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A Day in the City
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mikko Soiniemi, born 1982 in Stuttgart, studied German and English at the University of Stuttgart. He is an avid traveler and cites his experiences on all continents, especially in the USA, as inspiration for his work. His interests are widespread and so are the topics of his stories. He enjoys all types of narrative media, from movies to video games. This is his first publication.
Mikko Soiniemi
A Day in the City
A Day in the City © 2013 Mikko Soiniemi
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
Cover idea by Mikko Soiniemi. Design by Florian Mouret.
Font: GNU FreeFont
Imprint
A Day in the City
published by: epubli GmbH, Berlin,
www.epubli.de
Copyright: © 2013 Mikko Soiniemi
ISBN 978-3-8442-6207-0
Introduction
Dear Reader,
What you are holding in your hands right now is the portrait of a city, my city, your city, the city. The concept of the city has always fascinated me.
It seems to be the place where humans can be whatever they want to be, yet fail miserably at it. It is a place that is buzzing and humming with life and yet there are times when it looks like the deadest place on earth. What exactly is a city? It is a place in which many people have come together to live there, yet there is no place on this earth where you could be more alone than there. What fascinates writers about the city is not just only the fact that it is a place of contradictions, but also that it is so richly filled with stories. The more people there are the more stories need to be told.
So the book that you are holding is exactly that, it tries to be a picture of a place that has a million faces, something that eludes all description. The city can never be represented in one story. This book is a Panopticon, it is your way to look into the minds of people that make up the city they live in, it is your way of putting together fragments in order to grasp the city as it lives and breathes. Imagine yourself floating over the heads of people and randomly join them for a little while.
Something like the city cannot be portrayed, but in every story there is also a part of the place where it takes place. Places form people and people form places. So maybe the cities we have in this world tell us a little about how and who we are.
Contents
The noble man or beautiful nature
NIGHT
This book is dedicated to Nicole, who made me finish it, Florian who helped me finish it, and my mother, who I always have to thank.
MORNING
The Dutchman
He had always wondered how hell would be like. They told him a lot of things when he was a kid, about flames and screaming and torture and the devil. It used to make him very afraid. Soon he would find out what it was like, they were coming for him. He knew it, he knew it the whole last week. Ever since they told him he was thinking about it. He was pretty sure he would end up in hell, he was not the worst person on this planet, but there had been enough things that he had done to send a whole group of Mormons to hell. For a whole week now he was sitting there and kept thinking about when it all went wrong. He just couldn't tell. In fact there was not one particular point when it all went wrong, he never made that decision. Everything he did came naturally to him. There were chances and he just took them. It was like that when he took the first bribe, as it was when he shot his first person, as it was when he stole that apple, as it was when he kicked that cat.
The bottle was almost empty again. He was thinking about everything he had done and he didn't regret any of it. There was this one girl back in the day, with beautiful blond hair and eyes as clear and blue as the ocean, she was well worth forgetting about his wife, many times. There were also his friends, he was never lonely when he wanted a drink and he never had to sit alone at a bar as long as he paid for a drink. What were their names, he didn't know. He never met any of them again. How did his father say? “Life is like a restaurant and friends are like guests, they come and they go.” His restaurant went out of business a long time ago. He was a good entertainer, he liked jokes and knew many of them. The one about the Jew was his favorite. That never failed. Except the one time with that idiot Goldberg. He just didn't have any humor, but he smacked him good. That was a laugh. He would probably meet him down there again, along with his old pa. He was never shy of using the belt, he could remember the belt better than his father. That was one of the memories he shared with his mother. His childhood hadn't been bad, he had been going to school for quite a while and even after that it was okay. He