This week's work

Here are the first few hundred words of a short story I'll be working on this week. It doesn't have a title yet, but I have a few ideas about where it is going. Any input would be great. I'm sort of experimenting with the magic-realism style that Gabriel Garcia Marquez used, it's somewhat hard to do, seeing as I normally write very strictly in the realism style but it's very fun to let go of logic and it gives your imagination a work-out.


Clouds hung low over the hospital on the day of Gerald Smith's birth. An excruciatingly long labour by all accounts, one Gerald's late mother never seemed to get over. On his sixteenth birthday, two weeks before she died of a stroke, she smiled and looked out of the kitchen window. Her toast going cold with the chill of winter approaching and unending thoughts that Gerald would never know.
As a young boy Gerald was never the biggest kid, but he had an unnatural strength that frightened him. Since he accidentally broke Tommy Johnson's arm in the third grade, Gerald shook his head whenever he was asked to play. In the seventh grade he was dropped from the local football team after an especially rough tackle that left a boy with concussion.
'You're too rough,' the coach said.
'I'm sorry.'
At high-school Gerald was hardly ever bullied, only because he was too fast. Even for the older boys who chased him around the corridors until they gave up, panting and cursing. He knew he could probably win a fight if he had to, but he never tried. Gerald avoided trouble and by the tenth grade, trouble avoided him.
On the day his mother died Gerald was called into the principal's office to hear the news. He didn't cry, he simply thanked the principal for letting him have the rest of the day off. He took his time walking home that day.

Gerald Smith spent his eighteenth birthday alone at home, watching television. He bought a beer and deciding he didn't like the taste, poured the rest out. Gerald wondered about his father, who he had never known. And he wondered about his mother, deciding he had never really known her either. She would stare into space, blank walls and open windows demanded her attention more than Gerald ever did. He never interrupted her and waited until she shook her head and blinked her tired eyes before asking what she was thinking about.
'Nothing dear.'
'Okay.'
Gerald stared out through the kitchen window, his thumb rubbing the label on the empty beer bottle. The last leaves of autumn clung to the tree branches, fluttering to the ground whenever a sharp gust kicked up. Noise from the television became a faint crackle and Gerald saw a man floating near one of the grey trees.
The man wore a navy hooded jumper, obscuring his face. Gerald watched as he dangled in the air before vanishing. Once the man was gone, Gerald looked down to find that he had shattered the beer bottle. Green glass shards stuck into his fingers and Gerald went about pulling them out and cleaning up his mess.