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    Sprainter
    Sprainter
    Sprainter
    Ebook124 pages1 hour

    Sprainter

    By JT Therrien

    ()

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    About this ebook

    When MrE, an idealist street artist and acolyte, leads the citizens of a politically and religiously oppressed dystopic city to the truth of their existence, the military regime targets him for elimination. But when he is suddenly discovered by a pretty street artist named OZone, revealing the truth takes on a whole new importance. Love will set them free. Or will it?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJT Therrien
    Release dateJun 11, 2015
    ISBN9780921473220
    Sprainter
    Author

    JT Therrien

    Fine Form Press is a boutique publisher committed to working with a limited number of authors such as JT Therrien. We publish some of JT's novellas and novels in a variety of genres, including: commercial; YA; paranormal; romances; and, love stories. Along with JT's art-themed and cancer-themed fiction, Fine Form Press also publishes some of his inspirational, Catholic-themed, fiction.

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      Book preview

      Sprainter - JT Therrien

      Sprainter

      Copyright 2015 by JT Therrien

      Published by Fine Form Press

      ISBN: 978-0-921473-22-0

      Cover Designed by Fine Form Press

      Smashwords Edition

      This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The characters are products of the author's imagination and are used fictitiously.

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting this author's work.

      Cover image(s) from Flickr.com creative commons.

      Creative Commons License link:

      https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode

      Untitled original image copyright (c) 2009 by Jorge Gonzalez https://www.flickr.com/photos/macabrephotographer/3620569043

      Original image(s) modified under Creative Commons license terms by Fine Form Press 2015.

      1 Corinthians 13:8-9, 13

      Love never fails. Prophecies will cease, tongues will be silent, knowledge

      will pass away.

      Our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesying is imperfect. There are

      in the end three things that last: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of

      these is love.

      Author's note on St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body

      One of the themes in Sprainter is the exploration of the Theology of the Body, a Bible-based, Christo-centric theology developed by Pope John Paul II in the 1980s. In this theology, man and woman begin their relationship by respecting each other. Their mutual attraction and growing love eventually culminate in a complete and total giving of self - through the sacrament of Holy Matrimony in the Church. John Paul II wrote the TOB in response to men and women using each other, which has led to the objectification of both, and ultimately to the tragic prevailing Culture of Death.

      Sprainter, in dealing with OZone and MrE's relationship, is wholly Christian. Specifically, it adheres to the Magisterium and it promotes Catholic Church teachings.

      Table of Contents

      Sprainter

      Midpoint

      About the author

      Sprainter

      by

      JT Therrien

      The black-clad figure materialized from the darkness, a shadow detaching itself from the night. The orange glow of a sodium vapor streetlamp outlined an arm, a leg, a pair of rubber-soled runshoes. He stepped onto the catwalk. It gently swayed with the transfer of his weight, and he glanced down twenty feet to the ground. Realizing his mistake, the figure closed his eyes until the vertigo passed. Cool sweat ran down his flanks as his hand pressed a stencil of the cross against the cerulean wall. The arm arced quickly from one side of his body to the other, the motion creating a hiss and a puff of golden mist. As the cloud dissipated, he leaned back and held his breath. He peeled the cardboard from the wall and nodded in satisfaction.

      A Celtic cross, the intricate knotwork dizzying, shone golden against the brick background. The image caught the orange light and the cross seemed to rise, as if God Himself had lifted it out of the turbulent sea, toward Heaven.

      The sprainter dropped the paint-dampened stencil and reached for another can. He shook it with a series of jerky motions and, using another stencil, sent a red spray hissing through the night. Pulling the spraint-splattered cardboard away revealed the message John 3:16 in blood red letters. The bottom of each stenciled letter dripped down the wall like the Savior's blood, shed on the cross.

      Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in Thee, the figure prayed, quickly making the sign of the cross. Finished, he crouched into the pool of shadows at the bottom of the wall and gathered up the soggy stencils and errant spraint cans.

      Once upon a time, a long time ago, he remembered how this wall had been painted a cheery, hopeful, peach color. Back then, the sprainter had been one of the local elementary school kids asked to paint a politically correct, multicultural-themed image showing a collection of people of different ages, faiths, and colors, all getting along together in the hood.

      But that was before.

      After years of constant abuse by stenners, sprainters, and graffers, the owner of the building, a surly grocery store operator, finally gave in to the practical esthetics of blandness; when the surface became covered by overlapping layers of graffiti, some obscene, most of it unfathomable cryptic messages posted by roving streeter gangs, the grocer simply re-covered the wall in a flat color, the paint bought in bulk, knowing he would need to repaint the wall again soon enough.

      The condition of the wall, the whole building, and the neighborhood in general, reflected Tronno's industrial roots; rundown, lifeless, abandoned, and falling into decay and ruin, the chaos spread from the inner city out toward the burbs, gangrene acting in reverse. The stenner paused in his actions and searched the darkened facades across the street. Broken windows and boarded up doors confirmed the city's pervasive economic and architectural downfall.

      Not for the first time, he thought he lived in a decaying metropolis.

      If only caped avengers like Batman were real. The world, this city, would be so different.

      In the past, someone would have refilled the bullet holes, so common that the sprainter privately referred to the pockmarks as wall acne, but with city employee cutbacks, the deep holes got sprainted over, repainted, stenned, repainted, and sprainted over, again and again, the sprainters, the grocer, and the stenners involved in a complicated dance of transitory cultural signs, meanings, and counter-signs.

      As to El Alcalde and his censorship . . . the despotic ruler remained the improvisational element of this dance.

      The sprainter cocked an ear to the mechanical wails screaming for his attention: polirens, at least three of them, on the move. Fast. He thought he discerned the cries of a firen, too, although he couldn't smell any smoke drifting his way. The pols might have been chasing down another stenner. Father sent many out on evangelizing missions, and only Father knew where all the acolytes were at any given time.

      Most likely, though, the polirens were chasing a gang of streeters. Or maybe they got one of the other acolytes, a voice whispered insidiously in his mind. The panic-inducing wails reached their crescendo a block away. The cries soon faded, moving further down Front Avenue.

      They're getting too close, he reflected, the thought rising from his thrumming heart. He gathered the rest of his materials with shaky hands and told himself he was safe. Minutes later a large group of streeters, maybe thirty of them, dressed in dark rags shifting into amorphous forms, streamed from a nearby alley. Rending the night with drunken shouts and laughter, they boasted about some new act of vandalism, ecstatic bravado bolstered by the recent close call with the pols.

      Some observant streeter spotted the newly-painted cross, and a few teen voices, breaking from the effort, shouted out the opening lines of the Our Father, until the rest of their crew threatened them into silence.

      As he waited for the gang to move along, the prayer reminded him of Heaven, and the artist looked up into the starlit sky. One more day without seeing airplanes or hearing the sonic boom of jets. Not even a contrail to indicate someone had flown by and acknowledged this corner of the Earth, to maybe report the turmoil going on down below. Nothing. The feeling of complete abandonment threatened to overwhelm him again, and he shook off the melancholy mood. Motionless like a statue, straining to hear any further noise, he remained crouched in front of his street art. Once the group of rowdy streeters disappeared deeper into the maze of abandoned downtown streets, silence returned, and the artist breathed easier. He picked up his worn canvas bag and prepared to move on to the next canvas, a wall not too far away. A noise, near and sounding as loud as the earlier polirens, raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

      He held his breath and listened.

      There. The same noise again. Familiar, like the scraping of a sole against alley grit.

      Maybe . . . there?

      No, nothing, he decided. Just nerves. Or maybe a rat scrounging in the alley for scraps of food, or escaping, becoming food for something bigger than it.

      Leave no evidence, Father always told them, the old priest's sonorous voice exuding a mixture of confidence and trust in the teens and twens who lived in the church as he delivered his nightly instructions.

      Heeding the priest's advice, the stenner folded and wrapped the wet John 3:16 sten in a square of thick plastic. As he made room for the used sten, he inventoried the contents of his tote bag — the article ripped, patched, and re-sewn until practically nothing of the original hemp bag remained — to confirm what supplies he still had at his disposal. He spotted a dozen or so cans of spraint in a variety of colors, some cardboard stens, cut up and sequentially numbered, a couple of paintbrushes, and a clean change of clothes — also black as the night, just like the baggie pants, T-shirt, and hooded

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