And Then There Were Two
an excerpt

It is generally accepted opinion that novels should begin with a spectacular event –a murder, a robbery, or perhaps a suicide. However, Joure did not have a spectacular life. In fact, in terms of lives, it was altogether ordinary. And so Joure found herself, not too long ago, sitting upon a bench waiting for the 3:41 train, as she had done every day for several years. On this particular day, the temperature was exactly fifty-one degrees, but Joure was not aware of this fact. To her, it was freezing, cold, nippy, and chilly all rolled into one adjective.

***
She fancied herself a chronicler, an observer of details, a lone onlooker to the mundane – which under her guidance and molding became the spectacular. Every day was one filled with fleeting emotions and half-baked schemes. Her people were those with more peculiarities then jackets, whose quirks outnumbered their quarks, and whose intensity formed a sphere in the surrounding air.

Emptiness was her enemy, a foe of the greatest design. Every moment, each small glance from soul to soul – these had meaning, depth, worthiness. For every word to describe, another popped up, filling her with its beauty – gorgeous, lovely beauty – until her mouth moved to form the syllables. They were candles, no stars, nay the very heavens in bundled form – a cup of hot chocolate on an autumn day, a pause at the top of a flight of stairs, a great spider-web of complexity and exquisite lines.

And so the cold became a fabulous convolution of fractals, of snowflakes, of frostbitten fingers stretching out to touch windowpanes, an explosion of simplicity and intricacy all combined to create a single sense of cold. Cold was vanilla, tinged with peppermint and swirling, twirling tufts of air, with a white-blue center that would suddenly pop! – but most of all, it was so much more than four letters, more than discomfort and shivering. Thus, in her mind, it rose above the normal, just as every slight hardship or simple event had before it.

But here her ecstasy was interrupted.