WIP Wednesday

I'm working on two short novellas right now for upcoming paxes, one about time travel and one about second chances. This is the current opening I have for my time travel story, tentatively called "Unison."

*_*_*

While nearly everyone on the midnight shift either wore ear protection or listened to music as they worked, Freddie Valek never did. It wasn’t that working in a tool manufacturer’s warehouse was so fascinating he didn’t need the distraction. It was that his imagination was more than enough to keep his brain occupied while his body did the heavy lifting. Literally.

He’d always been a dreamer. Anything could transport him from the moment, from a bird zooming across an indigo sky to more traditional methods like movies and television. Books worked, too, except for the fact that he wasn’t the greatest reader. His imagination worked faster. He could be battling trolls in a war-torn aerial kingdom or marching down the streets of Washington, DC, in hippie clothes protesting the war without ever having to sit for ten minutes trying to figure out why so many of the words swimming on the page in front of him didn’t sound at all like the way people actually talked in rural Kentucky.

He’d thought maybe it might be different when he moved to New York City in 2006. But no, words didn’t match the way people talked here, either.

Some of the guys had given him a hard time when he first started working at the warehouse, calling him a dumb hick because he couldn’t shake his accent, but that stopped not long after he dragged an old-timer out of the way of a forklift backing up into an area that was supposed to be off-limits. He never really understood why that should make a difference. After all, anyone else would’ve done the same thing. It was just common decency. But it did, which made the transition to all the choices the city had to offer that Kentucky didn’t just a little bit easier.

Hell, they even knew he was gay and didn’t give him grief for it. Not like what he’d seen other boys get back home. More proof that this was the right place for him, even those times when it felt like something was still missing.