Summer Story

[Алекс]

The sunlight shone thick and warm this early summer morning. The birds were singing in the trees and the white daisies speckling the thick, damp, deep green grass like stars in the night sky turned their pale faces to the big yellow sun. A mild cooling breeze blew across the land over the heather hills and grass plains from the Atlantic Ocean to the southwest.

Alex walked beside the gloomy hanging northern pine trees in this temperate zone and felt the damp soil give under his feet. The air was slightly heavy with pollen and seeds and cells and warmth. Alex stepped out from the gravel path onto the dark road and walked along it to the station. Cars and houses and the roads and lines and fences connecting them like a stone and metal spiderwed hung across the nature crammed into the space from all directions. Cars roared by once in a while on the narrow road.

Alex came to the station and stepped through the turqoise painted door of the shady waiting room. The inside walls of the wooden hut were painted white and the floor was sparsely littlered with sweet wrappers and empty drinks cans. This was where the kids waited to board the school train before it was phased out for a coach. Alex saw his 2 year old dated graffiti on the wall saying 'I need to be myself'. He walked out onto the platform and paced around waiting for the train while the mentally-handicapped woman from the asylum weeded the flowerpots. He saw the sun reflecting white brightly off of the house on the top of the hill in the busy village a mile or so away. The train came.

Alex rode the train through the overpopulated pasturelands of northern England and the postindustrial consumer towns like battery farms with their blocks and blocks and rows of boxlike houses in square patterns. Looking out of the window he felt the river of humanity passing him by, flowing around him with so many missed opportunities and wasted days sliding by and pouring down the plughole into nothingness. All of the lonely young people sitting in their rooms at night in electic light were unlike him though. He changed trains a couple of times on the way south and crammed himself into the tight, stiff, uncomfortable seat watching the bright creamy hawthorn blossoms fly by on the hedges lining the train tracks.

When Alex came to the final station in the big city center by the big university campus he walked out past the Marx and Spencers green light lit store and out into the yellow stone tiled square to look at the long modern art water sculpture. It was a big, ugly sprawling mess of grey shining metal and stepped canal waterfalls. Alex looked at the fountain of white water and then turned away to go back to the taxi rank. From the grey nothing people on the train he cut through the plump, rosy cheeked intelligent middle class students in trendy jeans and clothes moving across the area. He got a black round government taxi like a grape steered by some kind of brown south Asian man with white hair. Riding uphill the five miles to the hotel through the traffic Alex saw the grimy little takeaways and one man business stores from the innercity and the sidelanes leading out to the apartment houses. A big blue and pale yellow mosque stood out through the cross road along the grey street.

Every time that the taxi stopped and started the automatic door locks clunked locked and open. As they drove farther out of town they passed some bigger, nicer houses with gardens, then some trees and wasteland grass fields and a small golf course with thick old oak and ash trees. Alex watched the fee tick up on the red L.C.D. counter above the drivers' rear view mirror. Soon they pulled off of the main road into the four star hotel parking lot. the red and white striped barrier pole rose and fell. Alex paid the Paki and carried his torn grey bag into the hotel, through the automatic doors past the tinted seven foot high windows to the 20 year old plain girl with peroxide hair and wearing a black blazer and trouser suit.

[Jake Featherston]

You know what this story lacks? A beginning, a middle, and an end.

[Алекс]

As Alex checked in and the girl went through her list he picked up a red apple from the glass bowl on the counter. There was a new girl learning her job and the other one passed over to her. She tried to charge Alex for the room when he had already paid prebooked. They stared right into each other's blue and grey eyes while he told her that and she started to call him sir as she finished her checklist questions and statements. Having her hair pulled back into a high bun did not suit her lumpy head. He walked out of the foyer and over the deep blue carpet, up the staircase to his room with the golden door lock. He pushed in the plastic keycard and when he pulled it out the light flashed green. He went inside.

After Alex had arranged his things, eaten the cookies and drunk the hot drinks provided he shut the curtains and slept. There was a long twilight and it got dark at about half past ten. Looking out of the window he could see the yellow orange night lamps washing and flickering in the indoor swimming pool through the glass wall. Through the tree's branches waving in the wind they cast a moving shadow on the wall of his room. Alex got up in the early hours of the morning, while it was still dark and went to the window and drew the curtains. He looked out across the long grass wasteland in the warm summer night at the grey apartment blocks standing out against the dark blue sky to the north. He could see the yellow rectangles of light shining out of them in random patterns from the late night people up.

He took the Gideons' Bible and read some of it, and did some revision for the exam'.

In the morning Alex took a shower and got washed and shaved and went down to breakfast. It was a warm summer morning. His hair smelt clean.

[Алекс]

The breakfast was good and Alex filled his pockets with teas and jam pots and muffins in napkins. He checked out and stepped outside into the warm sunshiny summer morning. The warm air caressed his light skin. There was no time to stop and understand things. Nothing comes to those who wait. The dull white noise roar of the traffic rolling along the dual carriageway to the south was not really masked by the leafy dirty trees. Passing out by the side of the car barrier the gray cracked concrete road reminded him of tar melting on the summer roads that he and his friends played on when they were young. And the red brick buildings behind the dusty woods and trees with the girls in maroon jumpers walking to school each morning shouting back and forth to the boys. They would be in their 30s now married with children.

Alex walked in his smart black leather shoes under the damp, dirty shade of the trees between him and the road. To his right was a green chickenwire fence down the grass bank wiring off the school tennis courts. It was brown dust and there were no nets up. The road was full of silver curved cars and the hill sloped down to the broad, fat river valley packed out with buildings and the bloated city. Alex looked at the soft, shapeless, effeminate young men and chubby girls walking past the roundabout to the sport center past him with eyes blue like the sky and a stone face. There was a thick thorny, deep green hawthorn hedge behind the green painted hooped metal fence around the edge of the property. It was just like back in Inverness. You could hang around the fence longing for food or something like an animal.

He turned around the corner past the council workmen with their dirty battered Transit pickup, in luminous yellow jackets. He headed down the wide road with the 5m.p.h. speed limit and past the nigger gatehouse and the smashed up old buildings with the windows broken out and covered with metal plates and the walls damaged inside with rubble and litter over the floor. Cars stacked up in the parking lot covering the ground. He went down the yellow brick steps and across the quadrangle to check in. There were not many people outside. The ugly, nasty old woman at reception's efforts to torture him weren't even worth laughing at now. He flew past her like an angel. The green and red narrow slit lights glowed on the alarm terminal. Alex saw the Донецк copper workers' triumph engraving.

The modern middle class bright kids' college opened out in front of him, the gray linoleum floor a wide open space like a government cathedral. Alex hated cathedrals. The electronic dragon cultural sculpture was frozen in mid-rear, poised menacingly with flashing red eyes 15 feet in the air on top of its tower. It was necessary to concentrate when one was pushed as one's performance deteriorated without consciousness of it. Or else forget about thinking and act naturally. "I am a whip" he thought 'Your head's a hammer'; but if you're so special why aren't you dead.

Alex lounged in the black cloth right-angled chair and the door opened. The woman with a harsh angular face and peroxide blonde permed hair called him through with a busy and artifical smile. Come on Valentin she beckoned. They went through into the languages section, into the hot classroom with the long benches. Alex left his ripped gray bag in the woman's office where the walls and push pin notice boards were covered with sheets and photographs and notices. That was her life at work and he guessed that she had some kids and a husband out in the town. A big black wave of nihilism like a corrosive oil slick washed over him and he tumbled and spun like his mind was inside of a washing machine on spin cycle. He left the door open and entered the examination room and took his seat by the slim plain blonde girl on the right. He was too old for despair now like his cool blue shirt showed.

[Keystone]

Not bad! Especially the last paragraph---good turning of phrases.

Why the dirty trees?

[Mark]

In the morning Alex took a shower and got washed and shaved and went down to breakfast. It was a warm summer morning. His hair smelt clean.

The breakfast was good and Alex filled his pockets with teas and jam pots and muffins in napkins. He checked out and stepped outside into the warm sunshiny summer morning. The warm air caressed his light skin. There was no time to stop and understand things.


Very Hemingway-esque. Simple sentences appealing to the senses. Nice.

[Scryllak]

Not bad at all--it takes guts to throw your fiction onto the Phora, of all places. I liked it. Absolutely Hemingway-like, but he's far from the worst writer to emulate, especially when you need to free your inner muse (it's important not overdo it, though--imitating Hemingway is often considered cliche, and it's difficult to hook the reader with nearly aimless writing).

If you're interested in writing/critiquing in a more appropriate clime I'd recommend writingforums.com (http://www.writingforums.com/). I don't post there often, but it's the best place for sharing your writing when the mood strikes you.

GL