Reading: "Born Fatale is the Femme" from the novel THE PRAXIS CONTIUUM (A.Glass 2018)

 

A woman looks down at a small tombstone, situated in a newer part of the historic Spring Grove Cemetery, she then stares up at the patchy overcast sky. Shades of blue cut through the white clouds, looking around at the foliage from the trees as their leaves begin to turn color within the cold Cincinnati Fall. Fieke Wolf, without any visual emotion, with both hands pulls down the baseball hat so that it is tighter around her untied blond hair, which, as the wind picks up from the South East, in a momentary way, it covers her face. She continues staring down at the marked grave. “Ein Heute ist besser als zehn morgen,” Fieke says quietly to herself, she feels the vibration of the cellphone in her upper right inside breast pocket. Lifting the phone out, she sees that the message is from her old colleague Kurt Schneider.

"I will be in be Venice, Los Angles. Weather is better!

Will meet you there in three days. Let me know time and date."

Fieke places the phone back into her inner breast pocket of her trench coat, a piercing ray of sunlight emanates through the cloud break to where she is standing. She thinks about her mother's grave in Frankfurt, Germany. “The past is finished”, she says to herself in English, yet she feels a tinge of sorrow for her mother Erna Wolf, who was murdered in front of her when she was a young girl. Fieke looks down at the grave again, looking over the man's name, birth year and year of death. She turns and walks away.

"In the latest digital privacy breach, the online job recruitment portal JobReach in which millions of Americans have registered with and used daily to apply for jobs. Accessed by thousands of companies as their main outsourced online recruitment portal. May have had their personal information compromised by this widespread security breach, investigations suggest that it maybe the work of a sophisticated criminal syndicate with intentions to sift through personal data scanning for bank details, tax numbers and other personal information that could be used in identity theft..."

Sitting at a small table, Fieke turns and looks at the large television screen attached to the left side wall of the small shopping center. The sound is silent, a female news reader face is displayed, as beneath are the large subtitles of the news report. Without much interest in the displayed news, Fieke then looks down at the two cellphones, she has placed next to each other onto the table top. The one displaying the GPS map, the other with a lit up display which only shows the make and model illuminating on the screen of the cellphone. With the attached modified USB aerial connected. She sees the GPS on the other phone freeze unable to verify its location, as the loading icon spins around trying to reconnect. Then the screen disconnects with a message showing that it is unable to connect. She lifts her latte and sips, as two armed guards appear, the male wheeling a trolley, the other, a female guard, holding the empty deposit bag for the ATM machine – situated right of where Fieke is sitting drinking her coffee. She begins, mentally, counting the seconds as the two security offices attend the machine, first unlocking the front part of the ATM, lifting the outer shell up, as the second security guard, the male, stands back holding the trolley – eyeing the area in which Fieke is sitting. The female security officer leans forward and taps with her right index finger onto the internal number keypad with the memorized security code to release the secured deposit bag. She reaches in and hands the bag to the man who promptly straps it onto the trolley. Quickly replacing the full deposit bag, with an empty bag. She then resets the code, closing the lid and checking the customer front of the machine to see if it is functional. Satisfied, they both walk back to the main entrance which opens up to Walnut Street in lower Cincinnati. Fieke finishes counting. Eight minutes give and take, she says to herself as she looks back at where the male security guard was standing which was against the wall of the mall toilet and service hallway. Exhaling, she lifts the latte drinking the remaining coffee.

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Reading:  "Born Fatale is the Femme" from the novel "THE PRAXIS CONTIUUM"  (A.Glass 2018)