The Story Begins

A strange place for a story to start, no? Our ‘heroine’, if she can be called such, is at work in Kerry’s Book Store, nestled in downtown Barrie. The Dunlop St. Store has been there quite a while - when a lot of the stores downtown fizzled, this one still stood. The men who owned it hadn’t sold, but they’d hired her the previous year, just a few months after Anianka’s eighteenth birthday in May of 2012. It was July 19th, 2013 now and she was out back, across from the Salvation Army store where the poor and homeless would congregate for supper later on - just across from the nucleus of the city, Barrie Bus Terminal. She watched people go to and from the Terminal while smoking a cheap Native cigarette. They didn’t always taste the best, but they were affordable.

Tweakers, losers, assholes... Anianka’s thoughts were of all the people she saw. Retards, niggers, Jews... By no means was she a racist; Anianka hated all races equally, including her own. If you asked her, and she was feeling particularly nice, she’d tell you she just hated humanity. “No one special,” she might say, “just all the people on Earth.”

She found it sickening that the whole town basically spider webbed from the Terminal, and the lake, Kepmenfelt Bay, not more than a two minute walk from where she stood now. And the city never did fix the Sunday and nighttime bus service to meet the demands of the growing population - which had been growing fairly steady since about nineteen ninety-five or so. It still only ran once an hour from seven pm on week- and Saturday nights, and once and hour from ten am to about six or seven pm on Sundays. At least during the week it was on the half hour

She snuffed out her smoke and went back in. She’d had three customers since her shift started at nine in the morning. And old woman and two young adults, probably no more than twenty fives years old each. The old woman had bought a romance novel; the young adults had gone for the fantasy and science fiction. Anianka preferred murder mysteries herself, but no one knew that except her and her bosses. And they were both drunks, so who cared?

Anianka working cash was more of her form of a joke. “Watch me fool people into thinking I’m somewhat normal!” she might have told a friend, if she had one. Besides, she needed the money for food, smokes, and shelter - and in that order, too.

About the only memories Anianka had were bad; her father beating her purple for not cleaning her room; the other kids teasing her in fifth grade for her home-pierced nose; the teachers telling her to take it out and her blunt refusal because she had the right to express herself. And OH! How furious those morons had been with her! How exquisitely pissed off they got when she told them NO! Had she ever been quite so happy since that day? Not that she could remember, but maybe...

A man, possibly in his mid-thirties, came into the store. They smiled at each other and he went to browsing the shelves near the back. He was almost an attractive man in Anianka’s mind, but for the most part she hated him before he even walked into the building. If he was feeling talkative she might slip him her number; she wasn’t adverse to sleeping with someone every now and again, even if she hated human kind. She was promiscuous, but she was safe about it.

She fixed her shirt to show a bit more cleavage and unzipped the sides of her skirt, upwards, to show more thigh. When she felt her appearance was ‘slutty’ enough she went out from behind the counter to fix some of the shelves a bit. He came back to the counter with a Stephen Davis novel, she likes his books, and when he looked at her she heard his breath catch in his throat. She turned, playing the innocent flirt, and she giggled on her way back to the counter.

“Hello.” she said, amiably and cutely. “Will that be all?”

He stuttered a bit before he got the reply of “all for the books, yeah.”

Real smooth, dude, she thought, then said “for the books?” and giggled.

After five minutes of poor flirting on his part, and gentle pressing on hers, she gave him her number and his book.

Another casualty of war, she mused to herself, slipping back to her usual morbid demeanor, zipping her skirt back down and re-readjusting her shirt.

She was studying human behaviour in her spare time, reading up on it, watching people every chance she got. It was manipulation she was really learning, and OH! Was she ever getting GOOD at it! Just for shits and giggles, to see how easy she would bend the rest of the world to her will. It was nothing to her, and it was oh-so-fun. But the main reason was the power; she had power over people. That was what was important, that was what turned her on. He would probably call later tonight, or tomorrow evening.