Rapture Noir, One Month.

One Month: A Bench

 

        I liked work. I needed work. It always keeps my mind off everything else if I can get a nice little puzzle to fiddle with and get angry at and hack and hack away it at until I get down to the bottom of it.

        This really wasn’t what I was expecting when I got the knock at my door this morning.

        Recycled air blew through the trees of Dionysus Park. The carousel spun along children and young couples laughing and playing a bit of backseat bingo. Angie and Keith Whitaker ran around in the grass in front of the park bench that currently occupied my entire world, and not by choice.

Their parents were some rich inbred hicks that have a permanent residence in Adonis Resort and they had a damn stupid request.

        ‘The children want to go to the park, but we haven’t the time. You will watch them. I won’t have any fruit from my tree being taken by some mechanical man in a wet suit.’

        When I asked why they didn’t just take the kids they said then just didn’t have the time.

        Worthless pricks.

The kids were kind of cute though. Angie reminded me a bit of that girl, Eleanor I met in The Drop, and Keith was pretty much exactly how I remembered Johnny back home before he moved when we were eleven. Maybe I didn’t much mind watching the kids; they didn’t want me smoking though.

        But the money was good, and while the city might start burning down around me, well, I still had to pay rent.

        I wonder how Abigail is doing. I took her to the Grand Carnival two days ago to try and make up for the whole ‘taking a break’ thing. I thought it went well, as far a I could tell. I hadn’t told Elizabeth about it, but then again, I hadn’t told Abigail about Elizabeth either. How did Martin juggle so many girls in high school and I can’t even handle two twenty years later?

        “I don’t think our relationship can work if you’re going to be keeping secrets, Booker”

My back smacks the bench as I jerk out of my own thoughts. Elizabeth is standing behind me. Why does she do that?

        “W-what?”

She pointed to the Whitaker kids and smiled, “You never told me you had children.”

        “Haha, very funny.”

        “I thought so.”

She sat down next to me, all prim and proper for a moment before really lounging into it, like she had to remember about it. We simply sat there and watched the kids run around playing tag or whatever it was they were doing.

        That was a good line coming from her, keeping secrets. She didn’t have much of a right to joke there with how she always steered any conversation away from herself or what was happening to me. It was always about Rapture. Sometimes I hated the place.

        “You know, I’ve always wanted children,” Elizabeth said.

        “Oh, what, never found the right guy?”

A despondent shade colored her face and smiled at me, “I did, but it didn’t help,” she said, crossing her arms.

        A melancholy wave washed over me, like a sense of déjà vu that you can’t place, just like the dreams. As we sat there, Elizabeth kept to herself a doleful smile crested her face as she watched the kids play. I’d seen her sad before but this was more like a kind of nostalgic regret.

        “I’m sure you’ll get that dream, Elizabeth.”

        “Well, getting your dreams, it seems, is a little more complicated than that,” she said, “You always lose something” her crossed arms dipped down to rest over her belly.