Marto and the trolley bus passenger

Marto passed the steering wheel through his thick sausage hands. His wedding ring suffocated his finger and seemed to symbolized his marriage that was figuratively gasping without air. He drove long shifts on the trolley bus and had little time to see his wife Irina. Marto was on his way to the trolley bus depot, it was his last ride after a long day. Now the trolley bus would derive from the original route, towards the depot, Marto opened the door of the driver cabin and screamed “final stop” to the five remaining passengers. “How should I get home now?” called a rude skater kid. “Why in the Lord’s name should I care, use your board man.” Passengers always got on Marto’s nerves and it led him to overeat during his breaks. This in combination with as little movement as humanly possible had made Marto a bald fat man. Irina, his curly haired wife, barely saw any reason to stay with him. Their combined meagre salary just made their ends meet.

As Marto rolled into the depot, he looked inside his rear mirrors and saw a woman that had not left the bus yet. “Wasn’t I clear enough at the last stop you duck?”, he screamed towards the slim woman with a fur coat. She wore a hat and little was visible of her face, especially from as far as Marto’s driver seat. “Get out, I have no patience for you”. The woman had been asleep and was now totally disoriented. All the doors opened and the freezing cold embraced her. Snow blew inside the trolley bus and as she looked through the window she saw many other buses, realizing she was in the depot. “Sorry, fell asleep” she said as she took her grocery bags and left the bus with a rather sad face. Marto felt some sympathy and asked “do you know where to go?”. The woman said “not really” and asked at what depot they were. “Zaharna fabrika”, he said. The woman sighed loudly, they both knew the area is not pleasant to walk around at night. The woman would get a cab, she said. Then Marto saw how beautiful the woman actually was and offered a ride with his own car. He felt bad letting a lady walk down the street alone at night. They both had to go southwest over the ring road anyway. Marto just did a short cleanup of his bus and rear-parked it next to the long fence.

As they both walked towards Marto’s beat-up Fiat Panda, the woman introduced herself as Diana. In the car, Diana took off her hat and it seemed she had red hair with a pony ending just above his eyebrows. In the dark car, few words were exchanged. As Marto sped up the runway towards the ring road, his summer tyres could not pull the weight of the little car and it got stuck in the icy snow. Marko put his foot down full throttle and the wheels spinned in an effort to get the car moving again. Little result. Other cars drove around them and Marto had to get out. He realized he’d have an appointment with friends of his wife Irina and as their relationship was already very tense, he knew he absolutely couldn’t miss it. He decided to push the car first while Diana was trying to drive it out of the snow they got in. Marto was already running late and decided to call his wife while using his foot to wipe loose snow under the front wheels. “You worthless hunk of garbage!” could be heard out of the phone from afar. Marto said he was stuck with another woman whom he would bring home. This had been the so-called straw that broke the camel’s bag and Irina, on the other side of the line, completely lost it. “You stay there with your metal piece of junk and that skank you dug op somewhere!” Marto was noticeably angry and threw his phone into the car through the rolled down. It was now Diana that felt sorry for Marto. One last time, one more push and the car jumped forward over the heap of ice they had gotten themselves into. Marto nearly bust his shoulder but his weight had really helped get the car out of its position.

As he crawled back behind the wheel, Marto stepped on it and thick fumes of exhaust polluted the white snow. “I’ve had it with her anyway, I was already thinking of leaving. I think we had the best part of our marriage by now” Marto said in a sad but also kind of relieved way. He then noticed Diana intensely staring at him, like she was closely staring at the freckle on his right cheek. Marto was well aware of his rather unappealing appearance but he was manly and his talk would always help him make friends and meet new people. Diana seemed to have fun with him and they kept laughing at each other’s silly jokes. As Marto left the ring road, Diana explained the way to her place. As they parked in front of the modern apartment building, Marto felt he had completely messed up with Irina, whom he was already completely out of love with. He thrusted his thick fingers through Diana’s hair, a bold move he would normally be scared to make. Diana was tightly holding her grocery bags and was seemingly charmed by the move. She invited Marto in for some herbal tea. Marto accepted the invitation, he was probably not welcome at home anyway at this point. When they entered the bright and spacious apartment, Diana didn’t mention the tea anymore and poured two glasses of chilled white wine. As they clung their glasses they looked each other in the eyes shyly. “Why did you offer me a ride?” Marto replied by saying “I saw an unloved woman and could not leave her in the cold night”. “What about you?” Marto asked. “Why did you invite me into your place?” “I saw an unloved man and could not leave him with a cold wife.” They both laughed and Marto slowly kissed her. Meanwhile Diana was pulling his finger to take of the tight ring. It didn’t move. They had some more wine and Diana took some hand soap, finally taking the tight grip from Marto’s finger. It felt like the tight grip on Marto’s life was instantly released as well.

© copyright 2017 - All Rights Reserved

#Shortstory

Maria and the railway to love

At the station of Gyushevo, Maria was starting her day with a strong black coffee. She had grown to like the bitter taste on her tongue and there was nobody to be bothered by the coffee breath anyway. It started with just one cup of sweetened coffee a day but now Maria was a full-on caffeine user. During the days monitoring the train schedule and collecting post, she would even pour some liquor into her coffee as well. This only happened on particularly dark afternoons where she couldn’t bear with her own thoughts and decided to drain them. Coffee grew to be her biggest friend, apart from Martin who rode the train to Sofia each Monday and returned on Friday. With dark brown eyes and a wave of hair partly covering his forehead, he was a handsome man with the matching style. He would bring Maria coffee each Monday morning and then board the train.

Maria, who grew to be sturdy and stuck between the armrests of her chair, had little else to do all day but fantasizing about Martin and what she would say if he’d return to Gyushevo. As Maria received the newspaper each morning around five and Martin would leave with the first train at twenty past six, she would read a newspaper beforehand and give him. She’d try to find topics of speech in the newspaper to discuss with Martin, as she had little else going on in her life that would be interesting enough to intrigue a handsome man. She’d think of some funny jokes as well to lighten up Martin’s mood at the crack of dawn, it mostly worked. She’d become obsessed with the thought of whether Martin actually found them funny or was just politely laughing along. She’d wonder whether Martin even liked her or could hardly stomach the thought of her invading his privacy by asking him personal questions.

Maria’s insecurities, she had never been loved by a man, were suppressed as she tried to think about them as little as possible. During the arrival and departing of trains, she could do little else but think, however. Her obsessive thoughts were so suppressed that she started obsessing about minor things going on. She had developed the rather strange habit of checking whether the office door was locked at least ten times before leaving for her breaks. When she walked home to have lunch, halfway there she would at times turn around to see if the station’s door was really locked. It always was. Besides, she had grown very orderly by pairing up items of the same size. Books with books, hard covers and soft covers. It bugged her that if she sorted by hardness of cover, they were not sorted alphabetically. That’s why she would order by cover and then alphabetically, once every few days. Plants in the train station were always watered on time and the green leaves were dusted off each morning and in the afternoon during hot, dusty days. Anywhere Maria was, whether at work or at home, there was no dust to be found. This was at least one benefit of her compulsive actions.

As these habits grew stronger over the years she knew Martin, she had not realized that suppressing her thoughts about him directly caused her insanities. Countless of times, she had counted the number of ceiling tiles even though they were the same number each day. The number of leaves of the plants in the station office changed now and then. She had then switched to counting passengers by the window of trains, writing the numbers down with a pencil that was always perfectly sharpened. Maybe not only Martin led to the woman slowly losing her mind, the strong coffees did little to unnerve her either. Maria, with her blond hair, intimidating eyes and large breasts hanging on her wooden desk, used to be a pretty woman. As a school girl she got much attention of the boys around her but never was she confident enough to continue down the path of love, nothing more than a few kisses. As there was little to no work in Gyushevo apart from a dull job as hers, she filled her days wondering when a passenger would come and they would fall in love at first sight. Many men had passed but they never gave her much attention. Martin did but he seemed to hide so much information about himself. What did he do in Sofia all week? Where would he sleep and did he think about her during the cold nights? She was clueless. As the first afternoon train pulled in, Maria collected the post destined to be for Gyushevo and the passengers got down the train. Gyushevo was the final station, right before the border with Macedonia.

The State Railways had a hard time transporting enough passengers to stay profitable and the Sofia – Gyushevo line was one of the first where the number of trains per day was reduced. There were just four a day where there had been eight in the good years. There was little going on in the sleepy border town and barely enough passengers along the line for it to make sense to have even four trains. Maria knew she would one time lose her job as a station worker, as she highly expected the line to close down entirely in the coming years. She wanted to try to become a station worker in the capital Sofia, she would not spend her days all alone watering plants and observing the dogs laying around the platform on sunny days.

Maria felt angry and slammed the train schedule on a fly that now laid flattened on her desk. She shot it away with her index finger. It would be picked up during her obsessive cleaning later on the day anyway. She kept dreaming about being on the side of Martin, he probably had a stable job and they would be warm and comfortable by each other’s side each night. She would never sleep alone again. She would lose weight and become a city woman.

Maria looked in the mirror above the sink and saw what had become of her, the early morning sun was set just right so she saw the wrinkles slowly appearing around the eyes. “Thin skin or not, I’m getting old”, she mumbled. Two distinct knocks on the door, just like in all these years, meant the paper man was here. With a subtle nod the bald man with a red cap gave her the pile of papers and he left again. It was a Tuesday and Martin would not come today, so she’d have some more days to think of what to do with her life. As she browsed through the Kapital paper, in the adverts section her eye fell on a job vacancy. Her overly large glasses balanced on the tip of her nose as she read it aloud. “Stable cleaning job at Sofia central station, modest salary. Workers from outside the city can sleep in station’s boarding room.” Maria felt a certain twitch in her stomach she had not felt in years. Even though the job was far from her dream of one day becoming a nurse, it was something in the city and promised to be stable. Maybe she wouldn’t even have to wake up so early either. Her obsessive cleaning would sure help, she joked to herself.

It was the first time that she thought of giving up on Martin as well, she wanted to pursue her own luck first. Besides, all men look for someone to spend their lives with. Two days later, on Thursday, Maria had packed her bags and gave a sudden notice. Walter, the station manager, slightly angry and unnerved, could do little to stop Maria. She argued that once the line would close down, she’d be stuck without work and Walter would be the last one to care. “Fair game”, said Walter. He’d have to look for someone else to spend their days at the station office. On Thursday afternoon, Maria got a ticket from her colleague at the station whom wished her good luck. Maria’s plan was to work in Sofia during the week and to return to Gyushevo on the weekends. If the line would close entirely, she’d find a way to take a bus. With one heavy suitcase, she boarded the train. Nobody helped her lift the heavy beast and during the ride she pondered over the thought of how a gentleman such as Martin would have definitely helped her. Even though on the day before her leaving, she told herself to let go of obsessing over this man, she couldn’t. The train slowly chugged through the river canyon on the way to the capital. It was rare for Maria to pursue her dreams, they really had gotten lost in the numbing silence of the job. She even started feeling disembodied from the silence and boredom, even though some days she found it peaceful as well. “Still, no woman wants to grow old alone”, she told herself in the reflecting train window.

She had skipped breakfast and arrived in Sofia with an empty stomach. Again nobody helped her get down the train with her luggage. She directly reported herself to the station manager and felt quite confident now she arrived in the big city. People walking over the platform, well dressed fed, all seemed to have their lives together. “You can start on Monday morning” the moving moustache of the fat station manager seemed to convey. “Get used to your boarding room first and have some rest, you look like crushed by a train”, he jokingly said. “Joke’s on him”, Maria thought. She’d somehow done what she decided, getting her stuff and leaving the sad life she used to have. She threw her suitcase onto the bed in the shady boarding room, took a quick shower and dressed better than she had done in many years. She walked into the center confidently and had a double whiskey at a sunny terrace. “Why haven’t I done anything I love before”, she’d tell herself. Accustomed to being alone, she spent at least two hours at the terrace on one drink. Some more coffee at another place and she’d go back to her room, doing whatever to get through Saturday and Sunday. She felt the wind breeze through her hair and a shiver passed her back. She felt alive and even slightly looked forward to wipe the station’s blinking floors. At least she had chosen it.

It was seven in the morning of the first day of the week. “Martin would come to town”, she thought. She was sure he’d be in Gyushevo with coffee for her right now and her colleagues would tell them she’d left for Sofia. Little time to think about Martin now, as Maria emptied the platform bins and carried the heavy trash bags to the left side of the station building. Everyone on the platforms ignored her while she cleaned out ashtrays and felt worthless. Somehow she felt worse than in Gyushevo. Still, Maria decided to pull herself together. She had chosen and so it had to be. A sudden tap on her shoulder awoke her from the day dream. “Maria, I got you a coffee.” Without having to look around, she knew it could only be one man. She looked him into the eyes and touched his cheek. Even though it had not been love at first sight, a strong spark between them made Maria scream Martin’s name out loud and she hugged him. Half of the coffee was spilled over her green work outfit but she didn’t care. She took the coffee, had a sip with tears in her eyes and dropped her broom. They walked along the platform together as the sun warmed their cheeks.

© copyright 2017 - All Rights Reserved

#Shortstory

Marko and the asylum

Marko was just doing his final round through the madhouse. The night fell and the last sunbeams peeked through the barred windows. Bored to tears with his job and the dull rounds, Marko stroke his hand along the peeling paint on the concrete walls. He had wine and felt tipsy. He’d gotten used to the screams in the hallways, the mad would not just go to sleep. The job was far worse for the night shift workers. As the screams and cries continued, Marko felt like he was silently screaming inside himself. He’d made few friends among the inmates, whom were locked inside the complex for their own safety. Marko had found them to be good people, often speaking what’s on their mind even though it would come out with tons of emotions such as anger and violence. He had gotten to know Josif, whom had been in the complex for 2 and a half years ever since having a manic episode. Josif was open about his condition, at least to Marko. He had explained about the days he couldn’t help himself and relatives eventually checked him into the facility. It had been a struggle and Josif did not seem to improve ever since he’d gotten in. If only, he looked worse and bore the marks of age on his otherwise young face. Marko had grown concerned about Josif, even more so about the bruises and scars he had all over his body. Because they were never in his face, Marko suspected some form of abuse rather than self-harm. Josif would not share a word about it and seemed totally paralyzed of fear.

The human mind is a complex matter and even though Marko had never studied it, he had come to see many aspects of it during his ten years at the madhouse. What he had learned as well is that he could not completely trust his colleagues. The sturdy and bald night shift worker Milan was especially aggressive towards the inmates, behaviour that Marko despised. One time, upon Marko’s arrival in the morning, Milan was making himself breakfast. An inmate who was allowed to roam the halls because of his improving condition, got into the kitchen as well. Milan instantly enraged and hit him over the head with the frying pan, his baked eggs flying through the room in a hundred pieces. This rage seemed to be common for Milan and for this reason Marko thought that Josif, among others, was being abused physically. Even though brawls were not uncommon, the bruises Marko saw on this round were just very obvious. It’s just that nobody would open up to him and Marko did not feel like getting too involved anyway. He was paid to shut up and ‘keep the fools silent’ as well, as he was often told by the head chief.

After Marko had been inside Josif’s cell for a few minutes to inspect his bruises, he took his trash as well and left the cell. Before he turned around, he gave Josif his pen and a piece of paper so he could write down his thoughts in case he really wanted to share something. Marko promised to pick up the piece of paper on his next round in the morning. This would normally be strictly forbidden and entering the cell was out of the question. Marko was alone and had little to fear of Josif anyway, he thought. His concern over Josif grew bigger than his own sense of safety and it seemed that Marko had grown a bit reckless through the years at the madhouse. The wine didn’t help either. As he retreated to the staff cabinet, he took another pencil out of the drawer. All inmates were present. Just a sign-off and he could go home. Milan, had not yet arrived and so he had to wait. Marko couldn’t seem to get Milan out of his head. Not only did Marko suspect he badly hurt Josif, he was late now as well. This normally never happened and annoyed Marko even more so. The door of the cabinet was closed and as it was noise-proof on the inside, Marko could voice his thoughts out loud. Nobody out there could hear him anyway. He grew tense again and remembered to follow his wife’s advice, to let the anger slide off his shoulders and forget about Milan and Josif. Work should not be taken home and as Marko started his breathing exercises, his desk phone rang. As he picked up the receiver, it was Milan saying he’d be half an hour late. Icy roads in this time of year. Marko continued his breathing exercises.

He should have long been home already. Each and every day, around this exact time, only Milan would be in the cabinet polishing his shoes and getting ready for his shift. As Marko looked through the barred window, he saw the kitchen in the other building was already working. The cook was busy preparing dinner, which would be delivered to the main building in an hour and a half or so. Still no sign of Milan. Suddenly, he heard a loud CLICK. It took a second for Marko to realize it was the door being locked from the outside. He thought it would be a practical joke from Milan, probably in an attempt to scare him. Marko couldn’t help but laugh at this ridiculous attempt of scaremongering and reached towards his key ring to be able to open the door from the inside. There was no key ring. It dawned upon him that he had left his key ring in Josif’s cell door. As he had left the cell a bit overwhelmed by the signs of abuse he witnessed, he’d forgotten the keys. He had just walked towards the unlocked cabinet and left Josif’s trash bag right outside the door. Now it was locked and Marko gasped for breath. His exercises did not help him with this and just seconds later, a note appeared from the narrow space under the door. Then smoke, lots of smoke. It seemed like the trashbag was set on fire and the wooden door with noise protecting cushions on the inside would only last so long. Marko started screaming, this time not on the inside. He screamed at the top of his lungs. He read the note and it said, “This is for two years of abuse Milan. Faggot”. Marko banged the door and screamed but to no avail. He rushed to the barred window and tried breaking the glass with a broom. Oxygen would not help to keep down the fire and there was no way for Marko to get out. Smoke surrounded him and he wrapped a wet handkerchief around his mouth. He saw smoke coming from the kitchen in the other building, dinner would be ready in a bit..

© copyright 2017 - All Rights Reserved

#Shortstory