Tuesday, 20 October 2009

• The Art Teacher

  Part of a piece titled "Bus Stop Sketches" I'm writing for my Writing Fiction class:
  

   
  

            Standing next to the wall of the bus shelter, the art teacher felt sandwiched in.  He pressed himself up against the wall so that he could keep out of the downpour just beyond his toes.  One false step backwards and he stepped on the edge of someone’s coat.  A gruff growl from the corner of the bus shelter told the art teacher to move up half a step.  Letting out a nervous laugh, he glanced towards the old woman he had surrendered his seat to.  She looked immensely pleased with herself, shaking open a copy of the same newspaper he had glanced at back at his apartment.

              He had sunken as low as he could possibly go.  Right there in the center of the singles ads was his.  Short.  To the point.  As a result of some cruel cosmic sense of humor, his ad had ended up wedged between the “affectionate romantic” and the “attractive farmer.”  There it was, “Art Instructor, Chicago resident, slim, 6’, 150 lbs, brown hair and eyes, interested in meeting Female, 30-35.”  Looking at it, he saw every short-coming in the hastily written ad.  First, there was nothing about his personality.  Second, he hadn’t indicated what kind of female he wanted to meet.  For all anybody knew, he was interested in meeting a female lemur.  The least he could have done was specify the species.

              No doubt the old woman was looking at the singles ads and had just picked out his as the most likely candidate for her Friday night entertainment rather than Bingo.  That would be just his luck.  Sure, whoever snapped her up was probably picking up a catch.  She was…charming, probably.  Behind the glasses, she was a vixen, to be sure.  Not his type, but who was he to be picky?

              He shoved his hands into his pockets, hiding the closely bitten fingernails.  If only he hadn’t watched Rear Window last night.  He had seen it at least eighty times and he still bit his nails to the quick every time he watched a Hitchcock film.  Why hadn’t he advertised that he was a Jimmy Stewart looking for his Grace Kelly in his ad?  Because he hadn’t thought of that.  It had been sort of a spontaneous decision, and Harold didn’t usually do “spontaneous”.  He had been at the post office already, mailing a package to his mother, and the singles ad had caught his eye, so he had stuffed a scrap of paper with his ad on it in an envelope, slapped a stamp on it and mailed it right then and there.  He had forgotten about it until it had shown up in the newspaper this morning.

              Harold’s mother was back in Philadelphia and her birthday had just passed, hence the package.  He had sent her a book.  He always sent her books.  This one, he had stuffed with little drawings he had done throughout the year that reminded him of her.  There was one of a zebra next to a flower twice its size, a comic about procrastination, all sorts of things that were sure to make his mother laugh, if not today then tomorrow.

              The singles ad would probably make her laugh too.

              But why had he written “slim”?  And six foot, was he really six foot?  Did it matter?  He might as well just face it, no one was going to call.

              And then the phone in his pocket buzzed.  And the art teacher froze.

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