Sinister Sentiments by K.C. Finn

vision, coming to stand between me and the mirror. She reaches out to straighten the maroon bow tie enveloping my shirt collar, patting her hands down the sleeves of my brown jacket afterwards. She smiles with angel’s lips, her almond-shaped, hazel eyes encased in long lashes. Though her hair is kept back by a sensible knot, a recent memory flashes to my mind of those soft, auburn curls hanging down about her bare shoulders.
    I pull her towards me, wrapping my arms tight around her waist. My little wife giggles into my chest, gasping as though she’s breathing me in. I feel her tender fingertips slip to the small of my back, fumbling up under the jacket and into the spot where my braces meet my trouser waist. The touch sends shivers through me that she knows only too well. I nuzzle into her smooth neck, planting kisses on the perfect, porcelain skin there. She smells like citrus and lavender water.
    “Khazran, darling,” she says, wriggling in my arms. “You have to breakfast, or you’ll be late for the office.”
    It’s a feeble protest, and one we both know will do nothing to assuage my lips from travelling up and down her collarbone.
    “I can’t help it, dear Annette,” I confess with a chuckle. “You’re too beautiful to resist. It’s my Turkish blood.”
    She makes a little scoffing sound and pulls her neck away.
    “You blame everything on your Turkish blood,” she chides.
    I’m about to counter her argument when we both jump at the sudden rumbling noise overhead. A bright flash illuminates the dull morning, turning the whole view outside the window into white nothingness for the briefest moment. Annette moves out of my now-loose grip, pressing her fingertips to the window as she squints out into the wider world.
    “It’s snowing on Forsyte Street,” she remarks.
    I turn to follow her gaze. In our little avenue, the dull, cloudy morning reigns supreme. Three streets away, however, the lightning flash has brought a tirade of concentrated snowflakes down on the dozen houses of Forsyte Street. Beyond that, most of the other alleys and avenues are bathed in faint spring sunlight.
    “Quite a blizzard,” I muse. “I wonder what they’ve done to upset Mr Metero this time.”
    Forsyte Street quite often gets the worst of the weather. Sunshine is reserved for only those who impress Mr Metero, the weathermaster, the most. I’m hoping that, after today, I’ll be the one responsible for bathing our humble home in light.
    “You ought to go,” Annette tells me, straightening my clothes once more. “He’ll make it rain if you’re late for work.”
    The Metero Factory is home to several divisions of labour. The ground floor is for labourers; the hefty men who stock the coals and turn the engines for the great machines in the sky. The first floor is for clerical workers and administrative assistants, who feed the machines their instructions. The second floor houses the designers; the grand men and occasional ladies who cultivate custom-made weather patterns to customer specifications, punching them in on co-ordinated cards to be fed into the great machines by the floor below. The third floor contains the private offices of Mr Metero himself. What goes on there, I can only dream of, as yet.
    I work in the Correspondence Department (first floor), dealing with requests for specific phenomena. It’s my job to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whose weather requests are suitable projects for the weather architects to work on. Occasionally, I also have to work through the pile of complaints that are threatening to start a fire in the storage room, and today is one such beastly day. I am resolute, however, that I’ll make a good, efficient job of it. I’ll power through the complaints at such a record speed that Mr Metero will have no choice but to commend the dedication of Khazran Steed.
    I work eight hours a day, in an office so compact that a mouse wouldn’t even envy its square footage. Surrounded by paper