Bartleby Snipes

Another Narration and Description piece specifically for character development. I quite like Bartleby, and I hope he'll be able to find a place in Dreamwalker's Path, or another of the books in the Archives. 

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            Every morning, before he went down stairs to man his corner-store book shop, Bartleby Snipes made himself a ham and mayonnaise sandwich. He did not particularly like mayonnaise, nor was he fond of ham, as a general rule, but Bartleby was, above all, a creature of habit. He’d eaten ham and mayonnaise sandwiches for lunch every day since his first day of primary school, when his mother had packed him a sandwich and a note, and a thermos of orange juice. Bartleby was now years passed primary school age, but the ham sandwich had been a constant in his life for so long that it was almost unthinkable that he should change now.

            So it was that when Bartleby reached for the place where the ham should have sat waiting for him, and grasped nothing but air, a sense of dread crept over him.

            “Oh dear…” he scratched an ear and frowned, deep lines outlining his muzzle and creasing his forehead.

Briefly Bartleby entertained the notion that he should go down to the store and buy more ham for his sandwich, but he dismissed it almost immediately. The shop had to be open in twenty minutes, and he would never get to the other side of town, beat the rush at the butchers, come home, make his sandwich, and still be able to open the shop on time. Likewise, the idea that he should not have a ham sandwich for lunch was so distressing that he was certain he could feel his heart propelling itself from one side of his ribcage to the other with little palpitations.

“Well…well, well, well,” he lifted his glasses off the bridge of his nose, the world teeter-tottering out of focus on the other side of the very thick glass. “I just don’t know what to do with myself. This has never happened before…” And it hadn’t. Bartleby kept strict inventory of everything that was in his refrigerator, and the one thing that he made sure he always had—other than mayonnaise—was ham. How did he run out? What had he been occupied with that had been so important that he’d forgotten to go to the butchers?

And then he remembered. It was the new project that Mr. Jaeger had him working on. Very important, very fascinating stuff that sucked him right in and caused him to forget that he’d run out of ham and needed to go get more.

Shakespeare couldn’t have written a better tragedy!

The old clock above the stairs co-cooed its way to the half hour. He had only a short time to decide what to do before he had to go downstairs and open the shop.

He had one option, as he saw it, and he dreaded it with all his being.

Carrying the weight of a routine he’d followed for over three decades, Bartleby picked up his phone and dialed.

“Mr. Jaeger? Y-yes, hello, it’s Bartleby. About the work you’ve given me…yes, I’ve decided a method of payment...”