WHO: Raymond van de Laar WHAT: Narrative for backstory challenge, prompt “midnight” WHERE: Downtown Personville, northward bound to Piper Pier WHEN: 1925. STATUS: Complete WARNINGS: None
1925. A twenty-year-old boy with a flat cap, practically identical to every other twenty-year-old boy of the times aside from his thick eyebrows and free head of curls, is making his way home under a cloudy sky. Not a star can be seen, not that they ever can be in Personville. Often he can make his way home by moonlight but it’s one of those nights where the moon’s gone away, wherever it goes between slivers. Raymond vaguely recalls learning, back when he went to school, that the moon doesn’t really go anywhere, but he doesn’t quite understand that, still. Something about shadows, maybe, but you could say that about many things, here.
He begins whistling a tune. They have recently got a radio set up at the Daily Herald and when Raymond is finished delivering his papers he likes to go hang out in the office, looking over the writers’ shoulders until they shrug him off irritably, watching the soothing click-clack of the typesetters in action, sometimes picking discarded drafts off the desks and poking through them over at his perch on the windowsill, comfortably out of everyone’s way. And always with the radio playing in the background, and often with this song, these days. The tune sticks in your head, grows on you, and now Raymond is whistling it as loud as he can as he rambles north on Sixth Avenue, bound for his dingy little room in Piper Pier.
Delivering a lazy kick to a rock, or loose piece of cement, Ray imagines himself a beacon of color -- red, probably -- in the grays and blacks of a Personville midnight, whistling a sweet little tune and walking with a bit of a skip to his step. It’s almost laughable, the way every corner he passes men and women speaking in hushed tones with hats pulled low over their faces; they glance at him, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes suspiciously, sometimes nervously, always with some confusion because it’s a grimy sort of night (it’s always a grimy sort of night) and he paints far too cheery a picture, waltzing in the darkness with Al Jolson coming from his lips.
And as his thoughts finally trail off into the back alleys of the city that’s so captured him, he grins. Ain’t that some nifty prose! Somebody really ought to write that down, you know? But the young man in question is just a newsie, not a writer with a pad in his pocket, so he allows the words to fall away, and just focuses on his song, and his step, and the way home.