Rusty Eyes

Rusty Eyes

A Story by MiddleNameless

He looked around. No one was paying any attention to him, just carelessly swishing past him in a whirl of itchy scarfs and uncomfortable coats. He thought that maybe it was actually that he wasn’t there, maybe just a ghost of himself observing the traffic of people in a train station. Stop it, he told himself. You’re perfectly alive and there’s nothing wrong with you, some people have real problems, he glanced lazily at a man wearing his emoji-speckled underpants on the outside of his jeans.


The train station brought a lot of interesting people, which is why Olyvar liked to perch there on the rust-colored bench observing the passengers of trains coming in and out like bees in a hive. Perhaps it was a bit of an odd pastime, but he liked to create stories. When a woman dressed in knee high yellow rain boots would pass, he would imagine she was traveling from a land where she had to walk in 2 feet of water at all times. Once a man with a feather in his cap, looking oddly from the 1920s, passed and was imagined as a time traveler reporter - gathering information to pass on to his own time, which no one would believe and all would call him crazy. Maybe he had a nickname like Crazy Joe.


Olyvar had the kind of look that made people look twice, only because he always fit his surroundings so well. People would have to check to make sure there was actually a person there. His rust-colored hair and his rust-colored eyes seemed to match the crusty bricks in the interior of the train station. Walking down the street, he consistently got double-takes as if he was the same color as the constant grey sky or the grey crumbling bricks of the archaic buildings. But when he looked in the mirror, he looked rusty, kind of like an overused human. A bit too messy and scrambled to actually be new, like something you’d pick up in a secondhand store.


Maybe sitting in the train station gave him a weird sense of belonging, knowing that he was the same species as the random myriad of people he saw. To belong to a species is an interesting thing. It meant that you were similar to another, and maybe they could understand you because they have the same anatomy and a brain. But this isn’t how it worked out in Olyvar’s experience. People don’t just understand, it’s like they try not to understand to prove they’re different from you. He wasn’t misunderstood, no, that would require at least some sort of understanding happening. Misunderstood wasn’t an accurate word. It’s that people just didn’t try to understand.


He had friends, lots of them actually. However, he always made the distinction between friends and people he actually yearned to be around. Those people were special, those were the kind of people you saw in train stations and couldn’t imagine them anywhere but there. They were the kind that lived in the moment, not stuck there but happy there. Olyvar surrounded himself with these people, for he yearned to be one of them. And maybe he was, but in his mind he was just a bystander.



-

It was during one of these experiences in the train station that Olyvar caught sight of a girl perhaps his age, perhaps older. It was difficult for Olyvar to define her age. As good of a story creator Olyvar was, he couldn’t place her in any scene but right here, right now. Intriguided, he focused on her. He was feeling the pull towards her. But as soon as his attention was placed solely on her, she disappeared. Maybe she hadn’t disappeared, but she couldn’t be seen separate from the coffee shop window she was passing. He stood up on two hasty feet and began following his rusty eyes towards the girl.

She flicked her hair. Oly caught the movement. What color is that? Oly thought. Grey? Brown? Silver? Copper? Olyvar couldn’t stop his body from moving now. She moved faster than him at a slow pace while he practically ran at a brisk canter. He never seemed to get any closer.



This is silly, what would I say to her? Why am I following her? Is she even pretty? Why does that matter? Oly snapped at himself.



It might’ve been a pure curiosity and an unknown source of attraction that guided his converse-clad feet.



She stopped, her hair still moved. No, it’s not moving, Oly observed, it's reflecting the lights of the passing trains, and maybe the stars. They were outside now, it was night but not dark, the snow reflected the waxing moon onto cold faces. He found the cause of her sudden stop, she had dropped her cup of - what was that smell? gingerbread, peppermint? He caught up to the half-visible girl. With brazen courage of an unknown source, he tapped her shoulder. Or at least he meant to. Instead what happened was a full-on bear hug of unexpected proportions. Olyvar realized the awkwardness and immediately let go (but somehow it didn’t feel awkward). She, it, was facing him now. She finally didn’t seem so distant and impossible to see. Her hair still moved, or it seemed to be. Oly took her in.


Her face wasn’t terrified or shocked from the totally inappropriate bear-hug. But her face contorted to a slight half smile as if her face had done it all of her life. Her lashes brushed the tops of her tops of her eyelids with ease, her chin dimpled slightly as if pressed in by a small child. Olyvar tried to gauge her height but failed. It seemed to change with every blink. But when she completely became solid Olyvar saw her. She didn’t seem human, or nonhuman, maybe something in-between. That’s silly Oly, he told himself, you aren’t superstitious, you don’t believe in ghosts. And she wasn’t. A ghost, that is. Her hair matched her eyes, silver and grey and copper all at once. And then he realized.



She matched the greyness of the walls, the bricks, the snow. She fit the surroundings. She blended in.


She told him her name, he immediately forgot.

© 2016 MiddleNameless


Author's Note

MiddleNameless
What do you think of the ending? Should I add more thoughts from Olyvar? Should I continue?

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Reviews

I think you did very well in the description of Olyvar. Nicely done. It was my favourite part. Why not keep going to see where they're going to go?

Posted 7 Years Ago


1 of 1 people found this review constructive.

i love this so much :) the character's descriptions are amazing !!

Posted 7 Years Ago


1 of 1 people found this review constructive.


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Added on November 21, 2016
Last Updated on November 21, 2016
Tags: fiction, short story, mystery

Author

MiddleNameless
MiddleNameless

Odense SØ, Syd Danmark, Denmark