Characters Under Construction

            The sun was rising again.  This wasn’t exactly anything new—it was expected, really—but the fact was that while it rose higher into the sky, it cast its light through a window.  The window was situated at the top floor of an apartment building.  Slipping past the glass, the light continued on its way, streaking over the floor and straight onto the face of Robert Riley.  His eyes screwed up instinctively as his brain began going about the process of waking him up.  With an animalistic grunt, he opened his eyes and surveyed his surroundings.  Yes, his brain told him, you’re in your apartment.  His gaze fell on a rumpled form sleeping on his couch. Apparently, so is Josh.  He furrowed his brow, trying to recall the events of the previous evening.  After a few moments, he gave up and decided to just go about his business.  That’s just the way things happened, after all.  No need to get too analytical.

            Josh woke up with a start as he realized that he was not in his own room this morning as he had first surmised, but was instead somewhere else.  His first priority was, of course, to figure out just where he was.  As his eyes brought the world into focus, Josh hoped silently that he was in a woman’s apartment.  It became apparent that this was not the case when Scotty jumped up on the couch and began licking his face with gusto.  “Hey, cut it out,” Josh muttered, pushing the dog away with his arms.  Scotty toppled off the side of the couch, landing in a heap.  With an indignant look, he turned and trotted towards the kitchen area, where Riley was busy cooking bacon.  At the sound of Josh murmuring, Riley turned away from the stove and looked at him.

            “Ah, so you’re awake now, are you?”  Riley grinned as Scotty came trotting over, looking triumphant. 

            “You told him to do that, didn’t you,” Josh accused, peering angrily over the back of the couch.

            Riley laughed.  “Of course.”  He turned back to the stove, having smelled the bacon starting to char.  He managed to get the meat out of the griddle before it got too burned to eat, and put it all on a plate that he proceeded to set on the table.  “So, any idea as to why you’re here?”

            “No reason,” Josh shrugged.  “Felt like a change of scenery.”

            Speaking of changes of scenery….

            The sun also shone through the window of Lynn Patton, but it found her to already be awake.  She was staring at the ceiling, unable to fall asleep again after being woken up by a nightmare involving a killer pile of laundry.  When the sun parked its light squarely on her pillow, she abandoned all hope of falling asleep again and got out of bed.  After dressing herself, she wandered into the bathroom and was confronted by her face in the mirror.  “What’re you looking at?” she asked the mirror, not quite sure why she did this every morning, as the mirror had yet to answer her.  The face stared back at her, looking expectantly.  After a few moments, Lynn realized how silly she was being and ran her hand through her hair.  Ah yes, her hair.  Due to some strange genetic twist that nobody had ever bothered investigating, Lynn was most likely the only person on the planet with naturally blue hair.  It had been rather beneficial through grade school—she was a source of interest to the entire school population, which made making friends somewhat easy—but the high school that she attended took some convincing that her hair was indeed naturally blue—the administration spent the first week and a half of her freshman year telling her to take the dye out.  Now that she was in college, nobody seemed to care what colour her hair was.  She guessed that there were just too many strange things to be found on a college campus for her hair to be anything worth talking about.

            A man sat in front of a café, hovering over a drink long gone cold.  The daily newspaper was opened to a random page, and every so often he pretended to be interested in whatever was written there (actually, it was an underwear ad).  In any event, he sat, watching the alleyway that ran betwixt Riley’s apartment and the next apartment over.  He didn’t necessarily know that one of the apartments was Riley’s—really he didn’t know Riley at all—but he wasn’t looking for Riley, so it didn’t really matter.  What he was looking for was the tell tale gust of wind that blew a crumpled up newspaper down the alleyway.  He stood up and walked towards the alley.  A passing bus obscured him from view for but a moment, and in that moment he had disappeared.