It's too early...
I had to take care of Olly's sheets again - you know how it is. Busy weekend... busy bee-ing...
...love you..."
"Hello? Hello? Earth to sleepy head on aisle four?"
Both eyes shot up, up to nowhere. The train suddenly screeched, coming to a ravenously momentous stop as Remus shook his head. He really was out of sorts. Ready to cut to black. Looking around him, thankfully, everything appeared still in place. Still in motion.
He needed to get home.
"Sorry," he mumbled as he stood, pulling himself up with some help from the silver bars above. Every bare finger, curled over, and then freed, as he tried to wedge into the shimmying crowd of others cramming the doorway. He caught himself looking back, but it was too late. The girl was there to meet him halfway. He had expected another eccentric smile, but she looked to be defusing a fragment or so more; he couldn't quite put his finger on the manner. It was something, something in the look she gave. The expression she'd so youthfully danced in front of him. As he left, it evoked a somewhat more puzzled flair than before. Like a swirl of new thoughts had begun, internally.
Caught as if in postmortem from a haze.
Who was that girl? What was wrong with her?
As he shuffled off the train, he felt something jiggle against him. Opening his coat, he frisked his inside pocket. Then his eyes briskly widened, fingers frozen. Hastily darting back up and to the closing doors of the train, he raised the palms of his hands sky-ward while the train lifted, purred, and began tumbling away in front of him. "Seriously?!" was all he could muster into the artifice of wind. Wayward glances be damned.
That girl. That weird, strange lil' girl.
Believe it; she, in all her completely functional wisdom, had left her worn sandal in his coat pocket! What did she expect him to do with it? What did she expect to do without it? Was it 1/2 Footwear day today? Did such a day exist? Remus shook his head, re-creased his dry cleaned top, and self-consciously scanned his surroundings, only to stop before an accommodating gaze. A frumpy, unshaven man stood before a nearby pillar. A little jittery, and noticeably fidgeting in place, but otherwise idle as he nodded rhythmically to the man in suit. "G-g-g'day to you. Sir, there."
Remus, lobbing a placid blink of an eye, swiveled on a heel and towards the stairs out of the station. Without so much as a word, he made his way back to his mid-town condo, hailing a taxi. The tired business man was keen to wash away the greyscale off his spirits, to pour himself a martini, maybe get a half hour of that game show in. Wrap this day up for good. The frumpy straggler, the one by the plaza pillar, with unshaven, bushy icicles, stared on after him. "G'day to you! I say, g-g-g'day, sir, there!
The scree of trains funneling to and fro through the careening tunnel rumbled in the distance, as so too did the bustle and podge of people, from the sidewalks outside to the benches and arbitrarily claimed spaces in the subway lobbies, to the dawning clubs and sports bars, welcoming the sun's slow turn of cheek. Evening never came early in this town. But when it did, it was like... well, sometimes, it was like the day never existed at all.
