Jessica Tyler (First 2 chapters)

Prologue
“How do you like the view from here?” a voice brushed against the neck of a young woman, and drifted softly into her ears. “It’s Terrific” she said subtly, realizing in her mind's eye that terrific must have a prefix of the word Terror, lost amongst the meaning somewhere. somewhere the meaning gets lost in itself. Standing there on a boulder-lined hillside peering over rolling greenery and abundant patches of browning trees and bushes. The sun rising in a vibrantly soft display of pink, orange, and yellow which painted the skies overhead. ‘It is truly beautiful’ she thought to herself, although she felt a tad too much effort may have been exhausted just for a view of the sunset. It was far too early for her to have been up, in actuality she wouldn't have been caught dead out of bed before twelve o’clock.
The day was ripe with winds, pushing domestically against the nylon threading of her overcoat, producing a silent velcro ripping sound that only her ears managed to pick up. The air seemed riddled with a cold spell cast on by the passing moon. Birds chimed from every angle, taking turns pitching in a tune before getting on with whatever it is birds do during their mornings; Rather that be flying, feeding, or dying. These thoughts however did not break the skin of her brain, because something else was on the mind of Jessica Tyler on the morning of October 24th 1990. Something perhaps more serious than death itself.

I
      Jessica was a stout and fat, yet an incredibly beautiful woman. Busty where it counts and sharp in the eyes. Although this was the case she often times found herself undesirable, perhaps due to her height, or maybe it was her weight which seemed to follow just behind the ‘average american-bloating level’. She had short well-kempt hair, silky and styled in a braid that ran almost three inches longer than the legitimate length of her hair. The braid had initially been a childhood thought, more of a dream really. But once her mother had given her the okay to start dictating her own appearance, the braid became more of a living fantization and has been tended too every day and kept at the same length ever since.
Her cheeks were curved and buoyant, brushed with a hazy glaze of freckles that ran over the bridge of her nose. Remains of a suntan still dissipating under her eyes, gave her an almost unnatural blush. Large forest-green eyes shot like daggers from above, Often taking aimless onlookers by surprise. “You have the most beautiful eyes” people often said to her, it seemed however, to be the only way a stranger would ever be able to start a conversation with her. Oh how badly she hoped people would notice her frolic dangling braid instead. How she wished someone would just pull her aside and ask her if she’ had braided it herself, just once, so she could tell herself it didn’t look stupid.. Just once, was all she would need.

On a peculiarly rainy day, when Jess was 19 darkness would block out the sun and betroth her in an epoch of goosebumps and sniffles. Her phone would drop, quicker than movement could render. the call button unscathed from the fall would remain a bright gooey red as rainwater washed over the screen in blotchy streams, until the battery had finally had enough of this malignant substance and ejects the phones soul in one quick pop and sizzle.
As she stepped backwards slowly, hands covering her mouth, she felt as though she may fall backwards into a bit of blackness (One that would perhaps render the inquiries from her stomach). she felt sick, noxious, the words the voice on the line were serious. Seriously stern and humble all the same, the voice stated clearly that “Your father, today on October 27th 1980 at approximately 7:00 in the morning, passed away due to an unshakable heart tremor, the doctors fought as best they could to seize the tremor, but by the time surgery became an operational possibility, your father had begun bleeding eternally and losing functions to some of his main vital organs, there was nothing the surgeons could have done to prevent the loss of his life. We are very sorry for your loss.” She trembled.
At first, her thought started sprinting across her temple as she pondered how horrid it had been, only receiving a phone call after the surgery. Only discovering his whereabouts after his death, it almost made no sense. Then she remembered how bad it had gotten, the way her father would sit on the edge of his bed and heave little spittles of blood into a handkerchief while clenching her chest. At first it wasn't so bad, he would simply cough up yellow, sometimes brownish phlegm and would wash down the pain with a hearty gulp or two of a vodka-tonic he kept close by the bedstand. After a while, Jessica started to notice that he would seem drunker and drunker every night before bed, when she would come into his room to offer him a nyquil and a tylenol (knowing his coughing and heaving often left his head light and hollow) and she would see him laying more-so on the bedroom carpet than his bed-edge. Often times he would shoot his eyes up at her and mumble something, some order usually that she could not understand. Nonetheless she would translate to the best of her ability and occasionally find herself completing more than was needed before tending to her fathers intended request. Not that this bothered him, she knew, he never enjoyed asking anyone for assistance, not even her mother and his own wife.
 Over months it became harder and harder to understand her father, his worsening heart condition caused almost stutter-like wheezing between every syllable he’d have to pronounce, making his speech long and mind numbing. No more than three months after the wheezing began he was forcefully admitted to the NorthernHeights Foundation Hospital, an almost imaginary construct that preyed off the almost deceased. She wouldn’t know this until later that year, after her father's death, when she’ll unexpectedly receive a whopping bill in her post.

As she stood there in the rain, she remembers thinking about death. How many times had she stayed up all night long praying that her father would make it through another day, another week maybe. But all of this Hope found its way to the blacklist as death settled its way into her consciousness. An overbearing need to scream ran throughout her body, and a geyser of salty glimmering droplets shimmied a river down her face, leading twinkling raindrops in an effort to hit the ground. “FATHER!” she began to scream, “FATHER! Father! Why?!?.. No... Father!”. People turned their heads in quick concern and then away again just as quick, replenishing a slow stream of onlookers. Everybody just walked by. Had anyone thought it to be death? Surely they have, why would they have looked if they hadn’t? Still, nobody stopped. Was it because her father haven’t actually been there? She scoffed in her head trying to think of something bright, it had to be because nobody could play the hero for her. And if nobody could play the hero and put on a show for the other onlookers, why bother to stop? Suddenly her big keen eyes feel to a droop and she began to bawl, realizing that maybe nobody cared to do anything because nobody thought that she would be worth the time.. That perhaps she was just a loony getting her kicks off by yelling at the weather, and her problems had no real weigh in this world. She felt that maybe she could be hit like thunder, right there on the sidewalk in sight of waves and waves of people and perhaps nobody would think twice to bat an eye.
Suddenly, that quick, she forgot who she had been. All that she could remember is death, that feeling of knowing, of expecting death to come. She grew an eternal hate for the world on that day, and perhaps that feeling would stay with her the rest of her life.

      That seemed to have been the case, for weeks to come her eyes began to rest almost permanently in a hateful lock, a lock that could only be connected to the stem of her own brain unless someone would have surely called the police out of freight. Her mental cap seemed to swirl endlessly with self hate and a sense of spiritual depletion. Although her new skin may have seemed crested, tough and almost complete even in the process of sending shapeless mishaps over her shoulder as if her worries didn’t matter, her interior remained gooey and sensitive. Inside the deepest crevices of her mind she could feel the way everybody stared, she could read the words in their heads as they rolled up their lips and brows in mocking disgust.
      Yes, she would feel it all, always right there with her. She could feel it like heavy baggage before boarding a flight, like the way her breasts dragged her down by the shoulders. she could feel it heavy, like when she sat, watching her father gag and heave into a bloody rag. She may never let it out, but nonetheless could feel that the pain was indeed there.

II
      Nine years past that exact day, approximately one year short of the present, she had been aching spiritually still. The tender caring of and for her father were never quite distinguished through her core, and she now released her stressful proliferation in ways of self defining support towards the female classification. Related to her unyielded past or not, Feminism became 28yo Jessica Tyler’s life.
She more than often found herself attending local, and often non-local gatherings in which powerful women would exclaim prideful acclimations furiously into the faces on one goers in an attempt to single out individuals with either similar or opposite views (for relatively self explained reasons). Jessica herself, found that she did not hold the voice necessary to cause such uproar, and found herself quite honestly afraid of the other women she would associate herself with on a normal basis. This made her nervous and shaky, almost unconsciously shaping her own personal goals and views by a constant wane of philosophical contradictions. Nonetheless, she looked up to and adjourned each member of their most accepting and applicable team. In fact, she looked upon each of their organizations leading-ladies in such a wholehearted and heretic kind of way, so that before much time, she found herself running paperwork and propaganda in frequent laps back and forth between the different cities and meeting places which the feminist group reconciled.

      It was during such an ordinary trip when in fact she would first lay eyes upon the love of her life. Take it that she wouldn’t have known it for another week or so, after his predicious botherings would have been enough to drive even the most prestigious feminists to give up their goals and drop head over heels. The frequent flushing of vomit down their rented hotel drain as a clear indicator of what her wooing was wrongfully consistent of..

The male counterpart in this scene could perhaps be considered the lowly cap of what can be socially acceptable. This man looked to be roughly in his late twenties, early thirties. His hair was short and mangled in a ‘spiked-up’ look, though devoid of any gel or hair products. His face elongated slightly and much more pale that most men whom Jessica had been around. His cheekbones morphing the shadows of his face and with a nose that almost seemed to be caught ‘post-wiggle’. He looked stuck up, but ironically monotonous with a slumped ire, dejecting he was prone of any sort of magnetism. But the thing that stood out the most about this man, was his odd contrast of dark yellow-brewed eyes. That of which matched up uncannily to the eyes of Jessica’s father, the only thing in the world that Jess could take as much comfort in as her social group of activists. She knew deep down that those eyes wanted to live, and she found them relative to her own sea of drowning.
They were cold and safe, like a cage of brass, capturing and concealing even his warmest intentions. Upon first glance, one would often guess that this man was an angry and deliberate person, for only those that are equally as hardened and cold would be able to distinguish his true emotions from the metabolic reflection the man emitted.
Most of the time,
      This young man could have been found half drunk stumbling out of an old and worn bar a few streets down from where jessica was traveling. His shirt was black with long sleeves and stained with last nights dinner, half dissolved orange slop, prominently crusting over his shoulder and sleeve on one side.
On the other side ran a nametag spelling ‘Timothy’ and suggesting employment at a local coffee shop down the road. Clutched under his arm, he held a bulky tan weathercoat that bulged and slid but never quite found its resting place. In the other hand he held several crumpled bills, flashing a 5 and 1 from under his thumb. Timothy looked hurried and frantic, he was late for his shift after all. Ol Tim and the immortal standing of time never had the right footing, and that often caught timothy slipping up. Slipping to the point now that his job was falling through, absences can only stack so constant, until the boss thinks you just don't want to work at all. So in a rush to not be as broken as he may have felt, Tim bolted head over heels to the sidewalk and profusely attempted to wave down a taxi.
None of the taxi drivers truly had a desire to pick timothy up. The crusting vomit on his sleeve and his half-cocked swaying posture displayed signs of a more disastrous mentality than he may have held realistically. A’las, the third cab to pass him finally gave in to the temptation, that was ‘fare, and pulled aside for the intoxicated man to board.

As Timothy stepped precariously into the peaked driver’s cab, dipping with blushing anguish to avoid contaminating the cabs seatbelts with his halloweenish-foam, he received a deep glare of concern from the driver and they set their course down the rattling city street.
The trip to his shift was expectedly short and possibly rushed, not allowing much time to render thoughts of cleanliness or harbor seeds of sobriety, let alone equip his coat and conceal his post-nightly totem. He had but one moment to ponder his actions before breaching the business doors, a moment caught between the urge to vomit and a burps unannounced birthing from a place deep within timothy's gut. Perhaps if the feeling had come a moment later, he would have succumbed to the emerging sickness, for what lay behind those reflective glass doors could render timothy nothing short of being shell-shocked.
      
One step into the coffee shop and Tim felt the atmosphere shift into a clandestine rage of chatter and vocal estrogen. seated at every table were pooled manifolds of gawking individuals, all women, conversing stories and idealistic standings as only a group born of togetherness could converse. Daggers were exchanged between the outwardly observant and the drunken barista as he trudged his way towards the breakroom. He heard questionably whispers adrift, addressing his non-complacent conduct  and crude-rusting smell, and his nerves twitched undeniably when one of the women takes a stand and captures his crackling essence with her quick snap-phone camera. In fear of losing his job and succumbing to the undeniably molding creature which fed of the quantum solace in his soul, Tim approached the woman in an attempt to right his fatal display.
“Good evenin’ Milady, is there anything i could do for you?” he said boldly, wincing a sincere smile.
“Uhm” she coughs and half cocks a sarcastic, arching stare. First to him then to the ceiling somewhere across the cafe “I think you’d ought to fix out of that stench of shit you're stewing in, and then maybe think about trying rehab or an institution, i really think it could improve your work ethics” she gave a conceited grin and sipped her latte with flair. Some of the woman's more careful and introverted friends looked elsewhere and faded out the unnecessary dramatics at hand, while some inclined onwards with ballistic observance
“Hah, Maybe i will!” he howled with a burly laugh, expelling the invisible lead from the air and continuing rather quickly, and casually, “but if that's really what you want’ you know i'll need to find me a crutch first” he stooped down to meet her at eye level. Her eyes widened pushing down the deepening red blush through her plumpard cheeks.
he looked upon her, with tenaciously pleasure, his glowing eyes locking on hers. An element of surprise shews over Timothy's face, a look plastered within misguided concern but reflecting off of an unexplained desire, somewhere deeper and infinitely more subconscious. Realizing the unforeseen realness of his words expressed so graciously on jessica’s face, he reaches his hand out towards her forehead.
Half bent and out of line Timothy extends out his fingers and curls them in a swooping glide, grazing Jessica’s braid with the inner palm of his hand,  “you have cute hair, i like your braid”.
His attempt to reconcile with politeness catches jessica like headlights and the room falls quiet.
Jessica Tyler almost faints, her face flushed with pale purple and black horror. Her conflicted contraptions conveyed in every which way around her skull, trailing her thoughts like ribbons.
Her friends now cawed gutterly as she neared a dying state then one older lady broke the tension by sliding her purse from her shoulder and using it to slap Timothy across the face.
Jessica broke out into a passionate red-apple blush and fled for the door, all the same while timothy shifted and stumbled towards the counter to take cover from the flock of peculiarly angry women. He thought perhaps if he made it over the large wooden counter of the coffee shop register, he might be able to continue on with his shift and dodge any further humiliation for the day.

Jessica now trotted down the busy street, through a gust of new winds that weaved down droplets of hushing rain. She felt a curious irony as the tears left her face.
‘Not him, not like that.’ she thought to herself frantically, each word straining on a broken repetition. ‘It's not true, it can't be true’ Jess screamed over in her mind, all the while cursing her reality. ‘He’s a mole-faced drunkard with no class, he disrespects women, and probably hasn't told a full truth since his birth.’ but still, that golden dusk in his eyes, the way they submerged over all her conscious nerves and free’d no room for breath. Jess felt as though nothing that cold and desolate, nothing that alone, could be anything unlike itself. That value, she felt, was more genuine than the finest divinities that must arise from a lifetime accompanied by more acceptable suitors.