Chapter One

The omens were there for anyone to see if only people would look at them. They were clear and unchanging, signs that had been passed down through the ages and across cultures, and yet people ignored them. It made Craig Klavans sick.

 

He stood, in his bathrobe with a glass of wine, in his library. It was a very masculine room. The mahogany bookshelves had been imported and installed by men who could never dare to dream of such finery. The leather chairs and the rosewood desk, too, were polished to a gleam and hand-crafted, probably in Italy. The rug on the floor was an ancient Oriental. The walls, peeking from behind leather-bound books and from underneath framed paintings, were painted a mute cream.

 

Tasteful. Expensive.

 

Yet, for all the grandeur, there was a shabbiness to the room and to the man. He was in his thirties and already fat around the middle, his hair already thinning on top and going gray along the sides. He did not enjoy the wine. It had come from Publix and was the cheap stuff. It tasted acrid and sour, stomach bile after too much drink the night before. The robe was silk but water-stained. He did not enjoy the books or the room or the house that had been left to him by his father. It was all - wrong.

 

He sat in the leather chair and sipped the wine and set it carelessly on top of one of the books that had been left out and open to some page so that the spine was stretched out. That the book was a classic didn’t matter to him. The maid would come by on Wednesday and would pick the book up, try to massage the spine back into place, and put it back on the dusty shelf. She would clean the rings of spilled wine from the glossy antique table.

Craig barely thought about the woman. He barely thought about any of them, the maid, the cook, his lawyer. They were all women, interchangeable for the most part, maternal and heavy-set in their own ways, who took care of him and were therefore useless. He didn’t know their names and didn’t care to except when it was time for their wages to be taken from his trust fund.

 

He knew that people thought of him as the typical trust fund baby, the inheritor of the great fortune his parents amassed, now sitting around with people waiting on him and watching the money dry up. He wasn’t that. He’d gone to university and nearly, very nearly, had a degree in Religious Studies. Very nearly. It wasn’t his fault that his father died and needed someone at home.

 

The phone rang and he allowed it to. It echoed through the house a huge, empty sound. Craig ignored it. It was always for him and so he hated to answer it. It was always someone asking for this favor or begging for that favor. He’d just sat down and the phone was in the other room. Let it go to voice mail, then he’d decide if it were worth getting up for.

 

He picked up the book with the spine wrenched open, nearly toppling his drink in the process, and started back where he’d left off. On omens. That was his new obsession. Omens. Death omens.

 

Death permeated the house. It lived in every corner and were his constant companions. His father’s death, especially, had been something of a living creature that hovered over his father and sucked life out of him. Upstairs, in the bedroom that Craig never went into, the heavy oak bed was still pushed out into the middle of the room, the gouge marks where the oxygen machines had been dragged onto the hardwood floors, scraping them, were still visible.

 

After all these years, Craig could still see the tubes going from the machine to his father’s face, sucking and sucking all the oxygen out until only the husk of his father was left. He’d wanted to wrench the machines from the wall and throw them out of the window but he’d been powerless to do so. Powerless. He’d watched his father die.

 

Aided in some ways.

 

The voice machine clicked on and Fiona’s voice echoed disembodied through the house.

 

“Craig? Craig, it’s Fiona. Um, right. I thought you were home. Well, um, you know, Todd and I wondered if you would like to come over on December 21^st, we’re having a party,” she said.

 

Craig tried not to listen to Fiona. He didn’t want to have to explain why he didn’t feel like going out and was tired of making excuses. She was a nice woman, the wife of his best friend, Todd Matheisson, from college. Todd had taken his hard-won degree and become some sort of businessman, Craig wasn’t sure what he did, and Fiona was a psychiatrist.

 

She was always trying to fix him. Her latest crusade, now, was getting him to cry about his father’s death and to get him to go out of the house and live again. Whatever that meant. She was well-meaning, of course, they all were.

 

“Well, I suppose you aren’t home. Just, well, Craig, Todd misses you,” she said.

 

Craig didn’t believe this. Maybe Todd missed him, sure, it wasn’t unheard of, but he was certain she was saying this to make him come to the phone.

 

“We both do. We’d like to see you.”

 

There was a pause. She seemed to be fishing for something else to say. She knew he was there, of course. Where else would he be? She was looking for something that she could say that would make him open up finally. There was nothing to say, though.

 

“Right, well, you know the number.”

 

She hung up and Craig went back to his book.

Reviews

[Athena Ramos]

what a good first chapter :D
this book is definitely going to be shelved :D

for the grammars and stuff, i think it's all fine. nicely written~
and for this chapter, i get it :)