhead lights are illuminating her long black hair, drawing me in immediately. I hardly notice anything else that surrounds me – neither the grimy bar, nor the heavy wet clothes clinging to my body as I slowly walk to one of the vacant seats at the bar, not far from the mesmerizing stranger. The sleepy looking bartender is polishing a glass in a melancholy sort of way, acting as though my request for a bourbon were an imposition to him. As the bartender sets the glass on the countertop, I look curiously at the stranger beside me, just from the corner of my eye to avoid openly staring.
She seems very tense, nervous even, constantly scraping her long dark nails against the wooden counter in front of her. The sound this makes is rather forlorn, resonating through the empty room around us. I take a few sips of my drink and keep watching her – as a writer/editor, observing people is where I find most of my inspiration, and there really is something almost magnetic about this particular stranger.
I watch her continued fidgeting, as I pay attention to the details: the droplets of water running down her long black coat, the chipped paint on her nails, the unbrushed and generally messy look of her hair that had seemed so sleek from when I first entered. Something must have happened to her, that’s for sure.
The Woman takes a shaky sip of her drink and my eyes fall to the large stack of slightly damp paper in front of her. I frown, recognizing a manuscript immediately. Can she be a writer? At that particular moment she turns abruptly around to face me and I duck my head in embarrassment, worried she caught me staring at her.
“Hi” comes a shaky voice a few seconds later.
I look up in surprise and am immediately met with a pair of huge brown eyes looking at me earnestly. The Woman’s face is very pale, the dull light from the dirty lamps making it seem extra angled, gaunt and very thin, the dark circles under her bloodshot eyes extremely prominent. The lipstick around her mouth is smudged and worn, and she’s blinking much too quickly and irregularly.
“Hello” I answer stiffly, thoughts like “she’s a junkie” or “she’s insane” racing through my mind. Then I notice a dirty bandage around one of her wrists and a chill runs down my spine, completely unrelated to the cold this time.
She tells me she’s a writer, her voice still very shaky, but now I can make out some sort of accent underneath. She says that the manuscript is the story of her life and that no one would publish it. She tells about rejection after rejection she received and how she felt each one has broken away a piece of her mind, until nothing seemed to make any sense anymore. Her quiet, uneven voice is the only sound in the deserted bar, occasionally punctuated by the squeak of the glasses as the bartender cleans them, and the soft crackle of cheap light bulbs.
I don’t like the Woman. She’s getting on my nerves. Why should I listen to someone else’s sad life story, especially after the day I’ve had? I’m cold, and I’m wet, and I’m exhausted, and I have water in my shoes, and my phone’s dead and I just want to finish my drink and go home. My mind is wandering – how could I have thought this person “magnetic”? Nothing special about her whatsoever – just a weak, sad young woman to be pitied, but surely not to be inspired by.
Without thinking, I pass her my card, murmuring some sort of offer to help find her psychiatric attention, when her huge eyes go even wider, and she starts babbling: “Publishing?? You work in publishing? But you must help me publish my life story, our meeting is fate, that’s for sure…” Her accent gets thicker as she becomes more emotional, making understanding her almost impossible.
Annoyed at myself for such a stupid mistake, I try to refuse kindly, but she’s already shoving the crumpled stack of paper at me with her long-fingered hands, all the while talking at top speed. The bartender is still wiping glasses at a glacial pace, a single raised eyebrow the only indication he was perceiving anything happening around him. I’m about to lose my temper.
“Ma’am, this isn’t how this works – you can apply to our publishing house, but I’m not just going to read a random stranger’s manuscript in a bar after midnight! This is completely ridiculous – please let go of my hand” I say firmly, gripping the skeletal fingers that have latched themselves onto my wrist.
The Woman blinks at me slowly then stammers: “Please. You don’t understand. My life…It depends on it. Please.”
I snatch my hand away. “Ma’am…”
She sits back, blinking slowly at me. “Fine” she says, her voice much calmer and more level than before. “If you don’t want to give me a chance – please, just get it away from me, I don’t want it near me” she says and pushes the tattered manuscript at me along the top of the counter. It hits the side of my empty glass with a muted thud.
“Wait…what?” My brain is moving extra sluggishly, the bourbon not helping at all.
With surprising speed, the Woman hops off the high chair and hurries towards the door, her long black raincoat billowing behind her. I grab the manuscript and try to follow her, but I’m unsteady on my feet and it somehow takes me much longer to reach the heavy bar door and wrench it open. Just as I do, I hear a deafening car horn, followed immediately by the screech of tires on wet pavement and an unmistakable, sickening thumping noise. My icy fingers still gripping the filthy bar door I stare in disbelief at the slender figure in a long black coat lying on the rain-washed street in front of me. I wouldn’t trust my eyes at this point, but I think I see a dark red stain slowly spreading around the spot where her head must have been.
***
It seems as though the police questioning takes for hours, and maybe it does – I’m nor sure of anything at this point. But what I know, is that it’s dawn, and I’m finally standing inside my own flat, at a complete loss of what to say or do. At this precise moment I notice something – I’m still clutching her manuscript with a grip so tight I must have been holding it like that for hours.
I slide slowly down my front door, beyond caring that I’m sitting in a puddle of rainwater from my shoes, and flip through the book with shaking hands. True to my old habit of always reading the last page first, I force my tired eyes to focus, – and feel my heart stutter in my chest. The last line reads: “As I run out the door, I see a blinding light and feel an enormous force break my body into a million pieces, and then there’s just rain, and blood and darkness”.
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