Ann-Louise's Story - Chapter 1 "The Beginning"

I'm sorry that I again missed a week. I haven't been very good at writing every week. I think the problem might be that I don't really like writing short stories. I like writing longer pieces. So today I am posting something that I wrote a long time ago. It is the beginning of a story that I haven't finished. What I am planning on doing now is taking one of the stories that I have posted the beginning of and continuing to write and post only that story. If you have a request as to which one you would like to hear more of, please post or send me a message (though I'd really like it if you posted since I haven't gotten any real posts yet).

Anyway, this is the beginning of Ann-Louise's story. It is only the first scene from the first chapter. Let me know what you think.

“You want to know why I did it, don’t you?”

The young man at the door nodded. He had never been to this house before, had never met the woman at the door, but he had come here for information that only she could give him.

She stood aside and said, “Come in, Kevin.  Would you like coffee?  Or would you prefer tea?”

“Tea, please.”

“I’ll put the water on.”  She led the way into her kitchen.  “Twenty years is a very long time.  You look like your father,” she said, pausing to look at him.  His dark hair was quite short and small rectangular glasses perched over strikingly blue eyes.  His black and white suit was impeccably tailored to his wiry frame, and it looked like he kept well in shape.  She shook her head and turned back to filling the kettle.  “Anyway, it seems like a lifetime ago.”

“It was.”

He sat down in her sparkling kitchen and watched as she set the water to boil on the stove.  Her sleek black hair held a few strands of grey that wouldn’t have been there before and though she was looking away from him now he had seen her green eyes were still bright with life.  She really wasn’t all that much older than he was at forty to his twenty; everything that had happened made it seem like there were more years between them than there was.  He watched the way her slim body stretched to reach the cups on the top shelf and seeing her fluid, no-nonsense movements reminded him of something his father had once told him.

“He told me you were graceful, that you used to dance.”

She nodded.

“I think he was half in love with you.”

She smiled and shook her head.   “No, he wasn’t.”

They were silent as the water finished boiling and she poured two cups.  They added their own milk and sugar and she asked him, “Shall we go into the living room?”

“Here is fine.”

“It’s a long story,” she warned.

“Here is fine.”

 She nodded and took a sip of her tea.

“It really was so long ago.  It seems almost to have happened to another person.  But I remembered it all, as accurately as it is possible to remember something with twenty years between then and now.  I knew that, one day, you would come to me and ask me this question of why.  And I knew that, those nine months we spent would force me to answer.”

She took another sip of her tea and looked at the young man across from her.

“You’re looking for truth, Kevin.  Beware that this is what you’re going to get.  It may not be pretty, and it may not be what you’re looking for.”

When he nodded, she looked away from him into a past that he could never see.

“The year was 2039 and my friend, Lucy and I were looking for jobs.  I still find it slightly ironic that the 1930s and the 2030s were decades of severe economic depression for Canada.  As my history teacher would later tell me, there are no new ideas in Canadian history.

“Lucy was a beautiful girl with long blonde hair and the kind of a body a man would kill for.  She was gorgeous.  She had gotten involved with someone a couple of months before and he had gotten her pregnant.  Then he left and we were on our own again.

“Needing money, we went to the last place either one of us wanted to be.  We didn’t want to get caught up in the controversy surrounding the place.  But they paid good money.  Kwan Dynastic is what would eventually help turn the economy back around for Canada, since the whole world wanted what he was supplying.  First, they offered jobs, which Canadians from all over came for.  Then, by putting a lot of money back into the country, the company put Canada back on its feet.

“Lucy and I, however, we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into.  We didn’t know our lives would be irrevocably changed as a result.  It was our fault, I suppose.  We never asked what the consequences were until it was too late.”  She shrugged.  “Plus, we were desperate.”