15,050 Words- Tough, Tough Day

It is 2 am and I just got my word count in. Ugh. Anyway, introduced a new character today who will play quite a big role in the denouement... you may recognize her. Jackie, sorry if I f*ck up your character, but she's just what Maggie needs at the moment.

These are the thoughts swirling around Edie’s head as she tosses her faded red duffel bag over her shoulder and walks to the TTC stop a couple of blocks from her apartment. The TTC has resumed its normal schedule, since the events surrounding the G20, Edie is happy about this, but still feels exposed walking around the streets where all the action took place only days before. She keeps expecting to be taken back into custody. Back into the detention centre, where hope goes to die. Every corner she turns around, she half expects to run into a black wall of riot police, pounding on their shields, screaming profanities. Or equally frightening, when she walks through the streets, she keeps expecting to find herself inadvertently trapped amongst a crowd of Black Bloc members, as out of place amongst peaceful protesters as a plastic reusable ice cube in a glass of expensive scotch. Edie shudders involuntarily at the thought. That would really ruin a glass of scotch. Maybe getting out of the city for a few days won’t be such a bad thing. Edie is haunted by her own ghosts.
On the 2 hour bus ride, Edie distracts herself by focusing on some light reading she brought for the trip: a research article on Aboriginal women in prison. She found herself distracted by the beauty of the writing, she felt like at least one of the co-writers had a real flair for writing that had not been seen since that great and epic novel ‘Soldiers of Misfortune’. The summer before, that novel had inspired her to launch one of her loafers at a shitster’s head during a screening of that great Jonathan Taylor Thomas classic, Man of the House. It might have resulted in a charge, had not several shitsters in attendance taken the opportunity to remove their ironic crocs and start a shoe fight. Perhaps launching the shoe had been immature, and a stupid risk to take given the attention Edie tended to receive from authorities, but dammit, Edie was tired of shitsters feeling like they had an ironic right to everything. Man of the House, a heart-warming and endearing film, co-starring the inimitable Chevy Chase, deserved better.