Short Story Sunday - 1

I began writing in early high school, and stopped before my Junior year. I've always loved writing, and this is my attempt to get back into it.

I wrote this today, my first short story in quite a few years:

“Ah, God dammit!” The first words uttered out of Steve’s mouth on a hot, sticky late August morning as his alarm clock buzzes like a wild bird.

Disgruntled, he throws his blue linen sheet to the ground and whacks the alarm with the impatience of a five-year-old throwing a temper tantrum.

6:45 AM

“Another day, another dollar,” he says as he looks down at his feet as he places them on a cool hardwood floor.

He gets up, heads to the kitchen. Opening the refrigerator, he peers inside, “God, I need to go shopping,” is all he can say to himself as he admires a half-empty bottle of ketchup sitting next to a three day old gallon of milk.

He opens the carton, sniffs, and takes a sip. This has been his morning ritual for four days now, maybe nine. It feels like weeks though, since he and Debbie, his girlfriend of three years, got into a very heated argument that sent her running out the door, a suitcase jam packed and tears a plenty pouring out her eyes. He hasn’t talked to her since, but still checks his cell phone almost religiously to see if she’s called.

She has yet to.

Looking like he’s attempting to grow a beard – though it’s just a matter of how lazy he can possibly be – he stares at himself in the bathroom mirror. “Nah, not today,” Steve says stroking the hair on his chin, as though there’s someone else listening, or caring. He leans over and turns on the water for the shower. While waiting for the water to warm-up, he grinds a toothbrush against his teeth, quickly spitting out the toothpaste without rinsing.

Fifteen minutes later, he’s dressed and headed out the door, ready to catch the #9 bus to Jackson Street. His car was his girlfriend’s car. He’s now a regular at stop #4 on Williamsburg Court. At least for this week.

Getting on, he drops a handful of coins into the slot before taking a seat towards the back – a window seat, smiling to the dozen or so people on the bus before him, but not meaning the smile he wears.

12 stops later and he’s squeezing by the fifty or so people now on the bus, attempting to get off at Jackson. Neither big nor small, average – like he’s always been, Steve slides between the standers towards the front and gets off.

He quickly jogs across the two lanes of early morning traffic and hurries up the stairs into his office building. He’s quickly stopped in his steps by two small children – coming from the company’s daycare center – sprinting down the hallway and making a sharp turn towards the basement stairs.

Steve throws his arms out in his best traffic cop imitation. “STOP!”

The two children come to a sudden halt, as though they were running from the police.

“Now, just where do you think you’re going?” Steve questions.
“Shhhh!” Nicholas, the older of the two boys, says as he holds up his pointer over his mouth.
“We’re playing hide-and-go-seek” Johnny screams out, just as Nicholas covers up his mouth as well.
“Shhhh!”
“Well, OK, but hold on, you’ve gotta pay the toll to get down the stairs,” says Steve as he pulls out a few loose coins – his bus fare for the evening ride home – and hands it to the two boys. “Now, give this to the boss man and he’ll let you pass.”
“Thanks Steve,” the boys whisper simultaneously, as Steve smiles at them. It’ll probably be one of the few times he really smiles today, and was the first time in quite a while.

Quickly, they scamper off down the stairs and into the basement halls. The basement had undergone renovations, going from several janitors’ closets to an adequate weight room and a few empty offices that have yet to be filled by potential employees. Steve’s applied twice to move down to one of the offices.

“Good morning Jean,” he says as he bounces up the stairs from the lobby to the receptionist’s desk.
“Mr. Barlow, how are you? Better, I hope?” Jean asks, with a glint of hope in her voice.
“I’m breathing,” he replies as he heads towards his office.

Steve, a writer for City Trends – a magazine highlighting the city’s up and coming arts scene – walks into his office, which is littered with a few awards, thumb-tacked to the wall. Pictures of him and Debbie in their better days, and a calendar and a red circle drawn around the last three days of the month, when he and Deb – as he called her – were supposed to head upstate to visit her parents at their cottage on the lake. He was going to propose.

Now, that feels like a dream, as he takes a seat at his computer. He opens his most recent file, a piece on an up and coming band from the south-suburbs that brings to mind the sounds of fuzz-ridden guitars and howling vocals. Steve’s favorite band.

The document is blank. He doesn’t worry. He hasn’t typed anything on it. No notes. No ideas. No sentences. No interview dates. Just blank. He wouldn’t call it writer’s block. He’d have to write something first for it to be writer’s block.

“How’s it coming?” His boss, Alenn asks.
“Oh, it’s great!” Steve mocks condescendingly towards his boss. His boss doesn’t pick it up.
“Two days” his boss replies as he walks out.
“Gotcha!”

He looks at the clock; it’s already 11:45 AM. Almost lunch, and still nothing. It’s not that he strives under a looming deadline, quite the opposite really. He’s normally got his work in almost a week before it’s due. The editors love him.

The familiar sound of the fire alarm goes off. Is it Tuesday? Sarah normally burns her popcorn at 2 o’clock on Tuesdays. He looks at the calendar. It’s Monday. “Odd,” he thinks to himself as he slowly pushes himself away from his computer and stands up out of his chair.

He steps to the door and opens it.

“HOLY SHIT!” Steve screams out as the hallway is billowing with dark heavy smoke. The fire alarms are all going full blast.

“Hello?” a voice calls in the distance.
“HEY! HEY! CAN YOU HEAR ME?” Steve shouts out.

There’s no response. He’s in the back of the office and it looks like he’ll have to go straight through the darkness to get out the front door. There’s no back door, which as it turns out, is a pretty stupid idea.

He pulls his shirt up over his mouth and nose and hits the floor. It’s the same routine he was taught in elementary school. He starts crawling, stopping every few feet to cough up his lungs. His eyes are burning from the smoke as he can hardly breathe. As he crawls out, he notices that there’s no one else joining him in his quest to get out of the building that’s surely to go up in flames at any moment.

Steve, not a religious man, begins to pray as he inches his way closer and closer to clean air. Finally, he can see the front door. Everyone is already out, or so it looks. But, at this point, it’s good enough for him. He slides down the stairs, past Jean’s desk, as the front fire alarm rings loudly, giving Steve an almost sudden migraine.

“HEEEELLLLPPPP!” A voice screams from down stairs – the basement.
“Oh NO!” Steve musters up enough oxygen to gasp out.

“The kids, the kids are down stairs,” Steve says to himself.

He turns and looks behind him, flames coming from the back of the building, no doubt burning into what once was his sanctuary. The ring, sitting in the top drawer of his desk, melted by now. He knew that he didn’t have an option – he was gonna make his way down the stairs into the basement.

“I’M COMING! I’M COMING! YOU’RE OK!” Steve bellowed down the stairs into the black hallway in the basement.

There was no response, again. He can’t breathe. Did he really hear the kids? Had they already been pulled out by someone else? Debbie, what if I don’t make it, will she be OK? How much longer before this all goes? Thousands of questions ran through his mind in the few seconds that it took to plunge his body into the darkness of the smoke inferno basement.

He stuttered to his feet, bent over at the waist, arms out stretched, trying to feel his way around in the darkness. Calling their name with every breath he could recover, Steve’s mind raced faster than his heart. Palms dripping with cold sweat, panic began to set in. Where’s the basement door? Where am I? Where are they?

Seconds felt like minutes as he finally made it to the end of the hallway.

“Help,” a small voice squeaked out in the corner to Steve’s right. Reaching out he grabbed something. Unsure, he pulled his arm closer to him.

“Johnny!” Steve coughed out.
Johnny grunted, choking on the smoke that began to settle in his lungs.
“Johnny, where’s Nick? Where’s Nick? Johnny!”

Johnny pulled Steve into the corner where they were hiding. Nicholas was curled in a ball, breathing, barely.

Using the last of his strength, Steve grabbed Nicholas and Johnny, tucking each onto his hips, like a mother carrying two babies, squeezed them tight as he looked both ways trying to figure out where to go.

He fell to his knees. His eyes closed as the boys began to cough violently. He fell forward, the boys laid by his side. He looked up, one more time, hoping…

Light! He saw a light! He closed his eyes again, unable to maintain the oxygen intake needed to survive.

Air! A facemask…an oxygen machine! The firefighters. Steve gasped for the air he’d longed for. The boys. Are they OK? Where are the boys? He reached out and looked over. The firefighters had already begun to pull them out. Steve pulled himself up onto the shoulders of one of the firemen, Steve’s arm draped around him like a buddy carrying him out of a bar after a few too many.

The front doors opened. Greeting Steve were the paramedics and sunlight and the heat. The heat was beating onto Steve.

“Water!” Steve gasped as though it could’ve been his last word ever.

He leaned back against the closed doors of the ambulance taking deep breaths of oxygen from the air tank.

“STEVE! STEVE!” a young woman’s voice called out.

Jean?
Was it his mom?
Debbie!

“Oh, thank God!” he cried out as he looked over to see her running up.

But, she stopped at the stretcher – some seven feet away – looking down, she began to cry.

“Debbie, I’m here! Debbie, come here!” he called out.

She bent-over the stretcher, sobbing.

“What? Wait, how am I laying down? How am I laying down?” he demanded to know! He closed his eyes; blackness.

Debbie felt his hand, lifeless, there was something in his fist. She opened his fist and saw the ring. Hysterically, she began balling over Steve’s lifeless body, as they pulled a white sheet over him before loading him into the ambulance.

Steve Barlow was pronounced dead at the scene. He died in the basement, saving two boys who were sure to have suffered a fate just as similar as Steve’s, had it not been for him.