ENCORE

Complete Short Story-A Preview from My Next Book

 ENCORE

A storm is coming. Not a violent, windy one, just a heavy, calm kind of snowstorm. The kind that makes all that traffic stop after a half hour or so; empties out the streets. Then what remains of the urban life are the lights. That green, yellow, and red blinking continues in its repeating pattern, though no cars wait for their instruction. The colors alternately diffuse off the white snow on the street, signaling no one.

After the storm is over, or even while it’s still snowing, everything gets really quiet. The city is peaceful and serene, like the cover of one of those cheesy Christmas cards; the kind with the clear glitter glued fast to the drawing of the snow in the illustration. That glitter that is still sticking to your fingers after you decide you don't want the card and put it back on the rack.

I can always tell how much snow we are going to get by the flakes, and how they fall. These are big ones, so large that you can see their shape as they float slowly downward. The air is still; not a breeze to speak of, so they just kind of falter and take their time and drop very slowly, kind of rocking back and forth. It’s almost as if they’re trying to decide if they want to continue their descent, onward to their inevitable fate.

If they had brains, maybe they would decide to fly back up the same way they came and start all over again. That way, they could be the ones that land on top, piling on the others, the ones that came before them. That way, at least, they would accumulate higher and higher, into who-knows- what? A pile worthy of industry? A fort? A snowman? An igloo? Anything would be better than just instantly melting away, only to run down the sidewalk into the iron grates that send them to the river. Or worse yet, becoming a one inch layer of slush that lasts for just minutes before being salted into oblivion and brutally pushed off the street by an anonymous taxpayer-funded plow, any cohesive individuality scraped noisily aside in a few seconds, like so many crumbs from a single piece of bread that has been reduced to burnt toast.

I stick out my tongue to catch one or two of the flakes, something I have done so many times in the past. It is an action that harkens back to my youth, and yet doesn't seem that far removed each time I do it now, many, many years later. The things that stimulate the mind while waiting...

Ah, finally! She's got to be the singer. Beautiful, nice makeup, stylish clothes. A swing band tonight? No, a jazz quartet maybe. A rock band?

“Gonna be a cold one,” I say as she walks by me, just to hear the sound of her voice if she decides to comment back to me.

Nope.

She looks at me, nods, and smiles politely enough but offers no vocal response. She does clutch at the scarf around her neck, pulling it tighter, and toss it back over her shoulder. She may not speak it, but her body language tells me she agrees with me about the weather.

“Yeah, it's gonna be a cold one,” I say again just to hear myself speak, confirming her signals aloud for the both of us. My words come out in a mist of condensation that floats for a second and then disappears in front of me. I exhale then, purposefully, puffing twice just to see it again. The woman crosses the street and makes her way into a department store.

Yeah, that would figure, I guess. More nice clothes. Not the singer, though, hmm...maybe she'll buy a new winter coat.

Then I see a man carrying a double bass, an upright, in a road case. He walks down the alley and up to the stage door. That's one. How many more tonight? So, it's not a rock band. But these days, you never know…genres are mixed. The lines of music are blurred.