Chapter 1

The Tuesday and Wednesday of the second to last week in November were passed through as per usual by most people that year. For Kurt Morrison, however, they were unusually awful; so bad, in fact, that in a convenience store early on Thanksgiving morning, when the sullen cashier wished him a monotone “Happy Thanksgiving,” instead of wishing him a “you, too,” he laughed out loud, zipped up his tattered jacket and walked out into the light snow.

While Tuesday and Wednesday were indeed difficult, to say that Monday was an easy day would be saying that the earth was flat, or that if you pricked your finger on something sharp it would not bleed. Kurt had had another trying day at his work, even with the long weekend just two days away. Back in his apartment his pile of laundry was slowly crawling its way up the wall, and although he knew it had to be done as soon as he looked at it all of the energy in his legs suddenly hid behind his bones and muscles. When he woke up Monday morning and realized he was out of clean white button-down shirts, he grabbed one from the middle of the pile and put it on over his undershirt. Suffice to say, he felt uncomfortable in his own skin all day. He felt as if everyone around him was able to tell how uncomfortable he was, too, and that this was the reason everyone, it seemed to him, was avoiding him. Especially Sheila.

Kurt had had his eye on Sheila ever since he started working for Whirlwind Real Estate, so-called because it was on Whirlwind Drive, and, beyond that, made for a catchy name. Throughout the city their signs were instantly recognizable, thanks to the anthropomorphised tornado that adorned it. Kurt had had a few moments with Sheila, such as when they toured houses and he thought he could sense some mutual interest, or when they worked together on a report about the rising cost of living in the area they specialized in.

“Shit,” thought Kurt suddenly. “That report…fuck.” Among the consequences that filled his head at that moment were, in order, a loss of Sheila’s trust and (perhaps) admiration, loss of his job (this is not the first time he had forgotten assignments recently), and lack of funds, due to the loss of the job, to pay his rent. Every object on his desk suddenly became a weapon once he saw the back of Sheila’s black ponytail waving from behind her head from her desk across the office. He wanted to pound his desk with his stapler, hurl all of his papers upwards into a white hurricane, snap his keyboard in half over his leg. Sheila got up from her desk to walk over; he ground his teeth so hard he thought they would turn to powder.
Her dark eyes made him simultaneously embarrassed of himself and overwhelmed by his animal urges; he thought of how lucky the thick threads of her light green sweater were to be able to touch her all day; how privileged the man who she bought her morning coffee from was to be able to talk to her – could they not see she was such a heavenly creature?

“Did you get a chance to work on it?” she asked in her slightly sour alto voice. Kurt wanted to slam his fist against the gray plastic of his desk; “How fucking stupid can one man be?” he roared in his head, wanting to be the one to sentence him for his crime.
“Ah, shit, you’re not going to believe this,” he started, immediately regretting saying ‘shit’ to her, “but I, uh, left it back at my place.”
“Oh,” she said, slightly cocking her head, “doesn’t it have to be in by today?”
“Ya,” he said with a short sigh.
“Could you maybe go home and get it?”
“I suppose I could, I don’t know though,” he said. Kurt averted his eyes from her chest, which was at his eye level. His dreams of passionately running home with her after work and making quiet love with her slowly evaporated and was replaced by a pure, red rage at everything around him.
“Well, it is due to-”
“I know, Sheila. I know.” He hated the way her name came out of his mouth – it sounded like he had been wanting to say it out loud for a long time but couldn’t, like he had put too much emphasis on it and tried too hard to make it poetic. “You know what, I’ll go get it. I’ll see you later.”
By the time he had said “later”, his coat already was around his left arm and his back was facing Sheila, who was completely oblivious to the one-sided war being waged within Kurt’s mind.

Of course, Kurt knew that he did not have the report finished, nor did he plan on finishing it. He decided he needed to go home anyway, much to the quiet concern to his co-workers whom he pushed out of the way as he stormed silently like a human hurricane to the automatic doors, which opened for Kurt just as patiently and emotionlessly as it had for everyone else.