To Live and To Breathe (Could Be #2)

Chapter 1

Breathe. In, out.

Timothy grimaced and turned his face away from the light filtering through the grimy window. It was wan light; scarcely even strong enough to pierce the glass, but it was enough to disturb Timothy into waking. He lay still, painfully conscious of every spring in the squeaky bed, every beat of his tired heart, and every clatter of the carts passing in the street outside. It was a work day. That thought alone exhausted him before he'd had a chance to earn his weariness honestly.

He hadn't yet mustered the motivation to open his eyes when the window panes rattled, signaling the fact that the knocker-up for the street had reached their house. Moments later, the floorboards resounded with a thump as Mrs. Mason gave her first-floor ceiling a jab with her broom handle. The obliging old landlady could never understand that they were awakened by the same rattle at the windows that she was. The very same rattle at the windows that everyone on the street was.

Timothy opened his eyes. He could hear his parents stirring on the other side of the thin curtain that divided the room in half, and soon Mrs. Wright appeared, wrapped in a tattered dressing gown. "Morning, Tim," she yawned, then huddled her way through the bedroom door as if she were cold, despite the fact that summer always made the second-floor room as stuffy and choked as an attic.

Before long Mr. Wright also appeared, fully dressed in his threadbare suit of clothes, and passed out the door after his wife. This left only Timothy in the airless room, and as it was high time that he did something other than lie there, he sat up with a groan. The bed screeked in protest, but he reached for the prosthetic leg lying beside it and prepared to fasten the cumbersome thing on by wrapping his stump in a cloth sleeve. At three years old, it showed signs of wear. The wooden foot was well-polished from having worn so many shoes, and the leather casing that passed around his leg was wrinkled in a permanent pattern around the knee. It was a cheap model, which meant that the ankle was stiff and the rest of it heavy, but it allowed him freedoms he'd never had before. Freedoms he had to try hard to be grateful for in the morning.

Tightening the belt that held the leg on with mechanical precision, Timothy struggled into his father's too large, twice let-down hand-me-downs, and limped out the door. Drag, step. Drag, step. Walking would never be natural—not in the way he'd known it before the accident. It didn't bother him like it used to, but he was always conscious of it, and sometimes it still limited where he could go.

Before him stretched a large room with bare floorboards, yellowed walls, and a smoke-darkened ceiling. On his right lay the pantry door, and beside it was the Wright who had suffered the least over the last four years' fall from grace.

"Well look what the cat dragged in!" St. Vincent squawked, ruffling up his feathers.

"If you keep saying that I'm going to feed you to one of Mrs. Mason's," Timothy grumbled, opening the cage door to give the bird a scratch beneath the chin. He followed up the threat by benignly filling St. Vincent's dish from a sack of walnuts next to the cage.

As the commodore set to work crunching up the nuts with ungentlemanly enthusiasm, Timothy joined his parents at the rickety dining table. Mr. Wright perused a borrowed paper from two days ago, and Mrs. Wright stirred a pot of gruel. It sat upon a tiny toy stove that was really too small to feed a family with, but Timothy could never look at it without wondering if giving girls a fully-functioning stove was standard practice. It made the things he did as a boy look tame.

After setting the table with what bowls and silver had not yet found their way to the pawn shop, Timothy sat down at a carefully-selected place between one rough spot and another. He didn't know what lives this poor, beaten-down piece of furniture had led before he met it, but in its current condition it had snagged almost every item of clothing he owned.

Mr. Wright turned a page of the paper impatiently. "Can't you think of anything more interesting to write about than the prices of fruit at the greengrocers', Timothy?"

Timothy stared at the table. How proud he'd been the day he first saw his name in print, attached to a story! It had promised so much. Now he was reduced to writing news articles about fruit. "It's the kind of uninteresting people like to read about," he answered quietly.

Mr. Wright only snorted and turned the page again, apparently in a mood to be dissatisfied with everything in the paper.

"There we are," Mrs. Wright interrupted, ladling out a portion of the watery porridge for everyone. She forced cheerfulness into her manner. "I do think I'm getting better. Isn't that better?"

Mr. Wright seemed to deem silence the best policy, and Timothy couldn't disagree. He hadn't been able to taste anything for months, but he was sure the tepid, gritty, excuse for gruel didn't have any flavor to begin with. He spooned it down bravely for his mother's sake, and then headed for the door with his father. She really did try.

After opening the crooked door, both father and son were faced with a long downward flight of musty stairs, terminating in a street door at the bottom. Timothy navigated the stairs more carefully than his father, and at the bottom Mr. Wright went left, and Timothy right. As soon as he stepped out onto the street, he was assailed by the numbing cacophony of voices and carriages and horses and human confusion. There was a dirty road before him, and dirty shops beyond, and everywhere chaos.

Slipping his hands into his pockets, Timothy set out into the jostling crowd, and tried not to mind the press. There were too many people. There were always too many people. Lately, he'd begun to daydream about the high green hills that stretched up behind Sir William's School for Boys, and what dewy isolation he'd found there the time or two he'd been degenerate enough to creep out of the school before sunrise. Thameton was suffocating him as surely as the smog suffocated the city.

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I hope you have enjoyed this, the first chapter of To Live and To Breathe! If you're curious how this story came about, you can find out more here: http://bit.ly/3bies1a