Excerpt: The Autobiography of an Imaginary Friend

“Good morning, Professor Blanc,” a gruff looking man with a salty hair color and a brisk stride, dressed well, came lumbering across the room, study material tucked under one arm and a coffee mug in the other.
The pain that swelled in his head gave a harmful vibration under the sound of the voice that made Florian grimace is distress, stirring his heated lunch of last night’s meat around the Tuberware container once, before adorning a complacent smile.
“Professor Lawrence, always a pleasure,” he returned, “Good class this morning?” he inquired, sitting back in his seat.
“As one as one can get, have a nice weekend, Flor?” he bellowed a laugh and took a seat adjacent to the brunette Frenchman, giving him a nod. If there was anything, above anything, that truly made Florian grimace above and beyond the migraine that already ensued—it was the use of Flor, which Professor Lawrence employed frequently as a way to invoke some kind of false friendship between the two professors.
“Pleasant,” he replied, “I went to the carnival this weekend, graded my midterms.”
“I didn’t go to that Carnaval this year. The family had a reunion, good things to. You heard about that disappearance of that lady, right? Elizabeth something or other?” leaning his robust body to the side to organize what appeared to be student’s papers and began to nonchalantly glance over them.
“Oh, Elizabeth Taylor, very unfortunate,” he agreed solemnly, cradling a bite of his lunch and carefully collecting it into a savory bite. The broad double-paned windows in the staff lounge offered a source of distraction for the time being as he resumed from where he had left off in the gazing not through, but at the window when there was far more pressing matter of work to tend to. In truth, there was quite the workload for him to complete, but after slowly picking through his lunch and having a class in a short hour, those same cold eyes wandered over any and everything on the main desk for what he attempted to focus on. He soon found that his hands were fidgeting of their own volition. Mentally, he was determined to work, to do the job that he was being paid to do well- but his body could not be bothered with the effort. He was not quite sure how to respond to such a rebellion.
And so he did the most obvious thing. He did nothing. It wasn’t a common occurrence, but it certainly was not something detested by every fiber of his communal being. It was slightly therapeutic, the sound the rain (which was persisting since the break of the morning) as it smacked against the glass which his head laid against, the numbing chill impregnated into the pane seeping through the mass of brunette hair and into his skin as he masked his eyes with thin eyelids, falling in to a migraine induced reverie.