a draft

Tina held the letter and looked at it again, searching for any distinguishing marks. Why now? She wondered. Why had it taken him so long? She sighed and placed the letter on the little wooden table in the hallway before reaching for her coat hanging opposite and stepped outside into the early morning.

The edges of the sky were a pale blue and the surrounding darkness seemed to be leaking down into it like ink. The street lamps tinted the shifting sky above with a supernatural orange glow and birds that had been up all night tweeted and called to one another though she couldn’t see them.

She liked these early mornings. She’d get her coat on and walk out into the city, walk up a hill, find a bench somewhere at the edges and sit. She liked to see dawn was breaking in from under the world. It was a long day anyway, what did a couple of hours in the morning matter. She liked being up first; it made her feel different as though she had pulled something from the day all for herself, as though the morning was just for her.

There was a safety in it too, she thought, a time of the day when she could be the only weirdo awake, and that she didn’t have to be bothered by other weirdos.

She sat this particular morning on a bench perched at the top of a hill overlooking a part of the city she had come to only a few times before. The view gave her a strange feeling of familiarity, as though it reminded her of something but she couldn’t put a finger on what.

The footpath looped on down the hill beyond her line of vision, but no one walked up it or down. A piece of paper, a fish and chips wrapper tumbled in an uncertain breeze over the grass to her left.

She hadn’t recognised the writing on the letter though. It was very neat and ordered, with a feminine lilt, completely unlike hers. But she was not in the habit of writing letters these days. Strange though, she thought, you can tell a lot from a person’s handwriting.