NYCC Samples - Velvet Revolutionist

Excerpts from Book Four - The Great Prague Adventure

The Great Prague Adventure follows Adrianne Burkin, the City Hero Moodswing, during his summer abroad in Prague and surrounding areas.  Much like in Chicago, he gets involved in investigating a human trafficking ring and discovering Prague has its own City Heroes.  Here’s the introduction for one of them.

Like my other excerpts, the numerical formatting goes as follows - BOOK/CHAPTER/SCENE. I’ve done this while in the editing process to track scenes so it’s easier to remove and insert somewhere better. It will also allow audiences reading work as its published out of order to have a frame of reference to the sequence of events across multiple books, much like when Blockbuster used to send tv show DVDs out of order or just picking up random issues of a comic series.

4.0.2 - Velvet Revolutionist

Vilém Jelinek was thirteen when he watched from his second story bedroom window as camouflage Soviet tanks turned onto his street in Praha in 1968.  He was a young, skinny and dark haired boy, no different from any other child on his block.  He ducked below the white trimmed windowsill, pulled his night gown over his knees, clasped his hands together and offered prayers to Yahweh.  He huddled there with his back against the wall and could not pry his hands apart to cover his ears.  The piercing screech of the wheels that turned the caterpillar tracks on the T-64AK medium tanks were burnt into his memory like the permanent image on a daguerreotype’s silver plate.  The screech from every tram and train heard afterward returned him to that moment of prayer beneath his windowsill.  When memory was stirred up in Vilém’s mind it manifested in a near seizure fit of shaking arms and fists.

His cobblestone street was left with the tread marks of the tanks.  Vilém spent his summer disposing of the rubble and rebuilding the road one stone at a time.  Every stone and moment spent on his knees repairing the road would not be forgotten.  He did not know of the Soviet campaign that spread across Europe during those days.  Having his street and Praha destroyed by the new oppressor was more than enough for protestation to swell in him. 

Despite Vilém’s resistant engagement with the ruling communist forces in Praha, he never threw a punch.  His fist never flew away towards a sneering officer’s face.  His foot never aimed at shins or stomachs.  He was opposed to violence although lawful authorities often brutalized him for speaking out against them.  Vilém was too young to stand with his countrymen in Wenceslas Square during the multiple protests that followed in the first years under Soviet rule.  He decided that harassing public officials would more than make up for his absence when he was younger.

Between 1975 and 1989 Vilém was arrested fifteen times but never served a prison term.  Not only had he never thrown a punch, his court cases always turned the bureaucracy against itself.  The courts would find him insufferable and send him back out to the streets.  Soon enough, when Vilém appeared in the courts, internal hemorrhaging took form in his prosecutors, leaving them weak and discredited among the citizens of Praha that knew of Vilém’s multiple proceedings.  

Vilém Yelinek was in the front line of demonstrators on Friday, November 17, 1989.  His eyes were cold.  His hands were rugged.  He had not grown up since 68.  Like everyone else under the Soviet Union, he had only grown older.  They marched through the streets that had once been vibrant and colorful, but the days underneath the communist government turned the buildings grey and black with coal smoke.  Praha was a shadow of its once magnificent architecture.

He was in the heart of what was later called the Velvet Revolution.  He marched down the river side, atop the brick streets with tram tracks underfoot and electrical wires hanging overhead.  He stood his ground when the protestors were surrounded by the police on Národní Street.  The battle was fought just blocks away from where the Tesco, a department store akin to a Target in American, would be built.  The store Vilém would work from opening day until the day he would finally retire if he had a choice about it.

The police may have had guns, shields, helmets, batons and badges, but to Czechs like Vilém, they saw no authority in the police line before them.  The people continued to march forward.  The police beat their shields as they marched forward to greet the demonstrators.  When the two lines met they wrote a new line in the books of Czechoslovakian history.

The opposing sides crashed together with fury shown on both sides.  The protestors refused to fight back.  They simply pushed forward with the conviction to continue their march. The men with badges on their chests beat all within baton’s reach.  They left bloody men and women on the ground with broken noses and bruised sides.  They ripped the film from video cameras leaving reporters without comment.

But Vilém Yelinek held the line with so many others.  Vilém didn’t retreat.  He was a child being beaten by his father.  He took the strikes in silence and without tears as his blood filled the cracks and ran along the tram lines in the brick street.

But that blood mixed with the blood of others and 32 days later, after nearly a full month of demonstrations, the communists released their hold on Czechoslovakia.

4.1.1 Waking Up

Vilém Jelinek woke up abruptly on the morning of June 4th, 2008.  He suffered from shortness of breath and sweat was wet on his brow and cheeks.  His white sheets were also damp and the yellow of his skin beneath showed through.  He was fifty three and frightened by the thought that he was suffering from some form of heart failure. This was the new normal.

He refused to see a doctor.  He chose to live with the mystery.  Even if his suspicions were confirmed, he believed that he’d find some way to side step the problem and avoid treatment because he’d been doing the same thing in all areas of life for fifty three years.

This morning was different.  The window had been unlocked and opened.  The wind was cool and the white curtains billowed out as the wind pushed them aside.  He ran his wrinkled and knotted fingers through his gray hair that had turned prematurely when he was in his mid thirties.  Aging was one of the few things he couldn’t dodge.  He looked at his hands and no matter how hard he tried to ball them into fists, he couldn’t.  The fingers would not bend in towards his palms.  

Two words lingered in his mind as he lay there.  They felt like they had been dropped into his ear as he slept on his side just before waking.  He repeated the words in his thoughts several times.  Each time conjuring up a different thought, a new take on old stories until they culminated into a mixed image of the tank.  It passed his childhood window and his older self leading the march for independence.  He said the words with inquisition.  “Velvet Revolutionsist.” 

He hopped out of bed in his itchy, white long underwear and walked hesitantly to the window.  The sun stretched over his face like a warm smile.  The air was filled with the scent of breakfast having floated across the street from the bakery.  He looked up and down the street below with a squint in his eyes.  The sunlight was overpowering.  There was certainly no one lying lifeless in front of his doorstep, having thought someone had jumped out his window before he awoke.  No one was running up or down the street outside.  Nothing worthy of suspicion met his probing eyes.

He headed to the shower and began his morning routine with the sole exception that the same two words were repeating in his head.  Velvet Revolutionist.  Each time the words repeated they sounded more and like the title of a person.

The rest of the morning’s routine at the house of Vilém Jelinek followed the regular steps.  He set a pot for tea on the stove.  He carried the kitchen trash to the large black barrel in street outside his back door.  He drank two cups of tea as he read the Hospodarske Noviny newspaper which had little or no news that concerned Vilém on a regular basis.  Each morning’s read was also accompanied by the agitations that he couldn’t read Czech newspapers as well as he could read Russian.  He could speak Czech more fluently than he could read it.  The childhood years spent using Russian in the communist run schools.

When he finished his tea he set down the newspaper, grabbed his hat and was out to work.  He lived North of Old Town Square.  Tesco was south of the square and if he timed his walk to work correctly, he’d pass under the Astronomical Clock.  He’d always pause below the two story clock that was built onto the side of the Old Town Hall.  

There were four figures, no bigger than a marionette that performed their own tasks at the dawning of the hour.  He reveled most in watching the figurines of the twelve Apostles when they appeared at noon.  He’d regularly take lunch in time to walk over and watch the noon time crowd’s amazement of the clock.  He would just watch the clock while trying to comprehend that something so intricate was built in 1410.  The clock never failed to assure him that the sun and moon were in their correct places in the sky above.

4.2.1 - Massacre Begins (VR)

From a block north of the square Vilém heard a peculiar noise coming from the direction of Old Town Square while on his walk to work.  It was filling the air the same way the smells of a bakery can carry on for blocks.  He quickened his pace.  He arrived at the square just moments after it had begun.

It was a small sound first, like a single pebble dropped from the palm of a child and colliding with the brick street below.  It grew louder and with a monstrous clarity, the sound of boulders breaking up and spinning and colliding against each other as if they were in a blender.  It came from the center of the square and all heads turned or were lifted to investigate the first viewing of a nightmare.

Vilém shielded his eyes from the sun to see what was happening.  

The screams rose and roared.  They pierced the air and grew like the group voice of a choir joining together after the solo was finished.  Children cried and wailed at the chest piercing terror of seeing their mothers, some fathers, and siblings losing all composure.

Vilém’s eyes glided over the crowd that was milling around in the square.  The sound of the bending metal swooped through the square.  He watched with a calm silence.  Was the Jan Hus Monument in the middle of the square actually moving?

Locals and tourists both pulled their cell phones and 35mm money makers because payday had come.  While some stayed for pictures, others dropped their bags and ran, some remembered to hold onto their bags and ran, and the rest stood in place, perhaps frozen in suspended fantasy, filled with intrigue.  Or fascination or maybe they just wanted to see what happened next. 

The one thing that they all agreed upon was that the Jan Hus Monument that once stood tall, proud and motionless in the center of Old Town Square was now breaking its legs free of its base.  All eight figures were stretching their solid metal arms for the first time in centuries.  They rolled their necks around, getting all the kinks out.  Two of them shielded their newborn eyes from the bright sun above as they faced southeast upon birth.  Their chests rose and fell with their bronze toned breaths.  Their yawns were the sound of bending girders, throats strained by years of misuse.

They were all wearing similar cloths, bronze garments that had turned green with corrosion.  Most of them wore saggy armed monkly robes with hoods that hung off the rear of their collars, exposing their balding or full heads of hair.  Some were clean shaven while others had been sculpted with perfect, majestic beards.  It was what one expected out of a Reformationist and his followers transcribed into bronze.

Vilém watched as one of the statues opened the book, which ran from the base of the statue up to his waist, out of the base and cradled the massive object in its arms.

People knocked into Vilém as an influx of people crowded into the square from all streets as those with intention to leave the spectacle had already done so.  What were these statues doing?  How was this possible?  The questions were stated or thought in a multitude of languages.  Two words walked through Vilém's mind again.  Velvet Revolutionist.  What did all of it mean?  He laughed when he thought the words.  They wouldn’t leave him alone.

All the statues except one holding the book, ceased all movement, as if they were falling back to sleep and their new millennium stretch was over.  The remaining statue flipped through the pages of the book, pages that had never been sculpted, only inferred by the textures that flowed across the tips of the pages.  

Was it actually reading?  It seemed to be reading.  Its face shifted form, as if it was deriving pleasure or disappointment from the texts.

Vilém’s uneasiness expanded in his chest, as if he knew somehow that he had a part to play in the upcoming moments.

Courage, or foolishness, filled the chests of onlookers as the crowd slowly spiraled inward on the monument in the center of Old Town Square.  Some photographers shot dozens of photos of the new positions of the statues while other lowered their cameras to see the occasion with their own eyes.

The pages fell atop the ones below with the clap of falling metal sheets.  One after another, he turned the pages, only spending a miniscule portion of a minute to observe the current page.  But those partial minutes endured a stretching by the time they were taken in by onlookers.

He just kept flipping the pages.  Teens and twenties had crammed themselves all the way up to the base of the monument.  Young shining faces filled with astonishment and intrigue, beginning to wonder if this was a publicity stunt or a genuine spectacle. If they wanted, they could have even jumped aboard and shared in the contents of the books.  That’s not how it happened though.

The Astronomical Clock sounded.  It was 10am on the fourth of June, 2008.  The birds perched on the roof of the Old Town Hall took to the air.  Vilém was the only person to break away from the statues to look at the clock and while he did so, the book clapped shut.   He turned back to the monument to see the statue toss the book out into the crowd with the nonchalance of a man who’d finished the newspaper.  The adrenaline pumping through onlooker’s blood slowed down the moment to the point where the book just seemed to float over the heads of wide-eyed viewers.  It spun in circles and for those with keen ears, the ‘fwoop, fwoop, fwoop’ sound the book made as it flew through the air should have told them that it was moving at an unbelievable speed, and hence, brains didn’t comprehend the danger they were in.  Except for Vilém.  Something pulled at his chest, an invisible tether goading him into action.

The book landed with a splat.  It crushed and popped the people underneath it as if they were water balloons.  Liquefied body parts sprayed out from under the book and onto the first and seconds rows of people.

The world was spinning out of control.  The ten or so people that could be identified by the contents of their wallets and passports were now without distinction from the soup of those surrounding them whom they’d been crushed with.  As quickly as people tried to escape the square, dozens more were running towards the ‘excitement’.   

Vilém took his first step forward into the Square.

All the statues were alive again.  Two of them simply walked down off the monument and made their way into a crowd that was backing away.  Not in synchronized motion, but still in unison, the remaining statues crouched down like they were doing squats and jumped, rocketing through the air in six different directions as if they’d been blown out of cannons.  The wind ripped through their beards and heavy garments.

Vilém pushed people aside, knocking them to the ground as he rushed toward the closest statue.

It was the colossal traffic jam that follows the pull of a fire alarm in a sky scraper.  Everyone leaves their offices but end up waiting in line to walk down the stairs.  It was that or running into the people who were standing and watching or were tripping over those who had already gotten lost on the ground beneath stomping feet.  Death was in the air, on the ground and chasing after everyone, and Vilém was out to stop the reaper.