nano novel...progressing...

Sven never thought much of his home. It was a place to be, and that was really all there was to it. The apartment he rented and lived wasn’t the first he had considered, and if anything, it was near the end of his list of places he could afford several years back. His paychecks hadn’t increased all that much over the years, and as he had really no problems to squabble with the management about, no leaking pipes, no broken windows or such, he chose to remain.

Most days found him grumbling about the abundant lack of available plugs in which to charge his favorite electronic gadgets. He had quite the extensive collection of older computers, all of which did technically work, for instance, and dearly wished he could get the overgrown paper weights working properly with the newest ones he drooled over. The large flat screen television was his pride and joy, nestled boldly as it was suspended on the wire racks that served as his entertainment center in the livingroom. The meandering bright orange extension cord which plugged it into an outlet somewhere in the tiny bathroom always distracted his eye from the game, and more often than not either caught his neck like a low clothesline as it dangled low from the hooks he had banged into the short hall, or nearly tripped him as it peeked out over the carpet. The television wasn’t the only such appliance of his that sported such an extension cord, Sven mused. Yes, the lack of available plugs was the biggest flaw of his apartment home in his mind.

The complex wasn’t much to look at. The building was old, And though Sven knew very little about it, he could estimate that it was built early in the century. The place looked as if the years had grinded into it well enough for the city to consider it as having something called “character” as opposed to being etither a blight, or the more kind sounding “eyesore”.  Concrete sidewalks covered most of the ground space, for the management had no wish to pay for a regular gardener. Most time, Sven didn’t bother to think of the lack of greenery, for the building, or rather, the great empy lot that had once sported a complete building and situated directly across form his bedroom window managed to sprout tall tree looking mass of green leaves. There was also a well kept city park nearby, he knew, somewhere behind imposing wire gates, and he often heard the other tenents grousing that the city wished to charge for the prevlidge of each visit with every council meeting.

Sven suppesed he really should go visit the city council one day, in the interest of civic duty, of course. Most of the time he wasn’t all that interested in such things, and since he was immerered in the business of it, really only cared that the truck eating potholes on the city streets kept being filled in when they happened to appear.

The apartment was  like the rest found in the complex, and he considered it barely a single bedroom, while the management had listed it as a batrgain two. The room that had been referred to as a second bedroom was barely large enough to be considered a closet in his experience, and lacked any sort of window, but the price of the place is teally what sold him, so who was he to turn a sour note on the place?

His bedroom rivaled the livingroom in terms of size, and both were situated side by side. Likewise, the tiny second bedroom jutted against the equally tiny bathroom. The kitchen area was tiled, and was what passed as the dining area, both were somehow squeezed into the courner of the living room, closest to the place’s only exit if one did not bother to include two window large enough in size that the front end of his sizable delivery truck would comfortably fit through if one were so inclined to attempt such a feat.

The majority of the city blocks about his home were not nearly as regimentally defineds at his apartment complex. There were dozens of rather old fashioned, aged homes wilthing a stones throw, and Sven supposed equally aged residents lived within, tenaciously holding their own against the encroachment of the forces of modernization. There were empty lots scattered here and there, and those were overgrown with greenery during the summers, and depressing compositions of barren dull dirt patches and broken concrete blocks in the winter. The most impressive of the structures were not the nextly built monstrosities of concrete and glass, which Sven consider monoliths of mediocrity due the boring reflective surfaces he passed while on the road. No, the most impressive structures were the solidily built, yet strangely decaying palaces of public buildings that occupied several blocks at a time. Between each of these particular structures meandered the narrowest of alleyways which had once been the state of the art when horses had been used to draw carriages of goods for these long gone lords of the city. He knew these places well because he had made the majority of his deliveries by having to tranverse them succcessully with his modern delivery truck, a feat that certainly wasn’t an easy one to accomplish.

He knew he was good at his job for a reason, and he liked to think it was because he noticed details such as this.

He knew vaguely he was within blocks of the city center, supposedly the heart of all things the city did. He didn’t know exactily what the city did, really, and since who ever worked there had happened to close down his favorite nightclub a few years back, more often than not, Sven rather thought of any city officail as shews screaming shrillily at anyone wanting to have a little fun.

The long bridge of the freeway was likely the lifeblood of the city proper, but to Jake, his toddler of a son, it was a lullaby. He would often drive along the conctrete kissed road of the massive flowing structure, carseat strapped in securely with a seatbelt and positioned just so next to him, just to get his son to doze off for the night.

He had no regrets in regards to Claire, and they amically lived together, eben if they rarely saw one another for very long each day. Such was the difficulty of people who worked differing shifts. She worked the day. He worked the night.

ooo

Claire was asleep in the hospital bed when she noticed something. She eased open her bleary eyes and  peered at the near gloom of the sterile looking room. The walls were painted white, and the few balnd images that adorned them inspired little else but a calm sort of daze. The tile was likewise white, and swept clean of any debris. A white sheet covered her, and athought the she felt a little cold, the room was kept at a somewhat confortable temperature that it was too much of a bother to really ask for another sheet.

She heard nothing. The lack of noise, the general clatter of plastic plates striking plastic bin, the sticcado beating of footsteps striking the tile as someone made their way down the hall just outside her door, or even the soft mummuring of voices as people consoled one another over whatever tragic ailment had occurred, all of it had been the steady drone of  life that defined her world since she had been admitted for the immenent event of birth.

Her son was not her son. He looked exactly the same, acted exactly the same. She studied his behaviors and mannerisms, but the unsettling fact the baby lying next to her in the wheeled hospital provided thing that could have passed as a crib in her nightmares was most definitely not her child ate at her each and every hour that she was forced to lay in the uncomfortably still room.

She liked to think that she knew every inch of her son’s body from even before he was outside the womb. She had numerous ultrasound images of his growth, and tucked them all neatly away in a folder. She meant to spruce the dull thing up, and make it look far more like a baby book meant for baby picture, but as things had often gotten in the way of such a joyful project. The folder remained as it was on the kitchen table, looking much like the thing it was when she had bought it. The white flaps covered with clear plastic made it appear a sordid sort of folder meant only to house school work.

Her son, when she had first held him, the softness of his new skin shocked her. There was no was this precious creature could ever protect itself from harm, and she held him close. She was sweaty, and hurting from the suffering of labor pains, but she found within her the strength to hold him for as long as she could. She wished she could have slept with him nestled right next her, and the urge to do so caused her to bat away the many grasping hands that reached over to take her son way. She couldn’t shake the feeling, then, that she would never see her son again if she should let them take him from her.

She couldn’t shake the feeling, than she had been right.

The baby thing was wrinckled, far too wrinkled for such a tiny young thing. She looked away as it cooed, and folded her arms across her aching breasts. Those glands leaked milk at the sound, and betrayed her deeply. No. That thing was not her son.

She had fainted and her son was taken from her. When she awoke, she found herself alone in the cool sterile room. A passing orderly noticed her stirring, she supposed, and the wheeled contraption was soon brought in. A pair of helpful hand lifted the babe and offered it to her to hold, even though she was clearly half awake.

That was when she felt it. The difference.

Her son nearly melded with the contours of her body, and she loved the feel of his flesh. The thing in the holding tray, for that was truly what it was, not a crib at all in her mind, did not. The thing squirmied and pushed and grabbed and pinched. He son did none of that.

The nurses told her it was because of the trama of the birth, that she had the baby blues over the entire ordeal. They assured her that her feeling towards that thing would change over time once her hormones had evened out and she was herself once more.

She tried to tell them that it was not she that was out of sorts, but they in the white official uniforms only smiled a barely there smile that spoke of long hours of practicing professionalism. She never liked that look, not in the teachers at her school, and certainly not in the very people she had no choice but to trust for her health and life. And more. For her baby’s life. The coldness was never something she could tolerate.

She wanted so much to scream and rant and yell for them all to be genuine in their feelings, and drop that damable professional façade.

She ordered them to wheel the thing from her. Her croaky sounding voice filled with steel and finality. To her disappointment, shook their heads as they refused her request. They left the holding bin close to her hospital bed. The thing was within her reach. She could hold it again if she chose to do so.

Or, she mused darkly, she could simply strangle it. The strength required to snap a baby’s neck surely wasn’t all that much. She could probably manage it with her thumb and forefinger alone.

She scrubbed her face with both her hands. Where had such horrific thoughts come from, she wondered. That is a baby. A baby. Even if the terrible thing wasn’t hers, she had no right to snuff out such a precious life.

The thing had to be precious to someone.

Her empty arms began to ache,and she rocked her self back and forth. She hoped that the empty feeling would pass like a dark cloud waffling over the moon. What about her?

A hiccupping cry filled the room, and she looked over again over at the babe. The cry soon became a wail, and Claire hunched her shoulders as she gritted her teeth. She felt the twinge of her biology reacting to the needful sound, and she hissed.

She realized it sounded very much like the noise that a cold blooded reptile would make, rather than a red blooded woman. She sweezed her eyes shut, and reopened them a scant heartbeat later.

With quivering hands, she reached for the wailing babe, and brought it to her chest. The tiny mouth searched out for what she supposed the thing could easily smell, that of the liquid leaking wetly and soaking through the cloth of her garment.  She frowned as the babe protested the barrier to it’s meal, an shifted the child so she could lift it up just enough.

That when she noticed it. The babe had no neck to speak of, but at the area where the round head met the back, there was the oddest looking of birthmarks. The mark was no longer that the child’s first pudgy diget, but may have benn a little wider. She eyed the intricate details of it. The sweeping grace of the curves and many delicate looking cells within each miniscule section. The birthmark resembled…no it wasn’t possible. If the babe could have had a tattoo done at such a tender age of a few days old, she supposed, then that birthmark certainly looks as though the babe had quite the ordeal. Especaily compared to her.  The tender skin of a three day old shouldn’t have to encounter the harshness of a needle.

She blinked in wonder as the baby began to loudly protest her hold on him, and she quickly adjusted herself. As soon as the mouth had latched on, she chewed her bottom lips as she looked down at her charge.

He did sort of resemble her son. But she knew her son had not sported a birthmark like that.

The birthmark looked to her to be, of all the things in the world, like a pair of insect wings.

She giggled at the thought, and absently brushed her free hand through the babes fine brown hair. She mused at the wonder, and sighed her acceptance.  Logically thinking, the babe had to be her son, for the hospital couldn’t have made a grevious error with such technology about to prevent it. She knew well about the missing baby alarms, and the blue bracelet adorning her wrist most definitey matched the braclet about the cubby little arm  that she saw as she marveled down at the wrinkled face.

 The winged birthmark on the back of his near to no neck was the whole of the proof of her wonder.

Jake was a fairy.