{i miss paper letters}

His father had been dead for little more than four days.  Kendall couldn’t seem to accept it, or to pull himself together enough to make the necessary arrangements, a duty that fell to his younger sister who resented him all the more for it; he couldn’t have cared less.

Comfortably well off, he was able to take a few weeks off from work to mourn the loss of his “best friend” as he put it.  His colleagues knew not to inquire further, and also not to display any outward sympathies to him.  He was not an emotional man, and this was all proving a little hard to take.

He took to his bicycle for long rides, often lasting hours, around the city.  It didn’t matter much to him that it had been the worst winter on record since the blizzard of ’36, and that the DPW hadn’t exactly caught up to the wrath the season had visited upon the streets.  On his first day off he had removed the tires from their rims and painstakingly screwed ¼” screws into every other tread on both.  He was proud of his new studs, and the fact that he—an analyst who had never been very “hands-on” with tools and such—had produced such a fine example of Yankee ingenuity; he wanted to show them off, almost as much as he did not want to think of his father.

He liked riding along the river and was often accosted by territorial joggers.  One woman in particular, he called her pinky for obvious reasons: pink tracksuit, pink sneakers, pink iPod with pink earbuds, somewhat pink hair, had become increasingly hostile.  She never said a word to him, choosing instead to arm herself with an arsenal of angry looks.  He always felt the urge to laugh out loud when he passed her on the path, and would often indulge himself—didn’t he, at the very least, deserve a laugh during these trying times?

She had issues of her own to work out, and one day decided she would not be laughed at by this prick again.  She filled her pockets with beebees from her son’s air-pistol and set out on her morning constitutional.  Soon enough they were within eyeshot of each other.  She reached her pink hand into her pocket, withdrew, and scattered the beebees across the path.  Sure enough, the desired result was achieved and he was on his ass before he knew up from down.  She cackled from her seat on the bench as he gave her the finger.
Nice gesture, her only words to him before or since.

I GESTURE OUT OF GRIEF, YOU TROLL, I-GEST-URE-OUT-OF-GRIE-F-F-F!

She didn’t care that she had no idea what he was referring to; she just knew that she’d won.