A Story Scene

Here friends is a scene with characters I know and love very well.  I have been writing them for years, and hope that one day I will be able to give them a novel of their own.  Enjoy, and leave comments with what you think.

TNT,
Words by Ali

The Picnic

The music was louder than it needed to be.  Jakob turned the volume up whenever ‘Ante’s songs began playing.  I spun around on one of the picnic tables, the sun glaring in my eyes.  Marcus was on the phone with his partner. Cas would be there in about five minutes, but they were still talking about their current case.

            Marcus held his cell phone between his right shoulder and his ear.  In his right hand was a hot dog and in the left was a bottle of beer.  He took a bite of his hotdog and a mixture of ketchup and mustard dripped onto the concert Tee he was wearing.  It was black with cartoon versions of the band members on the front.  The black material was starting to fade from all the years in the wash.  The image on the front, and tour dates on back, were cracking and pulling apart from use. 

            There was a small burn hole on the left side, high up showing the pale skin of his back.  The burn got there four years earlier when a drunken idiot in a bar threw an ashtray at the wall; scattering several still smoldering cigarettes around the room.  Marcus decided the best response was to throw the drunken idiot in jail for the night.

            The short sleeves of his shirt showed off the three-quarter sleeves of tattoos on both of his arms.  Only long-sleeved button ups on the job.  I still remember the first tattoo Marcus got.  I was four, and we had moved out to California only about two or three months before.  His first one was on his arm and it included my first name, Symphony.  I went by Ellie, my middle name.  I remember sitting there watching.  He had his arm resting on the chair’s armrest with his palm facing upward.  The buzzing of the needles started and I flinched, Marcus was stoic.  As the needles touched his arm his brows scrunched together, his lips flattened into a straight line, and his jaw was so tight I’m now sure his teeth were grinding together painfully.  The thing with Marcus was that he was in pain but he didn’t want people to know it.  I could still tell though.  His shorts came to mid-calf showing the tattoos that started at the knees and worked their way downward.  They were black Dickies that were nearly as old as the concert shirt he was wearing.

            They were fraying at the bottom, so that when he would pull out a loose thread it would unravel ever so slightly each time.  He could get new pants; actually he has much newer ones in his closet.  He continues to wear these ones because he was wearing them at the first gig he played with his old band, 'Ante'. 

            He shoved the last bit of his hotdog into his mouth, turned off his cell phone, shoved it into his pocket, and downed the last of his beer.  He tossed the empty beer bottle into the trash as he came my way.  He jumped up onto the table next to me, and danced me around to the music.