A Little Park Wind: Geriatric Magic: A New York Collection Short Story

By Stephanie Writt

A Little Park Wind (Short Story):  Samuel Brown braves the winter wind that controls the city like everyone else in New York. Until one day he charms away a bit of wind for himself to play with. With a little wind and a light heart, Samuel begins to spin up smiles on the frost nipped faces of the people passing through the park. But Samuel’s magic will not go unnoticed.

“A Little Park Wind” is part of the Geriatric Magic universe and can also be found in “The New York Collection: Five Stories of Magic & Life,” with foreword written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The New York Collection’s complete short story list is:
• Geriatric Magic
• A Touch of Jade
• Subway Drummer
• Streets of Light
• A Little Park Wind

The Geriatric Magic Short Story Series:  A hawk-face woman in a red dress walks city streets on a mission of magic. To find those with the indomitable spirit to live, though their bodies will shortly fail them. To each she finds she gives a gift. A gift of magic. And from the least expected of benefactors: Death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne Press
• Release date: Apr 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386076063

Book preview

A Little Park Wind

A Little Park Wind

A New York Collection Short Story

Stephanie Writt

Wayne Press

Contents

A Little Park Wind

Read and be happy!

Want to read more in this series?

Free Story: 1st in Storyteller’s : Volume 1

Rebellion of the Princess of Argon

Want to read more in this collection?

Free Story: 1st in Tony & Gage’s: The Junior Year Collection

Free Story: The Day Tony Earned Detention

Want to read more in this series?

Preview: Love & Jinx

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Love & Jinx: Want to finish reading?

Also by Stephanie Writt

About the Author

A Little Park Wind

Winter wind controls the city .

With windy hands that wrap about the neck and shoulders to send a body-wracked shiver through to the toes. Slices into the eyes with icy spikes. Slows the joints into a statue’s claw to grip the clothes tighter: a sacrifice to the elements, a hand to keep the rest of the body warm. Warmer. Not frozen.

The ladies of the city bundle their beautiful bodies away under layers of wool and stockings. Damn slacks and tightly pinned hair. Winter wind wipes their faces of their pretty smiles, their sparkling eyes now cast down, pinched.

Like it strips the warmth, the wind blasts the smells that make them women from their bodies; the smell of lilac and geranium, chicken soup and melting butter, lipstick and sex.

Left to struggle between the naked black trunks of the garden park, the women trudge on in their own grey and brown wariness, small and sad beneath the city’s silver behemoths that tower to touch the frozen grey sky.

Yeah. New York winter is a bitch.

Pardon my language. But she admits it herself, proud of it, with every mischievous tumbling hat just out of reach of a bumbling owner. With each leaf-ripping bellow that scrapes the last few hangers-on to litter a newly swept sidewalk. She cackles in glee at those pathetic leaf blowers. She shows them how it’s done, as a neat mound becomes an autumn tapestry of colors to rain down upon the poor man with an elephant nose machine strapped to his back.

Mischievous, with a bit of an evil streak is our gal winter wind.

And one day in particular a month ago I must have charmed her, like my ex-wife said I can charm any woman I put a mind to. Charmed her right out of a bit of her wind to play with for myself.

Not sure how I did it, and not gonna beg the question.

A cold morning, where to walk meant the blood kept flowing. And since my broken hip recovered, walking is what I do. Every day. To not miss life, to see the dance of the city, even wrapped in plain clothes for the season. Dreary and dark, solitary, and desperate for spring.

I had stopped at my bench in the park, a little scrap of grass and trees patch-worked between concrete pathways to the circling skyscrapers just off Wall Street. My midpoint on my lower city meander, as much as I could meander in the bitter cold.

My favorite spot to grab a steaming cup of coffee, which I gripped in my fleece-lined leather glove. The paper dangerously soft in my grip. My grip still steel-strap firm from my wrench-throwing military past.

The fingers beneath the leather may have be gnarled and scarred, with knuckles the size of half dollars, but my grip has not faded in the years. Not like my health, my hair, and my hearing. Hell’s bells. My hearing is gone, pert near. And damned if I’ll plug my ears up with plastic so I can annoy everyone around me with those beeps and squeals when the hearing aid goes on the fritz.

With the thick dark blue wool of my well-worn pea coat to protect my backside, I leaned against the arrow-topped wrought iron fence that edged the winding walkways. At hip height, they did little to protect or detour. Since any young brat worth his salt could hop them without a thought.

If anything, they kept the business dwellers from straying too far from their path.

Head down in the icy wind, only intent on their grey-suited little lives, with green in their sight, their heightened senses coated in merlot, they followed a path that led them into the hundred story bowels of some rich fuck’s game.

A rat race. Heh.

With their maze of cubicles and pitiful prizes made up of some business god’s castoffs. Some cheese, some bread, good job, but don’t stop.

The winter wind fluttered the bottom edge of a woman’s long coat. Brazen enough to wear a knee- length dress and bare her legs to the cold, the hawk-faced women strode through the park with power and purpose. Like one of the business gods herself.

She challenged the winter wind with her bare legs.

Because they were gorgeous legs. Long, elegant, tall, shapely, that drove under her flowing skirt and long coat.

And she knew it.

Red-edged, with the flirt of the dress skirt, the thin long coat’s tan panels flapped and fluttered.

If only the wind would catch the edge just right, I thought, dip under the dress to fill the skirt. The wind would twirl amongst those hidden flashing thighs that ate the ground with power. Then the air would escape in a divine lift of the dress, in an exposure not unlike Miss Marilyn in the Seven Year Itch.

Oh, how I wanted to see that rigid woman dance and sputter, her power blown away, and those lovely legs exposed.

Just like that. It did. Everything, just how I thought it.

Like a curious child, the wind swept under her skirts and played.

Feeling the danger of exposure, the hawk-woman slowed, and pulled her coat tighter.

I felt a tug in frustration. My finger tips tingled, a pull, like a tug on the coat from a lost child. What do I do now? It asked, as it