Story 1: Anna

Cristina Cass

Anna

            Anna grinned, letting her dirty blonde hair fly behind her through the back of her bicycle helmet. Casually, she lifted her fingers off one of the handlebars to gesture quickly to the other drivers on the road. Turning left.

            She smiled again, humming to herself softly. Turning left meant joining the boulevard. Turning left meant a sunny adventure, travelling with the wind on her back and the entire city beneath the strokes of her pedals.

            She wouldn’t mind getting lost. Amidst the patchwork of open windows studded with yellow cars and painted vans, she thought she wouldn’t mind floating forever in the rippling urban sea. The waves would subside slightly in the calm of red traffic lights, but only for a moment before they broke free, spilling into the road like sunlight warming the city with the hustle and bustle of the day. 

            And indeed, the hustle and bustle of the day would begin for her too, but not on the road. No, for her it would begin when she locked up her little blue bike in the sun and freed her untied hair from the confines of her clean white bike helmet. She would open the glass door of the café and step over the threshold into the dimly lit haven of local art and well-dressed people on their computers, shrouded in the morning aroma of brewing coffee and breakfast pastries. She would smile and politely greet the tired-eyed baristas and the hurried customers in blazers and expensive shoes, who rarely smiled and hardly ever sat down to enjoy their coffees. She thought she much preferred the start of her day to theirs, as she would sit down in the shade of one of the many umbrellas in the outdoor seating. Her day was busy, but it never started until she took a sip of her ice cold mocha and a bite of her delightfully fluffy blueberry muffin and opened up her computer to write.

            As Anna parked her bike on this particular sunny morning, she remembered there was nothing particular about it at all. She remembered Friday’s approaching deadline, but she also remembered the sun that fell lightly on her shoulders like a new silk shirt, and the cool comfort of her summer morning routine. She would have liked a little more allowance in her pocket, but she did not resent her life as she laid her hands on the keys to work on the nearly-finished final draft of her book. And she couldn’t help but feel the little giggly spark that arose in her mind when she thought of her plans for after it was finished. In slightly less than a month, she reminded herself, she would be writing, not with a cup of coffee in sunny Chicago, but with une tasse de café on the banks of the Seine.

            Paris. She relished the thought in her mind, of eating warm croissants with fresh fruit jam for breakfast, of starting new projects with new people, and of seeing the picturesque streets of the charming city from the balcony of her apartment every morning.

            Losing reality in her small reverie as she stood up to adjust the slowly sinking umbrella, she hardly noticed as her backpack swung around, accidentally knocking into the girl behind her.

            “I’m so sorry—“ she started to say, but she had barely caught a glimpse of the other girl’s brown eyes, looking away as Chicago strangers always did, before she realized that she had not been heard.

            “Oh.” She cut herself off softly, pursing her lips uncomfortably as she sat down. In her seat again, she looked back, quietly wondering why she hadn’t called after the girl in her usual friendly fashion, as the stranger faded out of her line of vision, leaving only the image of her monogrammed messenger bag in Anna’s mind as she passed. Anna wasn’t sure why it had caught her eye, but she thought that the blue thread spelling out the name Ivy in neat cursive was quite pretty.