Along with friends, I am participating in a writing challenge over at Frankie’s Wining Room. Each piece is intended to stand alone, but if you (like me) enjoy seeing the chronological progression of things in writing, I recommend you read them in order. This is the second piece of flash fiction for Week 3. Week 1, Excerpt 1, is located in Illness, Achievements, and Challenges. Enjoy!

Photo owned and copyrighted by Katie Johnson. Photo credit: https://katierenejohnson.com/

He wanted to see this. As Percy drew closer to the original location, he had to keep reminding himself. The place looked different. Good. Classy, even. Not the bare studs and steel beams he remembered from his last visit. No pool of blood staining the concrete at the base of the structure.

A nearby door opened. Out streamed a group of white-collar something-or-others headed straight toward his destination. His. Not theirs. Don’t go near there! You might get hurt. He wanted to warn everyone away from the window looking out over the cityscape, but once again the words stuck in his throat. He swallowed hard and forced himself to join them.

Percy felt conspicuous in this crowd. Surely they wrinkled their noses at his flannel shirt and blue jeans, dusty from the job site he’d just left. Obviously college-educated and very smart, they all smelled clean-shaven and freshly-showered. They carried laptop cases and those little computer pad thingys instead of regular notebooks, and wore suits and…suits? Is that what you call the uniform worn by a white-collar professional woman?

One of those suits collided with the shoulder of a woman in uniform. Percy stared the man down until he looked a little sheepish, but he still kept on going without bothering to apologize. The woman started coughing, glanced sideways at Percy, and edged away. Oops. He’d been standing practically on top of her and smelled of construction. He could hardly blame her for wanting to put just a little more space between them.

There was an opening at the window. He backed off a bit and hesitated, not wanting an audience for this particular visit. He’d let the woman go first. Sure enough, she stepped to the window, snapped a few photos and lit out of there, almost as if something was chasing her.

He could identify with that. Shoving his hands into his pockets, Percy waited for the crowd to thin. In a building this significant in a city this size, he had resigned himself to the fact that there would be witnesses to this encounter, but he wanted them to be as few as possible. Not everyone chases the ghosts who haunt them. Most run away, like that lady from the window.

He focused on the clouds floating past and waited for two men and a woman to finish posing and taking pictures. You had to watch out for those clouds; the fog and the mist could prove deadly. Like several months ago, when creatures reached out of the haze and overpowered Charles. At least, that’s the best way Percy could describe it.

“It isn’t worth it, Perce. You try and you die, and in the end, what difference does it make?” Only days after the one-year anniversary of the death of his son, the divorce papers arrived on-site where Charles and Percy were working, high over the city amid fogged-in struts and girders, in harnesses and on high alert. Every precaution had been taken to ensure workers’ safety, so no one would plummet to their death.

As the process server rode back down in the little steel cage, Charles unhooked his harness and raced him to the bottom. Charles won, and Percy lost his best friend that day. Finally, he had come to say goodbye.

Now it’s your turn. Leave a comment or send me a message to give feedback. Check out the writing challenge for yourself if you are curious to see how different individuals have approached the same material, or if you would also like to participate.

Until the next time…