(note from author - heh heh, I kinda should have put this one the i first i , but oh well, here goes: all of the characters featured in this story are mine. In every single chapter. So please do not borrow them without my permission (even though I see no reason why you would feel possessed to do so, but . . .). Anyways, if thou dost stealeth my characters/plots/etc, I shall unleash the evil chickens of wrath upon you, and they shall descend from the fiery sky down on you, and in their fury, eat you into little bits. Oh yes, and the evil chickens of wrath are mine too. Ne volez pas!)

Chapter Two ~ Quicksand

//Stop// he told himself. //Stop//. He knew that this was only another one of the numerous habits that he so desperately needed to free himself of. It seemed to him as if every time he had the occasion to look upon others interacting amongst themselves, he felt inclined to create a history and a future for them inside his strained mind. It was an age-old habit, and one that he no longer wanted to posses. It literally drove Christine near insane; she could not stand his fathomless quirks. In addition, his people- watching skills had become so much of an art to him that he found he was able to accurately guess near everything there was to know about those he observed, even many of the several petty details that even the person may have overlooked. Multiple times he had tried to use his weak excuse for self-discipline and determination to end his maddening habit, but all his efforts all remained wasted. In the end, he simply added it to the growing list of habits that he needed to break, that he vowed to break, and that, deep down inside, he knew that he would never really, truly, break.

//Those people are lucky// he sighed, still unable to break his mind away from his friends in the Chevrolet. It was Christmas Eve, and he knew that, more than likely, some time around midnight he would be called up to fulfill the duty that his job decreed he do. More than anything else, even fights with Christine, was his job the one thing that he hated most. Christine liked it no more than he did, and would constantly beg and plead him to leave it in the past. Despite all that he had done for her, it had almost ruined their relationship. Luckily for him, though, she was blissfully unaware of how deeply entrenched he had become in his work. If she was to somehow uncover the complete truth, she would, in all likelihood, never speak to him again.

//If only I had never taken that job// he thought to himself, and chuckled inside at the futility of that ever-so-repeated statement. He had been desperate for money, even more so than he was now. He could have become a rather decent writer, or maybe a journalist, with no more effort than earning a college education. He could have waited; he had been a patient man. But Christine jumped in, forever the wild card in his life. Poverty did not suit her, for she liked to be pampered, and she was as impatient as she was vain. She insisted to have money and shiny little baubles and such i now i, and Jack had known that she would have been long gone before he even got near to finishing college.

So, raising the faded white flag as he always did, he turned to the classified ads and searched for a job that would require no previous work experience or college degrees. He had came upon a job at a science lab, that gave a rather vague and for the most part untrue description of what would be expected of the employee, which was now eroded from his memory by the grating tides of time. For a while, he had considered it no more than his characteristic bad luck that landed him in that job, but, now, in hindsight, he decided that it had to have been nothing less than the livid wrath of a merciless God. Despite any preternatural explanation that he provided for his misfortune, though, he was still just as trapped in his position. He was sinking in the endless quicksand that was his job, a black hole in which there was no way to raise up and no way to escape.

Tbc