Bad Morning

Waking up is never easy

Chapter 1

A sigh escaped Trenton Denst's lips as the dream faded away, but the taste of it eluded him only moments later. Like the hint of a promise in a woman's eyes when she was playing hard to get, the dream was impossible to capture. He couldn't know to hold the fuzzy dreamscape as hard as he possibly could, and so, the chance faded away.

He groaned and glanced at the flickering clock on a crate beside his bed. The last two digits blinked anywhere between twelve and seventy, intent on not allowing him to even guess at the time. Appliances never work right after the third time they've been thrown against a wall.

“You're not going to cooperate, are you?...Stupid clock.” Trent punched his pillow and slumped down on his awkwardly twisted arm. He felt pathetic.

The clock didn't respond, which told him that whatever method of forgetfulness he had engaged in the night before had long since worn off.

If the hour on the clock was correct, he was at least an hour late for work. There was no reason to hurry. He was already an hour late, what difference would it make if he showed up fifteen minutes earlier?

The concrete floor threatened to afflict him with frostbite every morning when he woke up, but he never bought a pair of slippers. It was just another morning that began with toes so cold they hurt. Carpet would have been way too much of an amenity for his cheap landlord to spring for. At least in the basement apartments.

Another day of work at Charlie's Diner. He hated having a job, but he didn't do enough work to call it that. Complaining about it would have been too much work.

Trent studied his bedroom with grainy eyes. It was far from nice, and lacked anything resembling finery. The furniture consisted of a rickety dresser, his potato-filled mattress, and a plastic bin. For everything else he used old milk crates so fragile they broke when someone looked at them wrong.

He yawned and stumbled his way through the debris on the floor, he never put anything away. There wasn't really anywhere to call away, but he didn't organize anything either. “S**t!” He yelled when his toes slammed into something with his last step and he cursed at not being as adept as usual at avoiding the trash. A stack of spiral notebooks nearly a foot tall was strategically placed in front of the doorway.

“D****t, Erin.” He growled. She was the likely culprit. His girlfriend of three years, she had an ingrained habit of wanting him to do exactly as she desired. Setting books on the floor where she knew he would kick them was her subtle way of saying he needed to write.

Trent kicked the unoffending notebooks, growling viciously as he did so. They scattered pleasantly across the floor with a shuffle of fluttering pages, and he stepped in to his bathroom feeling slightly better. The throb that shot through his foot made him frown in anticipation of pain, but he could accept pain in exchange for thwarting Erin's plans. There would be no writing today.

The bathroom had been built with the same attention to quality as the rest of the apartment. The majority of the fixtures only worked when they felt like it, and the shower didn't understand the word temperature to mean anything but freezing cold. Added to the fact that the entire room was smaller than most closets, it was an uncomfortable place to spend any amount of time.

Trent looked into the mirror in the light of the single, flickering lightbulb overhead. His dark hair was cut extremely short out of financial necessity, and his pale blue eyes were nearly invisible in their sockets but for the light-catching glaze of the previous night's debauchery. His face covered the front of his head admirably, but he had always felt there was something wrong with it. Through years of curiosity he could never figure out what, though.

“You look bad,” he admonished himself with a chuckle. He tore his eyes away from the mirror and glanced at his hateful shower. A good reason to brave the frigid waters didn't immediately come to mind, and he wouldn't search very hard for one. There was no hot water in his apartment. It had been three years since he complained to his landlord for the first time, and it was beginning to dawn on him that it would never get fixed .

He quickly brushed his teeth and threw his old toothbrush in the sink, its bristles were going haywire. No toothbrush should have bristles that stick backward, and Trent felt a little sad that the toothbrush was trying so hard to escape his teeth. He had a cavity or two, but they weren't bad teeth.

From his bedroom came a tinny noise that insistently filled the apartment as his cell phone expressed its disappointment at being left behind. The doorframe was too small for normal people, so he exited the bathroom slowly to avoid catching his elbows on the splintery wood.

The search for his phone took him all over the room, and it stopped ringing long before he found the pair of years-old jeans that held it. Ignoring the question of who called, he held the jeans up in the meager light from the little window high up on the outside wall and studied them critically. Convinced of their relative cleanliness Trent pulled them on, and a white t-shirt with a burn hole on one shoulder rounded out the ensemble.

The phone came out of his pocket, slowly, and his eyes flicked to the screen before jumping away. He hid from the screen like he could be seen from the other end.

Erin. It was his fourth missed call from her in the past hour. She was anxious to yell at him, but he wouldn't call her back just so she could. Rationality was something he wasn't known for, but he was rational enough not to call his girlfriend while she was pissed off. Trent shoved the phone back in his pocket and walked into the only other room in his apartment.

His living room was a combination of kitchen and area for people to sit too close to each other. The few sticks of furniture had been owned by at least six people before Trent, and the only item anyone considered of importance was the refrigerator. No matter a man's status in life, he had to eat.

Trent picked up a crumpled pack of cigarettes sitting on the couch and looked inside. There wasn't even loose tobacco to roll in a paper and smoke as a stopgap before he picked up more. He would have to find enough change for a pack. People at his parties were always losing coins in their drunken revelry, so he didn't worry. There was always money hidden in the cushions of his couch.

Five minutes later a handful of coins jingled in his pocket as his feet dragged out the front door of his building. That first step out of the dim hallway onto the street brought a shock to every frayed nerve ending he possessed.

It was hot. Even the air smelled like it was cooking, and his skin prickled with sweat so that he, too, could cook along with it. The air was heavy with the familiar scent of hot asphalt, and Trent wondered for the thousandth time why he stayed in Houston.

He looked around the heat-hazed street with squinted eyes and a desire for sunglasses, smiling at the sense of solitude. There wasn't a soul in sight. His street was short, and easy to miss, but it was always surreal to see an urban environment so devoid of life.

He took two steps and his phone rang, interrupting the peaceful silence. He fumbled it out of his pocket and swore loudly when Erin's name popped up. The longer he avoided her the worse things would turn out.

“Hey,” he uttered instead of groaning.

“Don't you 'hey' me! Where the hell are you?! Why'd you ignore my calls?!” Erin was already in fine form, her voice high enough to give him permanent hearing issues. It usually took a while for her to work up to full-blown insanity, but she was already there. He smiled at the mental image of her small frame quivering in rage, upset once again at her deadbeat boyfriend.

“Sorry. I just woke up, and I'm stoppin' by Bailey's.” Erin could get on a tirade and not stop for hours if something didn't stop her. It was simple physics. Objects in motion tend to destroy everything in front of them, or something like that.

“Are you kiddin' me? Charlie's gonna snap if he finds out you're an hour and a half late. Lex's been coverin' for ya so you don't get fired before you even get here.”

“I'll be there in a few minutes. Just gotta get some cigarettes. Charlie's dumb a*s won't notice a thing. Guy can't see anything past his beer gut. When do I not show up a little late? Seriously?”

“Yeah...Just getting cigarettes my a*s. You probly got enough change to get yourself some vodka, too. Just get over here before we can't cover anymore.” The phone beeped tonelessly, her usual goodbye.

For what seemed the hundredth time, Trent wondered why she stayed with him. Erin MacAnders had grown up with a silver spoon shoved up her a*s, but after just a single semester of college she decided she wanted to make it on her own, rather than depend on daddy for everything. It was an admirable plan, if ill-conceived. Her avenue of making it had consisted of shacking up with a struggling writer, and pushing him to get published. Three years later, the avenue was looking like more of a dead end.

Erin had made it abundantly clear she wouldn't settle for a dead end.

Without waiting for her to call back and ask why he was just standing on the sidewalk, Trent hurried to the rundown convenience store at the end of his block. He didn't know how she would know, but she would.

The storefront was unimpressive by design. Bailey made a smart move in not being ostentatious. People that showed off their wealth in the slums were normally robbed before anyone had the chance to appreciate what they had. The word 'Bailey's' painted in small black letters above a glass door was the only thing that said a store was even there, and that wasn't a sure thing. Even that was ambiguous, since no one knew exactly what Bailey's might be. A flip sign in the center of the door read 'open'. It was a hopeful message, considering the staff of layabouts that worked there.

Trent sauntered in and stopped, staring at the young man behind the counter. His head rested on his arms, and shaggy blond hair fell to brush the countertop. Trent smiled cruelly to himself and snuck toward him. When he was within reach, he slammed his palms down with a thunderous crack only inches from the man's head.

The noise reverberated off the plaster walls of the small store, and even Trent flinched at how loud it was. He gritted his teeth against the sting in his palms, but was rewarded by the clerk kicking backwards off his stool and falling to the floor. Luckily no one else was in the store, because they would have hidden behind the single rack of goods to avoid the gunshot.

The sleepy guy was one of Trent's best friends. Not many people called the dilapidated part of Houston home, but those who did stuck together. His name was Bobby, and when he wasn't sleeping on the job, he was sleeping on Trent's couch.

Bobby was nothing if not a stoner, and he embodied every possible stereotype the word brought to mind. He was habitually lazy, smoked like a freight train, and wouldn't have mustered enough ambition to get a job if his lack of money hadn't bit into his munchie budget.

“Wake up, man! If Bailey came in here and found you like that, he'd kill you.”

“Dude, not cool.” Bobby mumbled as he picked himself up off the floor. “I thought you were sposed to work today?” The tired shopkeeper twitched his head to remove his unruly hair out of his bloodshot eyes.

“I'm supposed to be there, but I need a pack of cigs.” Trent fished the change out of his pocket and scattered it on the counter.

“So, what're we doin' tonight?” Bobby turned around and snatched a pack off the shelf without paying attention to the brand.

“Gimme a pint of vodka, too.” Trent pawed through the change on the counter and ignored his friend's question.

“Shoulda known. Want me to bring some over for us to drink tonight?”

“Yeah,” Trent said distractedly before mumbling, “That girl knows me too well.”

“What?” Bobby asked as he walked back toward Trent with a pint of vodka.

“Nothin'.” Trent said, shaking off his annoyance with Erin. “Yeah, bring some s**t over.”

“Alright...” Bobby watched his friend quizzically as he spun the cap on the vodka one-handed and slung the door open with the other.

Trent stopped outside to light a cigarette and took a swig. It would help him through the short walk to Charlie's. He wanted to have the pint finished before he got to work. That way he might end up working the entire shift instead of taking off early.

Reviews

[Jacob Clifford]

I really like this story thus far. I love the slow, dry narrative and how life-like the characters how. You do well that showing what they're like and giving the reader a feel for them. I also love that Trent is basically just a piece of s**t. Not many protagonists are. At the same time, Trent's perspective is really entertaining, humorous, and unusual, as is his relationship with Erin, and the fact that he even HAS a relationship with Erin. Very enjoyable.

[Dante Carlisle]

Thank you for the review! I had a blast writing Trent because he is indeed a piece of s**t. I hope you enjoy the rest of the story.

[Xavier Lee]

You began excellently, although, "He hated having a job, but he didn't do enough work to call it a job." I would've said "that" instead of "job" the second time.
This, however, was the only error I could find. This chapter was simply fantastic. I'm usually not into works set in reality but really captured my attention. It's equal parts funny and intriguing, and I love what an a*****e Trent is, he's practically perfect. I cannot wait to read more and I say excellent work.

[Dante Carlisle]

Thanks for the tips on that sentence, that's one of the many lines that I've never been too fond of, but haven't felt strongly enough about to take out. As for Trent, he's been a great character. This entire novel is actually written, I'm just putting it on here as I edit the chapters. I hope you continue to enjoy.

[Xavier Lee]

That's how I am too. Most of my novel is written, I just don't want to spring all of it on here at once. Helps to build suspense and excitement, i.e "oh boy, the next chapter's released!" Any way I'm happy to help with any grammar and I'm sure I'll continue to like this.