This is the first chapter with dialogue in it. This took me ages to do because html isn’t a formatting language and it is basically the only language I have any idea about (thanks, myspace). Because html renders all whitespace into one whitespace I am doing hack-and-slash things to get the indents I need. Don’t be a hater. Also: I doubt there will be any formatting in your RSS reader because the lords of the Internet have decreed it so.

CHAPTER TWO

   Chie drove fairly sedately for someone who had just stolen a car. In reality, the only person in the world who knew the car was stolen was herself – nothing to be speeding through breath-testing checkpoints about. Joseph’s car had about half a tank in it. Chie was pleased about this. This would take her out of the city and most of the way to the next town. She could fill up at a roadside service station and get a motel somewhere.

   She could have done all of these things if the fucking car hadn’t billowed a coal power station of black smoke before she could even get out of the city. Right now she was standing on the sidewalk in light drizzle glowering at her stolen car and any cars that slowed as they passed. The last thing Chie wanted was to have to deal with some ex-mechanic turned Internet entrepreneur who would huff and puff and talk about alternators and oil changes. Perhaps he would offer a ride to the nearest service station. “Fuck the nearest service station.” Chie thought, “I’ll walk this way until I find somewhere to stay.” Chie plucked her meagre bag of belongings – containing two changes of El Macpherson underwear, Basil by Marc Jacobs, a cocktail dress and a pair of high heels – and walked West, the way the sun sets.

   Twenty minutes of walking left her damp enough to be mad at the world and outside some kind of dive bar. Chie sighed. The exact person that she tried her best to avoid at the scene of the car would be the exact type of patron this day-old-fish-and-chip-burger-with-a-mouldy-egg-and-some-crusty-onions of a bar would harbour. Chie sighed again and pushed the sticky door open, “At least it’s not strip night.”

   There were maybe thirty people in the bar on this Thursday night, four at the bar itself and the rest scattered about tables and couches around the dank room. Chie took a sticky seat at the sticky bar and the barman sidled over to her, the sticky floor sucking at his shoes, trying to hold him in place. “Care for a drink, miss?”
  Chie didn’t see a wine list anywhere. “What do you have in the way of fermented grapes?” She ventured.
  ”Well, we got house red and, uh, house red, I guess.”
  ”Do you pour the dregs of whatever wine is left in people’s glasses into the house red?”
  ”Well, missy. No one here drinks wine. So this house red that you are so very, very interested in is pure as the driven snow in those terms. Perhaps it has been sitting there for a tad longer than house red ought to really exist for, but otherwise as pure as the driven snow.”
  ”Forget the wine. What beers do you have in this fine establishment?”
  ”Well, missy we ha-”
  ”Stop calling me ‘missy.’” Chie interrupted the man, “My name is Chie.”
  ”Well, Chie. The beers we have at this fine establishment are none other than Terracotta Pale Ale and Terracotta Brown Ale.”
  ”Those are both student beers. No one here is a student. Why would you only stock these beers?”
  ”The people that come here need a lot of drinking to get drunk and if a person chose to do this as often as my neighbours fail to recycle then a person cannot afford to drink anything that has to go further than, say, a hundred kilometres before it gets to their livers.”
The barman had a good point, so Chie ordered a Terracotta Brown and resigned herself to the taste of salty dirt. She was about halfway through a rather hefty pint of the stuff when she heard a rumble from the man to her left. “Mmmm, gotta love that house red!” To her astonishment, this man was drinking white wine. She turned on the barkeep: “Where did this man get white wine? You told me you didn’t have any!”
  ”And we don’t,” replied the barkeep, “William brings his own with him. His own bottle, his own wine and generally someone else’s wallet. To say he doesn’t buy drinks off me is not to say that I don’t see him spending up a storm right there.”
  ”So William drinks for free and, what? Fences goods from his stool?”
  ”Well, no. William collects, shall we say… ‘insurance’ from local businesses. They meet him here and I never see, nor say, anything.”
  To this Chie drank the rest of her Brown and clunked the vessel onto the dark, sticky wood of the bar. “What do you get out of this, Mr -”
  ”Thomson”
  ”Mr. Thomson?”
Sending a glance William’s way, Mr. Thomson lent in and filled Chie’s glass again. “I get a bit on the side as well as some free protection for making sure William is never interuppted in the course of his profession.”
Chie nodded, looked at her beer then looked at William. Then looked at her beer again and turned to face William. He was bent over his wine wearing an old navy blazer with what looked like a very expensive open-necked white shirt underneath. On closer inspection he was also sporting cufflinks.
  ”William, would you mind sharing your wine with me?” Chie didn’t even bother to be cute. Terracotta Brown was fucking gross – it wasn’t much colder than room temperature.
The man turned on his stool to face her. He motioned to Mr. Thomson who proffered a questionably clean wine glass to William and filled it with a bottle of white which came from somewhere under the bar.
As Chie picked up the glass William raised his own. “To you,” he said. He drained the remainder of his glass. “We’re leaving.”
  ”But – my wine!” Chie motioned toward her hardly sipped glass.
  ”There is certainly more of that in my cellar,” William said. He took her by the arm and and Chie let herself be led out of the bar.

Written by: Zach.
Tags: clit, writing.