Literature is art, is beauty, is life. That was Aohkii’s motto. She stuck to it too; come rain or, well, more rain. That year, the rain had seemed endless. After the first week of it, dripping and drizzling its constant rhythm, she began to notice the intricate patterns it made while pirouetting down from the sky. At times, it would drift this way or that in the wind, racing. A month since the sun last shone, she had got into the habit of making room in her book bag for a set of pants, a scarf, hat, and an extra pair of socks. Her bike ride to work was more than a mile away. Often, a large car driving by would spray her with a combination of rain and mud. It never lost its humiliating quality, but she would have been soaked no matter how far from traffic she rode. Her workdays at the bookstore habitually began with a trip to the bathroom to change into dry clothes. They ended with a shower to wash away the cold drops of moisture her hair and clothes had diligently gathered during the ride home.
“Art is beauty is life,” she thought as she glanced around her small tiled bathroom. She stepped out of the shower and rubbed the steam from the mirror. Her self-reflected gaze triggered a different emotion for every mood she contained. That afternoon, it shone brightly. There was none of the usual angst. She brushed away the taste of cigarettes that had accumulated on her teeth and tongue during her afternoon lunch-break.
Once upon a time, Aohkii had started smoking as a self-challenge. “I want to know what its like to be a smoker,” she’d declared while in her last year in high school. “I want to know so that one day I can put it into a novel. Its research,” she mused to her friends. Before long though, the nicotine had taken its hold on her soul. Smoking had grown from research into habit and then addiction. The one-year-plan to smoke had come and gone, as had the year after that. Now, in her third year of smoking, a cute guy she’d met at one of many campus parties had, after hearing her reasoning, replied, “Well…. now you REALLY know what its like to be smoker,” and had laughed and lit her cigarette for her. The experience left her feeling chagrined and yet, even after sleeping with the man, she lit up a cigarette and pushed the feeling to the back of her mind.
The sound of rain continued its fantastic lullaby. Inside the little bathroom, Aohkii secretly admired the constancy of it and the talent it had to bring people together. Olympia certainly would not be the same without the rain. The little college town was full of writers, artists, punks, bull-dike lesbians and general all around creative types. Because of the rain, students would crowd into various coffee and bagel shops, bookstores, and seedy restaurants to write and read or sketch while drowning proletariat troubles away in chai-tea lattes or espressos.
They weren’t pretentious arty types. They were hopefully pessimistic arty types. Kurt Cobain had died, or was murdered, depending on how you saw it. The end of an era had come. Grunge was on its way out and cell phones were on their way in, as were children whose toys were computerized and adults hungry for the war machine to begin again its locomotive roll across the planet. Generation X had begun to streamline the way to fast becoming millionaires. Generation Y was still in elementary school. “What about those of us stuck in between,” she wondered as she dried the remaining moisture from her body. “Generation X.5” Aohkii wrapped the towel around her head and wandered naked into the dining room.
-ninjacat

www.literarylady.wordpress.com

***Due to the fact that children might view this work, I will not be posting the rest of this story. However, if you’d like to read it please visit my room at wordpress (see above address). I would love to have you over to sit back and read, or just to leave a comment.

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