Talk about a writing challenge – AWC’s Furious Fiction this month almost defeated me. Why? Because the first criteria was it had to be set in a library or bookstore and, if you read Sweet serendipity, you’d know I did that last month. Plus, you had to include at least six of their twenty words. But inspiration springs eternal and one of those words was cupid…
The other nineteen words – smelt, broken, music, grubby, around, game, coffee, mechanical, hands, beige, twelve, backpack, letters, nameless, cowboy, operate, train, pungent and untouched – are all included in my story: The Anti-Cupid.
Twelve broken hearts in an hour.
A new record.
Boris surveyed the bookstore from his perch on the counter, a faint sneer tugging at his lips. His patch, his rules and most of the lovelorn had no idea how to play the game.
Still, one couldn’t afford to rest on one’s laurels.
That was the express train to complacency station, followed by demotion and the dead-end siding of incarnational opportunities. If he didn’t watch out, he’d be back as a fly, distracting some grubby, nameless, post office sorting-room minion to ensure the love letters were misdirected.
He shuddered.
Anything but that.
‘Are you alright, Boris?’ Gwyn said and he twisted expertly away from her reaching hands, leaping to the floor and darting into the best seller aisle.
‘Boris!’ she called, but there was only so much of her pawing he could stand.
He reached the cross aisle and looked for opportunities. A middle-aged woman flicked through the journals. Two office workers gossiped next to the latest biographies of movie stars and music producers. A tall man in jeans browsed the Westerns. A student with a backpack stole curious glances at a short woman with hair the colour of wasabi, who read the blurb on a fantasy novel.
The pungent aroma of blossoming love drifted from them.
Boris sauntered forward as the student said, ‘That’s, er, that’s a good book. Have you read her Steampunk one? With the mechanical corset?’
Wasabi-girl looked up and grinned. ‘I loved that book. When they smelt the copper and Tippi injects it into the automaton and Pickerel says -’
‘“That’s not how we operate!”’ they chorused and smiled at each other.
Boris’s cold nose hit the back of the student’s leg at the same moment the green-haired girl said, ‘Want to get a coffee and talk Steampunk?’
It was hard to say which startled the student more, but she stammered agreement as they both exclaimed over what a gorgeous cat he was. Boris bunted his head against their ankles, weaving between the women’s legs in an arcane match-breaker pattern. He purred his satisfaction. They might leave together, but there was no hope for their budding romance now.
He looked around. The cowboy had abandoned the Westerns and was sidling towards the lone woman who clutched a beige Moleskine like it was her bridal bouquet.
Not today.
Not on Boris’s watch.
No-one left his bookstore untouched.