This Week I Wrote

Part 12: The Need For Speed

This week I wrote: quickly.
"normal service will be resumed next week". Normal?! I don't think I remember what that is. Anyway, last weekend, I found myself in London, on a trip I had entirely forgotten was happening, (I saw some family, which was lovely) and thus found myself writing on transport again, if anything under tighter time constraints than last week.
But, I promised you fiction, and fiction is what you shall have- bizarre fiction concocted from a variety of sources and patched together in very little time.
This monstrosity of an opening was inspired by a paraphrasing of a writing prompt I saw on Pinterest a while ago, asking the writer to take one of the protagonist, antagonist, opening line, setting, and genre from each of the last five books they read. From this, I present Liesel (The Book Theif) and Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights) in a YA (The Outsiders) novel set in Soviet Russia (A Gentleman in Moscow). It begins with the first sentence from The Weight of Water, shifted into the third person.

The wheels on the suitcase had broken before they had even left Gdansk Glowny. Liesel suspected foul play, but she had learned when to fight her battles, and this was not the time- she may have met Heathcliff only a few weeks earlier, but she had seen his type for her whole life. He was the sadistic teachers, and the shrill mothers, and the officers who walked a little too close when they checked your luggage. He was hail on an August day, and he was not the person Liesel wanted to share Moscow with.
That seemed to be a point upon which they could agree; neither liked the other, and neither liked Moscow. Heathcliff fell into surly silence the moment the train left the Gdansk station, and every sight of the new world she had been dispatched to, Liesel's stomach dropped further into her heels.
Heathcliff's suitcase was intact.
Liesel had found the train to be relaxing, and her narrow bunk to be a comfort rather than a cage, but the final stretch into Moscow had been her favourite. The city had been captured by spring, and the harsh outlines of the uniform flats had been hidden in the saccharine beauty of cherry blossom. Every person walked in the streets as if they were seeing their surroundings for the first time, and Liesel was able to put the circumstances of her arrival to the back of her mind.
For a moment, at least.
It took barely an hour for the spring rains to creep in, banks of black cloud rolling by as of they were God's cheap metaphor for what was yet to come.
The weather changed the city, as it often does, and seemed to change the people too.
Heathcliff had not laid a finger on her for the journey, despite his ever- present threats, but as the skies began to open, he ripped into her, with words, and then with the flat of his hand.
The thing with rain is once it starts, it falls in abundance, and I, for one, will always wonder if Liesel knew exactly the torrents which were about to begin.