By The Water #1

"I hope you're ready for a firefight," Save Yourself, I'll Hold Them Back by My Chemical Romance.

Credits to TotalPhysicalResponse.

Fresh out of college with his English Literature degree, he came to Permaipura not really knowing what to expect. He got a job offer teaching English in a tuition class in this town last week, and the pay was good enough for starters, so he decided, why not? It was either this or back to college for his Masters, and he had had enough of school.

That morning he woke up extra early, as new endeavours tend to make the mind restless, and left his rented apartment early. He knew that the tuition centre was just 8 kilometres away, and with the second-hand Kancil that his parents gave him upon graduation, he could make it there in less than ten minutes when it was off peak hours. And he was sure to avoid peak hours, which would have made it a 30-minute-or-more drive. He wanted to get this job off on a good start.

His friend had told him that there was a restaurant not far from his tuition centre, so he headed there for breakfast. "You absolutely MUST try the nasi lemak there, I tell you," that friend had said. When he arrived, he was impressed by the number of people who were already there. "It must be pretty good then, since it could wake people up this early on a Saturday", he thought as he stepped out of his car.

It was a typical Malay low-budget shop-house restaurant, with the counter at the entrance and a balding man of medium height wearing a button plaid shirt with the three top buttons undone counting some money and pocketing some as well. There were a few tables on the parking space immediately in front of the premise, and he spotted an, be it uncleared, empty table so he went ahead and sat there. He didn't feel like going inside, since it looked stuffy, what with all the people and food jammed in one place. Plus, a few packets of the "killer nasi lemak" were conveniently placed on the table, so he would just eat those.

He pushed the used newspaper/banana leaf nasi lemak wrappers to the other end of the table. As he unwrapped his nasi lemak, he looked around and didn't notice anyone going about taking orders, so he took out the textbook from which he was going to teach later. "Form 3 English, shouldn't be that hard", he reassured himself and opened the book to the place he bookmarked it. He placed the book beside his breakfast and took a spoon from the plastic cup half-filled with water and started on the "must-tries".

"Assalaamualaikum. What would you like to drink?"

***

Click here for next episode

This is the first episode of my first mini-project on this blog, entitled "By The Water". It's a short-story (sort of) and there will be several episodes to come, insyaAllah. The next episode will be posted tomorrow, insyaAllah, and I'll try my hardest to post a new episode everyday until the series is done.

Just in case you wanted to know, it's a romantic short story, inspired by (you'll find out in the final episode). And you're probably wondering "Anak Pak Man?? Doing romance??" then proceeding to ROFL and smack your keyboard so hard you break it (I hope [but only if you were ROFLing]).

This is just something I want to do and I think will be fun and give me less free time on my hands (I have too much free time on my hands now), so if you're not really interested in this kind of stuff, then you should probably just ignore my updates until I post something with the title "It's Done. You Can Read This One (If you want to)". I'll label this whole series "By The Water" just in case (and if you're following me, you probably know that I don't really label my posts, so yeah, this is sort of a big deal to me).

That's all for now. May peace be upon y'all.

Cheers!