It's all about the letter

Chapter 1

Chapter 1. 

I  feel exhausted, as if my body has been squeezed out of a juicer and transported in containers across the Pacific Ocean to the farthest corner of the world. What time is it? Where exactly am I? Nothing around me rings the bell, except for the same lonely darkness that swaddled me up like a capricious infant.

Remember the rules, my father always hammered them in my brain through his favorite exercise – drills. There were times when I had to wake up late in the evening in fear, as my body had been dragged to a completely unfamiliar places with little of light whilst I was asleep. My father was a weird man, but he had his reasons for it.

"First things first, look around yourself and identify the danger, your ability to confront it, then location, details and possible ways of escape,"  his imperial voice sounded in my head even right now.

Done it.

My lack of knowledge could only suggest that the place where I have wound up in is a café, which makes my head ache even more, as such places are not even in the top hundred of my interests.

The café is decorated with dozens of Halloween string lights, lanterns that malevolently stand on top of each table around the whole hall. Window clings, portraying ghosts and vampires with their spooky faces, occupy half of picture windows from the inside.

Danger? There is no present danger in the room except for the rumbling coffee machine, which certainly intends to kill me by inciting excruciating pain in my head.

My hands are folded on the table in front of me in a way as a decent college student would likely sit. I feel like drowsiness is still whirling around me, trying to get me back to the land of Morpheus. I yawn and wipe the sleep out of my eyes with a few idle, lazy movements.

There is a girl right in front of my eyes. She sweeps across the hall like a breeze amidst mountain hills, or like an agile kitten which springs over an abyss in an attempt to fetch its prey.

She is a girl of short stature. Her long, curly hair whirls around her body alike snowflakes that have a dance with gentle wind during one of the frosty nights.

The girl wears almost a knee-length apron that is of the same color as their interior design. Dark brown with a small green Lemur logo in the middle of her chest. I would expect her to wear the same Halloween-like clothes, but the manager, or whoever was in charge, turned out to be smarter than I had imagined.

The sleeves of her black t-shirt are too short to cover her gentle rosy skin, which has a few totally preposterous small scars of cuts around her wrists and higher up her hands. Whether her cat has given her them in an absurd way of manifesting its love or there were other reasons, but my heart sinks every time they catch my eyes.

I know that she is going to lose my interest as swiftly as she managed to catch it, so I decide not to get disappointed and switch my gaze to the spoon that lays next to the cup of vigorous coffee.

The first thing of must-do-list has been accomplished. No danger, the location, even though not precisely, has been identified. There is no need to worry, but I somehow feel that it might be a bad evening.

I decide to close my eyes and focus on the second step of the protocol, which says... Somehow, I cannot remember what exactly it says, even though the memory of it is on the tip of my tongue.

Jazz is played in the background while I am deep in my own ruminations. I recognize the song that is on the playlist now. It is from my student life, as our professor liked to play it before the classes. She was a melomaniac with her own collection of jazz records, which was not a very rare thing those days.