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rainbowfic2024-02-10 05:25 pm
freevistas) wrote in rainbowfic2024-02-10 05:25 pm
Entry tags:
(no subject)
Story: Without Homeland
Colors: Teary-eyed #11: Out of gas
Word Count: 1439
Rating/Warnings: T
As Karol ran down Bank Street, he actually considered hopping on a trolley. There were still a few running–at least in theory. Over a hundred strikebreakers had arrived from New York, and the streetcars that had been abandoned in the middle of the streets a few days earlier had begun to come back to life, though they seemed almost ghostly as they glided through the streets without a soul aboard. Karol had seen someone try to board a trolley earlier that day, only for a crowd to suddenly materialize around the confused man, shouting “Get off the car!” and bursting into applause when he finally did.
“I wonder how far their solidarity would go if they could afford a jitney ride,” Karol had thought to himself as he watched the scene from the window of Mr. Jaronczyk’s printshop that morning. It was the kind of thing Alba would have said; before he met her, the word “solidarity” wasn’t even in his vocabulary.
He’d spent the day walking around town peddling the new batch of “We Walk for Justice” badges Mr. Jaronczyk had printed up. People all over the city had begun pinning the little cardboard signs to their lapels and hats, assured that Mr. Jaronczyk would donate a “portion” of his profits from the badge sales to support the strikers’ cause. Karol had scoffed at that empty promise too, the way Alba would have, but he couldn’t afford to be too cynical when he was on Mr. Jaronczyk’s payroll.
A few days into the strike, though, people’s enthusiasm was already beginning to wane: the badges weren’t selling like they had earlier that week. In fact, Karol spotted more and more of them in the gutters and ash-bins as he made his way further and further across town trying to get through the inventory he’d been saddled with. By the end of the day, he’d found himself all the way down at Ocean Beach Park, trying to unload the last of his badges on the young couples he found trying to enjoy the view of the late afternoon sunlight glinting off the gentle waters of Long Island Sound.
He checked his watch; Alba and Mairead would probably be getting ready for their night out.
“Ten reels of motion pictures!” Mairead had exclaimed when she’d seen the notice in the Day. “And an orchestra–all for free!” Alba had been quick to remind her that the event was a fundraiser for the striking trolleymen, and that they’d need to make a donation if they wanted to get in, but to Mairead that was neither here nor there. A night out was a night out.
“Will you join us?” Alba had asked Karol. He’d barely heard the question; the sound of the breeze rattling the dry pages of the newspaper Mairead left on the attic floor seemed to fill his ears.
He gave the excuse that he needed to work; he knew it didn’t sound convincing, but Alba didn’t press him, and Mairead was already scurrying around the apartment planning her outfit.
The truth was, Karol couldn’t imagine laughing through some Charlie Chaplin pictures and dancing to an orchestra when the numbers on the front page of the paper kept flashing through his mind: all those zeros, so many thousands dead. What right did he have to laughter, to music, to this life he was living?
So he’d spent the day pounding the pavement, selling Mr. Jaronczyk’s badges, calculating how much of his wages he could afford to donate to some organization that could do more good with his money than he could.
Now, at the end of the day and the end of the city, he took a few hesitant steps onto the sand and took in the view. Out past the Ledge lighthouse, that floating mansion, he could see Fisher’s Island, where the Roosevelts and their friends spent some of their summer. And beyond that, the tip of Long Island, sticking out like a finger extended from the fist of New York, pointing back across the Atlantic to the ports and harbors the likes of Karol, Alba, and Mairead had come from.
Karol could feel his mind’s eye straining further; for the briefest of moments, his imagination carried him across the ocean, over the battlefields, the stretches of land that were scarred and burned and lacerated and stripped bare like the body of the crucified Christ hanging above the altar at St. Mary’s. His mind carried him past all that, back to Września. What was he doing here in America, in this wet and windblown town whose very name meant disappointment? What did he have to keep him from being swept away from here like the trees that people said had been ripped off of Fisher’s Island during the Great Gale years back? Unlike the trees, he had nothing rooting him to this place. If he were cannon fodder back in Europe, at least his body might nourish the soil he’d grown out of.
But as he turned from the view of the placid water separating him from the ocean of blood that Europe had been transformed into, his gaze fell on one of the couples he’d approached with his box of badges. They were older than the pairs of teenagers snuggled up on the benches facing the water; they had been the only ones who hadn’t asked him to repeat himself when he proffered the badges, the only ones who hadn’t snickered and mocked his accent as soon as his back was turned. They’d just smiled and continued their slow walk down the boardwalk, trailing the soft susurrations of a private conversation in a language he didn’t understand. Now they were making their way back in the opposite direction, their eyes cast down at their shuffling feet, their thick black hair catching the late afternoon sunlight, their smiles just as quietly content as when Karol had approached them.
The woman looked like Alba. Or what he imagined Alba might look decades from now.
He wanted to see what she would look like decades from now. He wanted to see what she looked like tonight, dressed up for the charity show, laughing with Mairead at the spectacle on the big screen. He wanted to see her.
There were a few jitney cabs waiting outside the park, and slow as sales had been today, he had a pocketful of cash and coins. He could splurge on a ride to Bank Street.
He hadn’t counted on the jitney running out of gas halfway up Ocean Avenue. “Sorry, mister,” the driver had said with a half-hearted shrug. “Gas prices are through the roof. Thought I could stretch my last fill-up a little longer.”
And so Karol had run. And for a moment, he’d actually considered hopping on a trolley, though Alba’s voice in his head dissuaded him in no time.
When he reached the Empire–his jacket almost soaked through with sweat, the soles of his shoes flapping, his sandy hair plastered to his brow–the sidewalk outside the theater was teeming with hundreds of people waiting to get inside.
Alba and Mairead were among them; they spotted Karol before he could even catch his breath.
“I didn’t think you were coming,” Alba said as they approached him. She seemed to be fighting back a smile.
“I changed my mind,” Karol said between gulps of air. “But what’s the matter? Why is everyone waiting out here?”
“Because everyone else is inside,” Alba said. “I guess this is what happens when you encourage donations instead of charging for tickets.”
“There’re two thousand people in there,” Mairead said, swinging her hand toward the theater’s entrance. “What difference would three more make?”
“And what makes you think we’d be the chosen ones?” Alba asked with a wry smile. She seemed to find the whole situation–including Mairead’s indignance–as amusing as whatever pictures were probably flickering across the screen inside.
“Well what’re we going to do now?” Mairead asked, turning on her heel and leading the trio away from the Empire. “And don’t tell me you’re going to drag us to one of those awful anarchist parties. They make you listen to an hour of speeches for every five minutes of music.”
“That wouldn’t be the worst thing for you,” Alba chided, tugging on the massive bow tied around Mairead’s green straw hat. “If you keep wearing Mrs. Fairchild’s hand-me-downs, pretty soon you’re going to start thinking like a bourgeois.”
Karol listened to Alba and Mairead’s playful bickering as he followed them up the sidewalk away from the theater. He didn’t care where they were going, as long as he was with them.
Colors: Teary-eyed #11: Out of gas
Word Count: 1439
Rating/Warnings: T
As Karol ran down Bank Street, he actually considered hopping on a trolley. There were still a few running–at least in theory. Over a hundred strikebreakers had arrived from New York, and the streetcars that had been abandoned in the middle of the streets a few days earlier had begun to come back to life, though they seemed almost ghostly as they glided through the streets without a soul aboard. Karol had seen someone try to board a trolley earlier that day, only for a crowd to suddenly materialize around the confused man, shouting “Get off the car!” and bursting into applause when he finally did.
“I wonder how far their solidarity would go if they could afford a jitney ride,” Karol had thought to himself as he watched the scene from the window of Mr. Jaronczyk’s printshop that morning. It was the kind of thing Alba would have said; before he met her, the word “solidarity” wasn’t even in his vocabulary.
He’d spent the day walking around town peddling the new batch of “We Walk for Justice” badges Mr. Jaronczyk had printed up. People all over the city had begun pinning the little cardboard signs to their lapels and hats, assured that Mr. Jaronczyk would donate a “portion” of his profits from the badge sales to support the strikers’ cause. Karol had scoffed at that empty promise too, the way Alba would have, but he couldn’t afford to be too cynical when he was on Mr. Jaronczyk’s payroll.
A few days into the strike, though, people’s enthusiasm was already beginning to wane: the badges weren’t selling like they had earlier that week. In fact, Karol spotted more and more of them in the gutters and ash-bins as he made his way further and further across town trying to get through the inventory he’d been saddled with. By the end of the day, he’d found himself all the way down at Ocean Beach Park, trying to unload the last of his badges on the young couples he found trying to enjoy the view of the late afternoon sunlight glinting off the gentle waters of Long Island Sound.
He checked his watch; Alba and Mairead would probably be getting ready for their night out.
“Ten reels of motion pictures!” Mairead had exclaimed when she’d seen the notice in the Day. “And an orchestra–all for free!” Alba had been quick to remind her that the event was a fundraiser for the striking trolleymen, and that they’d need to make a donation if they wanted to get in, but to Mairead that was neither here nor there. A night out was a night out.
“Will you join us?” Alba had asked Karol. He’d barely heard the question; the sound of the breeze rattling the dry pages of the newspaper Mairead left on the attic floor seemed to fill his ears.
He gave the excuse that he needed to work; he knew it didn’t sound convincing, but Alba didn’t press him, and Mairead was already scurrying around the apartment planning her outfit.
The truth was, Karol couldn’t imagine laughing through some Charlie Chaplin pictures and dancing to an orchestra when the numbers on the front page of the paper kept flashing through his mind: all those zeros, so many thousands dead. What right did he have to laughter, to music, to this life he was living?
So he’d spent the day pounding the pavement, selling Mr. Jaronczyk’s badges, calculating how much of his wages he could afford to donate to some organization that could do more good with his money than he could.
Now, at the end of the day and the end of the city, he took a few hesitant steps onto the sand and took in the view. Out past the Ledge lighthouse, that floating mansion, he could see Fisher’s Island, where the Roosevelts and their friends spent some of their summer. And beyond that, the tip of Long Island, sticking out like a finger extended from the fist of New York, pointing back across the Atlantic to the ports and harbors the likes of Karol, Alba, and Mairead had come from.
Karol could feel his mind’s eye straining further; for the briefest of moments, his imagination carried him across the ocean, over the battlefields, the stretches of land that were scarred and burned and lacerated and stripped bare like the body of the crucified Christ hanging above the altar at St. Mary’s. His mind carried him past all that, back to Września. What was he doing here in America, in this wet and windblown town whose very name meant disappointment? What did he have to keep him from being swept away from here like the trees that people said had been ripped off of Fisher’s Island during the Great Gale years back? Unlike the trees, he had nothing rooting him to this place. If he were cannon fodder back in Europe, at least his body might nourish the soil he’d grown out of.
But as he turned from the view of the placid water separating him from the ocean of blood that Europe had been transformed into, his gaze fell on one of the couples he’d approached with his box of badges. They were older than the pairs of teenagers snuggled up on the benches facing the water; they had been the only ones who hadn’t asked him to repeat himself when he proffered the badges, the only ones who hadn’t snickered and mocked his accent as soon as his back was turned. They’d just smiled and continued their slow walk down the boardwalk, trailing the soft susurrations of a private conversation in a language he didn’t understand. Now they were making their way back in the opposite direction, their eyes cast down at their shuffling feet, their thick black hair catching the late afternoon sunlight, their smiles just as quietly content as when Karol had approached them.
The woman looked like Alba. Or what he imagined Alba might look decades from now.
He wanted to see what she would look like decades from now. He wanted to see what she looked like tonight, dressed up for the charity show, laughing with Mairead at the spectacle on the big screen. He wanted to see her.
There were a few jitney cabs waiting outside the park, and slow as sales had been today, he had a pocketful of cash and coins. He could splurge on a ride to Bank Street.
He hadn’t counted on the jitney running out of gas halfway up Ocean Avenue. “Sorry, mister,” the driver had said with a half-hearted shrug. “Gas prices are through the roof. Thought I could stretch my last fill-up a little longer.”
And so Karol had run. And for a moment, he’d actually considered hopping on a trolley, though Alba’s voice in his head dissuaded him in no time.
When he reached the Empire–his jacket almost soaked through with sweat, the soles of his shoes flapping, his sandy hair plastered to his brow–the sidewalk outside the theater was teeming with hundreds of people waiting to get inside.
Alba and Mairead were among them; they spotted Karol before he could even catch his breath.
“I didn’t think you were coming,” Alba said as they approached him. She seemed to be fighting back a smile.
“I changed my mind,” Karol said between gulps of air. “But what’s the matter? Why is everyone waiting out here?”
“Because everyone else is inside,” Alba said. “I guess this is what happens when you encourage donations instead of charging for tickets.”
“There’re two thousand people in there,” Mairead said, swinging her hand toward the theater’s entrance. “What difference would three more make?”
“And what makes you think we’d be the chosen ones?” Alba asked with a wry smile. She seemed to find the whole situation–including Mairead’s indignance–as amusing as whatever pictures were probably flickering across the screen inside.
“Well what’re we going to do now?” Mairead asked, turning on her heel and leading the trio away from the Empire. “And don’t tell me you’re going to drag us to one of those awful anarchist parties. They make you listen to an hour of speeches for every five minutes of music.”
“That wouldn’t be the worst thing for you,” Alba chided, tugging on the massive bow tied around Mairead’s green straw hat. “If you keep wearing Mrs. Fairchild’s hand-me-downs, pretty soon you’re going to start thinking like a bourgeois.”
Karol listened to Alba and Mairead’s playful bickering as he followed them up the sidewalk away from the theater. He didn’t care where they were going, as long as he was with them.
no subject
He wanted to see what she would look like decades from now. He wanted to see what she looked like tonight, dressed up for the charity show, laughing with Mairead at the spectacle on the big screen. He wanted to see her.
Aw, oh dear. XD
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