Hey everyone, so this is a departure from the sort of thing I normally write. This is the first chapter of a fictional story I am working on. I joined a writing group and I plan on reading this on Wednesday to a group of authors for critique. But first, I would like to show it to you guys to see if there is anything I can fix. Let me know what y’all think and thank you for taking the time.
The dimming yellow lights flickered in the subway as it sped through the tunnels deep under the bustling streets of the Big Apple. The passengers lucky enough to have a cold metal seat curled in their shoulders and crossed their arms in order to avoid touching their neighbors. The rest gripped onto the poles and firmly planted their feet on the floor for balance. Everyone’s shoulders bobbed back and forth with each clank and turn that the subway cart made. Most of the city dwellers had their eyes shut, focused on their smartphone screens or were staring off into space. But Dallas, a man sitting in the far back seat of the train was leaning forward in his seat and wrinkling his eyebrows over the next clue for his crossword puzzle.
Number 4 Across was seven letters and was asking for “What ended a tragedy?” Dallas stared at the seven empty white boxes and considered what ended a tragedy. He thought of different types of tragedies, earthquakes, bombings, or any disaster really. Natural ones ended on their own, or maybe it was God. Other types of tragedies were ended by a hero or by someone deciding to do something about it. But he wasn’t sure what word was seven letters and would match the clue.
He was concentrating so hard on his clue solving, that Dallas was startled out of his skin at the sound of a woman’s voice inches away from his ears. “Twenty one across is ‘escrow’?” She said. He glared at her, irritated at her unprompted assistance and then frowned disapprovingly at her large purple and green plaid scarf wrapped around her neck. Her curious brown eyes stared at him. The man returned to his puzzle. “I’m not there yet.” He said. The girl leaned in closer and peered over his shoulder. “Are you sure that you could have gotten that one on your own? It’s kind of a tough one.” She asked. Dallas scooted an inch over so that she couldn’t see the rest of his puzzle. “I think I would have been just fine.” He replied. The girl frowned and backed away. “Alright, be that way.” She said crossing her arms and leaning away from him. Dallas read the clue for 21 across to himself, ‘A contract, deed, bond or other written agreement deposited with a third person.’ He had no earthly idea what that was. He tried to remember what she had said but all his brain kept spitting out was escargot. Which was definitely a cooked snail and had nothing to do with a bank agreement.
Dallas shrugged to himself, he wasn’t there anyways. He’d figure the answer out when he got there. He glanced over his shoulder to see if the girl with the barney colored scarf was still sitting beside him. But she was gone. Confused, Dallas sat up and searched the rest of the car. She wasn’t there. Dallas thought to himself, trying to remember if they’d stopped since she’d scooted away from him. But he couldn’t remember. He’d been too absorbed in the answers. She must’ve gotten off, he finally decided. She probably snuck out to avoid talking to me again. I’m surprised she tried talking to me in the first place. Dallas thought. He pictured the brightly colored scarf wrapped around her neck under her brown eyes and wondered what was underneath the scarf. If he’d pulled out his gun, he could have forced her to show him but he’d been too absorbed in his puzzle to think about it. Now she was gone and he would never know. Obviously, the girl wasn’t very smart because she’d talked to a man that was now fantasizing about threatening her just to see what was under her scarf. He imagined a large scar encasing her throat or maybe a hideous tattoo she’d gotten one drunken night wrapping around her waist and framing her perfect perky breasts. It was then that Dallas realized the answer to one across, a clue he’d skipped. “Cross your heart” was a reference to something people did to symbolize a promise. He wrote ‘Promise’ into the white boxes.
Dallas continued to sit in his seat on the subway, analyzing the crossword puzzle and the strange woman’s behavior until he arrived at his stop, Penn Station. One of the larger stations in New York City, it was full of travelers, workers, and the beggars hoping for some change to fall out of their pockets. Dallas walked towards the center of the station and peeked around an awkwardly positioned wall blocking his view. And there, just like every other Thursday was his only friend Gus, wrapped in a large black blanket resting in his nearly shredded wheelchair. The old man wasn’t handicapped but the chair was so convenient and comfortable that he’d seen Gus fight two teenage boys to the ground to keep it. Gus was dressed every bit a man living on the streets with his long green patched up jacket stuffed to the brim with newspapers, his mismatched gloves and mud stained beanie. He looked so needy that strangers would toss him coins without even being asked.
“Gus, wake up! I made it.” Dallas said. The slumped old man’s head perked out of his nest, searching for the source. “How are you this morning, sir?” Gus asked when he spotted the man staring at him. Dallas sighed and pointed at the vacant tiles next to Gus. “Is that seat taken?” He asked. The homeless man sat up straight in his chair as if he were welcoming a guest. “No, No. It’s all yours.” Gus was unfailingly kind but also extremely forgetful. They saw each other every Thursday and every Thursday, Gus would start to introduce himself like they were strangers. But they were far from strangers; Dallas had slept beside him in many cold damp alleys and begged for money on the same corners as his old friend. Before he’d gotten the watch, they were desperate together. And they’d conned many people out of enough money for a bottle full of bliss. For almost nine years now, Gus had been his friend. They’d traded stories whether true or false and ranted about the injustices of the society that they lived in. Dallas almost beat a man to death for calling Gus a scab of New York City once. The old homeless man was the only person he’d ever been completely honest too and sadly the poor man was slowly losing all recollection of Dallas and his own life as his dementia took over. “I’m doing alright today.” Dallas responded. Gus’ most distinguishing feature, his huge underbite, caused his jaw to shake abnormally in response. “Well that’s good, what brings you to this spot at Penn Station on this cold day?” The man with the watch shrugged. “Just doing the normal routes. Have to make sure everyone is doing alright.” The man’s entire body shook. His eyes rounded to take in the young man next to him. “You ain’t a cop are you?” Dallas shook his head in the negative and then changed the subject. “Of course not, Gus can I ask you something?” The old man nodded, his chin haphazardly following his nod. “Of course, of course anything you need. I fought against the Japs in ’67, and boy, I could tell you some frightening stories. Them Asians are the spawn of Satan.” Dallas sighed but decided not to correct him so that he could ask him his question. “Do you believe in time travel?” Gus leaned back in his seat, overwhelmed. “Yeah I don’t see why not. Sure would be fun if I could travel through time. I’d probably go back and kick the shit out of that brat that tried to steal my chair again. You remember that?” Dallas stared at his friend amused that pieces of his memory came back and others didn’t make any sense. He nodded politely and then decided to let Gus rant about the conspiracy during the terrorist attack on 9/11.
“The way I see it, Bush wanted all of the business people and the firefighters dead so that he could take over. Then while all of this was going on, he was brainwashing little kids to follow him after all of New York City had burned to the ground.” Dallas shook his head at his friend. The poor guy barely remembered anything correctly and he was out on the streets to defend for himself. But Gus wasn’t his responsibility, he couldn’t take care of him anymore, he was busy trying to keep himself on a leash. The homeless man exited the subway station at the same time he did every Thursday, with his finger raised in the air scolding the entire Bush administration, he rolled up the ramp and onto the streets. With his old companion out of the station, Dallas returned his attention back to his puzzle.
But before he could properly focus on the next clue, Dallas felt eyes weighing down on him. He looked up for the source and saw a well-dressed man leaned against the wall about 5 paces to his left. Dallas studied the man with the upturned nose. His pant suit was neatly pressed and his red tie was tucked in place. His cleanly cut hair was smoothed back and was complimented by his recently shaved face. He pulled his black briefcase to his other side and crossed his legs to face away from the homeless man glaring at him from the floor. Dallas stood. “What are you staring at?” He asked. The man with the briefcase scoffed, rotated his perfect blonde head and unwisely said. “I was admiring you and your friend’s ability to impersonate a pile of shit.”
Dallas covered the distance between them and pulled his gun swiftly from his pocket; placing it directly at the man’s cringing nose. “Wrong answer. Try again.” Dallas said. The man panicked. He fell to his knees with his briefcase displayed in front of him. He searched the station for someone to help him. But only a few had noticed and they were all frozen in place, not sure what to do. “Look, I’m sorry. Take this briefcase, it has $600 in it. Just don’t shoot me.” He pleaded. Dallas rolled his eyes. It never ceased to amaze him at how quickly people changed their attitude when they realized that the person they were dealing with was certifiably insane. “Wrong answer again.” He said. And then pulled the trigger. The first bullet slammed into the man’s arm and threw his body up against the wall. Blood spattered the dirty station concrete. Several woman behind him screamed. The man threw the briefcase and yelled in pain; tears flowing down his cheeks as he gripped his bleeding forearm. The second shot went through his stomach, causing the man who had been scowling only moments before to stain his khaki pants brown.
Dallas knelt down to look the man in his eyes as they clung onto his last few moments of life and asked. “Now who’s the piece of shit?” And then pulled the trigger the third time, blowing his brains all over the subway.
Dallas stared at the dead body as the relief spread through his limbs. He wondered if all killers felt the same release he did at taking the life out of somebody’s eyes. It was a shame he’d never get to go to jail and talk about his experiences with other murderers. Maybe he would someday and he could create a support group for his fellow strugglers. “How many people here stare into their victim’s eyes right before they kill them?” He would ask. Maybe one or two would raise their hands but the rest would stay silent and maybe even look away, slightly ashamed. “Those of you who don’t aren’t real killers!” Dallas would shout. “Would you like to know why?” They’d nod sheepishly. “Well good, I’ll tell you why! When you hold a person’s life in your palm, they stare back at you with the entirety of their soul in their eyes. They are so scared, that they are laying everything that they know about themselves, every memory and every feeling that they’ve ever felt right there on the table for you to examine. It’s right there in their eyes, pulled from the depths of their hearts and given to you out of desperation. In this wordless moment, you will forget that you have your own feelings, becoming completely absorbed with theirs. So much so that you might want to change your mind. You might think, ‘wait, this person doesn’t deserve to die.’ And then surprisingly decide to let them go. Then you are weak. They have no more meaning than any other person on this planet and they are attempting to deceive you. It takes courage to look them in the eyes and kill them anyways. Proving in a second that whatever meaning they held for themselves was ultimately a waste of time.” The room would become stunned with silence. Not even other killers would be able to identify with Dallas when he described killing in such a romantic way.
Zapped back into reality, Dallas heard people screaming and running frantically behind him. A woman was crying into her 9-1-1 call. “He just… shot him!! Right here… in the middle of the station!” Great. The cops would be here any minute. He thought.
Dallas buried his head into his knees as his mind took in another kill. Visions clouded his brain and pulled him to another place far away. He knew that he was still in the bathroom but at the same time, he felt pulled from the real world. As if he had been thrown into the static of his television for the rest of his life. He screamed and cried to be set free but the eternal static remained.
“Sir! Could you hurry up, I really need to take a dump.” A muffled voice bellowed through his subconscious; Dallas felt as if he was being pulled to the surface. The dingy stall returned as Dallas gasped for air. A man standing outside his stall pounded on his door. “Hello! Is anybody in there??” He hollered. Dallas unlocked the door and stumbled out of his cell. “It’s all yours.” He said. Dallas met the irritated eyes of the man with the briefcase from the subway and remembered how desperate they’d looked right before he’d killed him. But now, the man shoved Dallas to the side like he was a peasant and slammed the stall door in his face.
Dallas emerged from the bathroom and saw the people that had been frantic only moments before now filing into the subway. They had no memory of him killing a man in plain sight in the station. In fact, they didn’t even look at him. The subway dinged and sped down the tunnel towards the next stop taking the group with it.
Leaving the scene behind, Dallas walked up the stairs and emerged onto a bustling New York City sidewalk. Before he continued down the sidewalk, Dallas darted to the nearest alley where he sank into the damp concrete and rested his back against the cold brick. He pulled out his crossword puzzle and thought about the next solution.
Three down was ‘thinking makes it so.’ And since it intersected with five across which was, ‘Tokyo’ he knew that the second letter of the nine letter word had to be an ‘o.’ Dallas thought to himself wondering what thinking made. For some people, thinking led to ideas and success and then more and more money. For others, thinking made them depressed and lonely. It could make them bitter and cause them to wallow in self-pity. While it was a simple answer, perhaps it was saying that thinking made someone good or bad. Dallas checked and it fit. He wrote down the letters and then sighed and leaned his head against the brick.
Closed System 