The First Cold Rains of Winter

It was always cold in the apartment block where the writer had lived for some years now. There was no elevator so he tromped down eight floors to the ground, his shoes stuffed with cardboard where the soles had worn through. Nobody really needed writers any more, or so they had been instructed, and his income had all but dried up. He had a few clients, mainly elderly emigres with arthritic fingers and he penned their letters back home, occasionally wrote a memoir. Today he had an interview for a teaching job. He didn't really want to go for it, but as he tapped away at his typewriter, day in, day out, something in the rhythm of the keys told him his words would never be published. It seemed his career would end where it had begun, in a dusty classroom teaching grammar to over privileged kids who didn't give a shit, while their helicopter parents hovered close by.

He reached the ground floor and pushed the heavy front door open. It creaked ominously. Exiting onto the pavement, narrowly missing a pile of dog crap, he turned to close the door, checking out the most recent graffiti, hoping for something original. 'Winter is coming.' he mouthed silently, reading the words sprayed in red mist onto the peeling paint of the green door. 'Death is coming', he thought as he skirted yet another turd and headed for the Metro.

He hadn't gone far before it started to rain, soft rain with sharp edges and a touch of ice. It appeared the graffiti artist was right. Winter was on its way, poking chilly tendrils into ears and nostrils, circling throats with steel bands of cold and stealing voices as the populace succumbed to colds, flu and other viruses. The writer reflected on what fun it would be spending a winter with a classroom full of snot-nosed children, inhaling their grubby little germs. Was it too early for a drink? Was it ever too early for a drink? Turning up the collar of his shabby coat and pulling the shredded ends of his jumper sleeves down to his knuckles, he crossed the street. His interview wasn't for a couple of hours, he had time for a little bit of Dutch courage.

The bar was a little dark and dingy but warmth still clung to the corners of the room, chasing the sudden blast of early winter away. He settled into the chair he spent so much time in it was imprinted with the shape of his increasingly bony arse and looked around. The barflies could have just been early risers, although it was more likely they had been in place since the previous night. Maybe they never left at all. He didn't think he would ever join their ranks, but at this moment in time he couldn't be one hundred percent sure. He wasn't really sure about much anymore. He had moved to the city twenty years earlier, an eager young writer, keen to make his mark on the world. But the world had changed, he had changed. Now he was just another bitter middle-aged man, trying to get through life one day at a time, one sentence at a time, one word at a time. Today that word was sadness.