Shift Pt. 1
Stella Lynch pressed the metal safeguard that held,
frightened of separation, tight to the outline of the steel-framed-glass door
to her apartment–freedom. Her face greeted the cold with a scrunched
nose and gnashed teeth. It was snowing, snowing and then it started snowing.
The trees, cars and everythings were covered in piles of heavy, sodden snow.
Zipping up her puffy, red, goose-feathered, sub-temperate resistor, she waved
to a man standing, obscured by snow and most assuredly more, on the sidewalk
outside her bricked jenga-stack home. She followed a foot path left by now
extinct feet to the snow covered city-walk and stopped just short of the strangely
out of place gentleman. She removed her hand from it’s warm, hibernating
cave, reached out and hoped, but it was left to hang like a post bag from
a hook waiting for a train to swoop it up (Or was it his hand? He was covered
head to toe; not a single slice of flesh showed. A dark green parka sat loosely
over his body, hood up and cinched so tight it was a fact he couldn’t
see. His legs were poured into the tightest jeans possible and stopped a good
two inches above his Chucks, as if the jeans and sneakers were lovers embarrassed
to be seen in public, touching). Statuesque, a hand was never birthed by his
awful green frostbite fighter.
“What’s that all about?”
She waited for a response.
“Whatever, you know, fuck you then. Lets go. I need to warm up,”
She scoffed.
Stella stuffed her hand back in her welcoming pocket and headed, head down,
towards Lyndale Avenue. The man, however, still remained frozen against a
frozen nightscape and, rightly, to the frozen ground. Stella spun around,
walking backwards for about three steps before she stopped in shock. A contortion
of her facial features brought confusion to rest on her pink face. Ten paces
back, exactly where she stood before, her gentleman friend was shifting–not
moving–shifting, phasing between two spots not more than an inch apart.
It was as if he was being pulled one direction but then immediately being
torn back the opposite way. He soon began to shift farther, maybe a foot now–faster
too. Stella pulled her hands from her pockets, not worrying about the bite
of winter air, and began to run towards the phasing transcendent, who was
now becoming nothing more than a translucent blur. She closed the gap quickly
and tried to wrap her desperate arms around him. Stella slipped and fell to
her knees and her gentleman friend was gone and she couldn’t believe
how cold it was.