Maria

Assignment ... sit in a coffee shop and observe someone, imagine what they are like

...

She sits alone pouring over her technical manual. One hand curled into her face, the other limped onto of the hundreds of pages dedicated to statistical analysis. Maria, a young Pilipino woman, is sitting alone along the windowed wall of a quaint coffee shop. Barely a stranger passes by outside. She looks uncomfortable in the fastened mental chair, but her intense gaze suggests notions of correlation analysis sooth her rigid posture.

Maria occasionally adjusts her angle but never moves her hands. A jean suit encases her; concealing her stout frame. She dresses this way to stand out from the other students on campus, but she wears bright runners. While serious, she maintains a flexible and durable appearance.

Her coffee is to go, but something made her stay. Between pages, she blows the coffee's steam away but never sips. As time passes, she realizes she must attend a personal engagement. She looks anxious; concerned that her twenty minutes of study will not prepare her for next week's exam, but frightful of what is to come. Regardless, she quickly packs her text into a large, square pink purse covered in hearts and trots out of the coffee shop, leaving the untouched coffee behind.

Her 5'2" frame moves unencumbered through the door and onto the grey sidewalk. The runners show their true worth as she picks up her pace. The denim flexes easily around her brisk, pumping legs. Passers-by can hear metal clanking in the pink hearted purse, but nobody stops her. Nobody recognizes the sharp steel clattering of knives in Maria's purse.

...

Maria walks into her apartment. Her cluttered, cheap porno rags covering vomit stains. The TV's rabbit ears dangle to the floor, receiving nothing. Her brother, in a brown-stained undershirt and green underwear, draped himself over the yellow, crusty couch before passing out. Maria reviles him. She spent so many years collecting these obscure pornographic magazines, touching all genres from the grotesque to fantastical. She whimpered when as pulled a magazine from a mound of her brother's underwear. Her prized magazine featuring a green, gelatinous woman with one breast, six eyes and a vagina the size of a Buick was tore down the middle.

Instantly, she grabbed the knives from her bag. They were slender, double-edged, and showed no use until now. Maria turned to her brother ...