Blackout (Logan)

[Lets_Eat_Paste]

Olive Degarmo

Lightening ripped apart the heavens, shedding down sheets of rain onto the unsuspecting heads of Parisians. Grey clouds rolled in with a hungry grumble of thunder like an ominous omen of what was yet to come. Soaked, Olive held her bag above her head and sprinted towards the metro where it was dry and she could enjoy the petrichor without the soaked feet.

Her train, according to the sign, was here. She could take a quick ride home and get out of this impromptu tempest the cosmos decided to hurl down. She boarded with a mass throng of other hopeful shelter-seekers, slipping on the puddles they all left behind for another to find. She gripped the metal pole tightly, resting her sopping forehead to it, relishing in the cool metal stability. She closed her eyes for a moment and the train began moving.

Someone screamed.

And then another person.

And another until there was a chorus of terrified screams. She opened her eyes. It was dark. It took Olive over a minute to realize that over the shrieks, the wheels were no clacking on the metal tracks. They were at a standstill.

“Attention, passengers…” a crackly voice said from the intercom above. But then it was silent.

She glanced around to the silhouetted passengers around her, her eyes adjusting. At last, she could make out features enough for her to tap a man gently, but urgently on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” she said. “Did you hear that message? What’s going on?”

[The Exodus]

Logan Bell

Logan could not catch a break. He’d had his first round of language lessons and had received what he understood to be a thorough tongue-lashing from his tutor. Apparently, when Logan spoke French, he made it sound as if someone was strangling him.

“The language… it flows,” his tutor said, using expressive hand gestures to illustrate his point. “It is not like your English, which is so choppy and…” Another gesture. “When you speak French, Monsieur Bell, it sounds like you are hanging yourself with a noose of words.”

The other students in the class all had a good laugh. At either Logan’s expense or the teacher’s. He couldn’t be sure which of the two, since the only language he had in common with most of the students was, in fact, French.

Then there had been the storm. It started out as a little drizzle. What they said about Paris in the rain was true. It was breathtaking. People always said that the streets and the buildings looked beautiful behind a veil of mist and rain. What people didn’t say was that craning your neck to see the rooftop of a historical building while walking and listening to your iPod spelled disaster. In any country – in any language – that was just common sense. Logan, of course, stepped off the curbside, dropped his iPod in a puddle, and got drenched.

The rain came down harder. He picked himself up and took shelter in the subway. He’d ride the train back to the hotel.

The subway was something vaguely familiar. Reminiscent of the London Tube, Logan felt more at ease here. He leaned his head against the closed door of the train. It was cool and hard; vibrations rumbled through it and lulled Logan into a state of half-consciousness as he listened for his stop to be called.

And then someone screamed.

Logan jolted and stood upright. He looked around, but found that the subway train had gone dark. Another person screamed further down the train as lights in other subway cars disappeared. The train was frozen on the tracks.

It’s a jumper, he thought suddenly. Once, he’d been on his way to an audition and there’d been a jumper on the tracks. It was just before his days in Radio Remedy. The jumper had made him late to the audition and for two weeks, Logan bemoaned the loss of a potential job. Silly, really, in the scheme of things since it all worked out in the end. For him, anyways. Probably not for the jumper. A little frown tugged at his lips. Poor, desperate bloke. Or girl. Jumping on train tracks was a one way ticket to a final destination not listed on any map.

A garbled voice came on over the speakers of the train, but it went dead almost immediately. Logan looked around the train. It wasn’t overly crowded, but it was crowded enough to be uncomfortable. He imagined that in the twenty minutes it would take for authorities to do whatever it was they did about jumpers, people were going to get irate.

He should have taken his chances with the storm.

A soft tap on his shoulder got Logan’s attention. He looked over to see a woman whose features were obscured in the dark. He wondered if he knew her or if she knew him.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Did you hear that message? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Logan said. “My French isn’t all that good… I think there might be a jumper on the tracks or something.”

[Lets_Eat_Paste]

Olive Degarmo

The shoulder Olive grasped shrugged and with equal frustration and panicked confusion, he said “I don’t know,” and Olive could tell by his accent that he was not French. She squinted through the accent to find the words he uttered. “My French isn’t all that good… I think there might be a jumper on the tracks or something.”

Olive gasped, her eyes welling up with cold tears that mixed in with the rain water that dripped from her hair and clung to her cheeks. A jumper? On these tracks? It was something one heard about in stories, but never witnessed. Olive’s heart broke for the life that felt so shattered, so torn, so dismally hopeless that the only possibility for them was to be crushed by a train. “Oh my,” was all she could manage. She was there after her surgery. Every car that passed her was a one-way ticket to peace and numbness. She even tried once, stepping in front of a car, but the driver of the blue taxi stopped just in time to crush her toe with the tire. She didn’t try again.

The intercom gave one last feeble pop like a last ember going to its final rest. It made no other sound. At least, Olive thought, they had the air conditioner. With bodies packed into a small train car, a humid air of evaporating rain rising around them like steam.

“I… hope everything’s okay.” She looked up into the pitch void, listening to the chatter. “Where are you off too? Or were, rather, until the train stopped?”

She should have just walked home.