Robert Archibald Van Walden III (working title)
an excerpt

Every morning Trindy and Bob woke up at seven o’clock. They went through their morning routines, showering and dressing and whatnot, before going downstairs to the kitchen. There they brewed a pot of medium-roast coffee and toasted whole-grain bagels. These they spread with light cream cheese, because Trindy had taken to the health craze of the 2000’s that was rocking North America (despite the fact that they lived in London, England), and light cream cheese was going to make that much of a difference to her and her husband’s health. After breakfast, Bob and Trindy walked out of the house to their separate cars, both white Honda Civics, and drove to their separate jobs. Trindy was a banker and Bob worked in a generic office building where he sat in a generic cubicle with generic office paraphernalia scattered about his desk. You may be wondering about their cars, and why they were exactly the same; you see, Trindy didn’t see the necessity of buying two different cars, going through the shopping and haggling process twice, when they could simply get another one at the same time as the purchase of the original. There was also the fact that now there would be no confusion as to how one car handled in comparison to the other, should the occasion ever arise where Bob needed to drive Trindy’s car or Trindy needed to drive Bob’s car. Plus, the salesman at the Honda dealership had knocked five dollars off the price of the second car, and who can pass up a deal like that? It is true that they could have at least gotten a different colour for the second car, but Trindy didn’t see the need for that and didn’t want to waste time deciding what colour it should be. So Bob and Trindy each had a white Honda Civic.
Anyway, every morning Trindy would go off to her banking job where she dealt with money and numbers and things that were easily calculated to correct answers, and Bob went off to his mundane office job where he often forgot what the purpose of the company he worked for even was. Sometimes he had to write reports, or talk to people on the phone, or read memos, or attend conference meetings in a room that overlooked the city through floor-to-ceiling windows. Often Bob would imagine that he was dressed all in black beneath his brown suit, and, when at one of these conference meetings, would suddenly jump up from his chair and rip his brown suit from his body with one jerk of his arm, revealing his black clothing underneath (complete with a billowing cape). Then he would momentarily place his hands on his hips as he laughed a booming laugh before taking a crashing leap through the window, the glass shattering in glittering fragments all around him as he swooped down and then upward, holding his cape out like wings and flying away on the wind.
But then Bob would be startled from his daydream, sometimes by a co-worker nudging him in the ribs or merely by his own cruel conscious reminding him that this would never happen and that he was stuck at his office job in his brown suits with patched elbows. He would much prefer a black suit over a brown one, but Trindy told him that if he wore a black suit it would seem like he was trying to pretend he was James Bond or some other fictional character of caliber, and pretending you’re something you’re not was not written on the stone tablets of Trindy’s mind. The patches on Bob’s suit elbows were also attributed to Trindy’s ever-purposeful reasoning, for why buy a new suit when the old one can be repaired to nearly new condition? She never asked how holes always appeared in the elbows of Bob’s suits, because she did not see a practical reason to do so, and Bob never felt like telling her it was because when he was sitting alone in his cubicle, he would flap his arms up and down as he imagined himself in his black suit and cape flying around the city. Flapping your arms up and down on a regular basis does not do wonders for your clothing, as Bob soon found out. But he didn’t care because flapping his arms up and down while sitting in his cubicle was the closest he would ever get to his daydream. So he suffered through the patching of his suit elbows.