Things That Don't Matter

So as promised here is my weekly update, and I think you’re in for a treat. This is part one of my story The Delivery, and I do plan to follow up with a part two, possibly a part three, and I plan to not take a long time about them either because I’m excited about this one. This story has it all: humor, action, suspense, possibly romance. Don’t hold me to any of that though because I’m actually not to sure where I’m going with this. All I know is that it’s going to be awesome.

The Delivery

The night was pitch black, the kind of darkness you find only in tar pitch, and Dick Cheney’s soul. There was no moon, and had it been in the sky it would have made little difference as a thick layer of clouds hung in the air, blocking out what would otherwise have been a spectacularly starry night. It was the kind of night where it felt like if you were to turn your back the darkness might reach out and swallow you, thus Damien stood with his back to the wall under the light next to the garage door, watching the road at the end of the driveway. Damien was a man in his early thirties, with long brown hair and an unshaven face. He was dressed in jeans and a plain white T-shirt, which did little to ward off the surrounding darkness, and looked dingy under the dim yellow light bulb above him, which isn’t to say that it wasn’t dingy in the first place. The house he leaned against was a small bungalow, a similar color to that of his T-shirt under the light, and just as dingy. Damien stood tapping his foot in the pavement and lightly slapping his hands against his thighs, keeping the rhythm to a song, or at least a fracture of one, that was stuck in his head. The tension was getting to him. He stopped tapping when a pair of headlights appeared down the road, but the car drove past and he resumed his nervous habit.

Despite the darkness it was hot, and humid. The warm heavy air surrounded Damien in the same way the darkness did, yet the darkness at least had the decency to hover outside the boundary of light provided by the dim yellow bulb. The moisture on his skin was more from precipitation than from sweat. Damien thought back to the summers of his childhood when every year his mother would take him to Arizona for six weeks to visit her family. The desert heat was of a higher degree, but was of the kind that beat on your back rather than clinging to your skin as was the tendency with this eastern humidity. And it went away at night. Damien had only his mother growing up, had never known his true father, as by the time he was born his mother had taken up with someone else who didn’t last long either. So it had been just him and his mother, living in a trailer park which pretty much made up the entire town of Slacksville, South Dakota. Looking back through the years Damien came to the conclusion that life had not been kind to him. But that was okay, because now he had a chance to return the favor.

He stopped tapping once again as another pair of headlights appeared at the end of the road. He watched intently as the car made its way down the road towards him, looking for any sign of it slowing down as it neared the driveway. He was disappointed when as it neared it did not appear to slow, but then at the last moment it suddenly braked and made the sharp turn into the driveway. The tires screeched a little on the pavement, and Damien flinched, the last thing they needed right now was the attention of the neighbors. The headlights now faced him and he had to squint as the driver had not yet bothered to lower the high intensity beams. The car stopped just in front of him, and with the lights still facing him Damien was unable to see who or what was in the car. The driver killed the engine and switched off the headlights. For Damien, whose eyes had begun to adjust to the glare, it was if all the light in the world had gone out, leaving him enclosed in a cloak of darkness.

Smart people may already be able to figure out my main character’s true identity, figuratively that is.