Stuart Marshall

CHARACTER FILES: Stuart Marshall
         Stuart Marshall was parked in a residential neighborhood outside the home of his next fare. He mashed the horn. He waited. He checked his phone to make sure the address was correct. He mashed the horn again. Neighbors were looking through parted curtains and cracked drapes, but screw'em. He wasn't being paid to wait, wouldn't get paid until someone got in the backseat, so technically he was off-the-clock and could do whatever the heck he wanted to do on his own time. Before he could mash on the horn again, however, God ripped open the sky and mashed on His. The noise was deafening and Stuart immediately covered his ears, but it did little to help. He briefly uncovered his ears, just to open the glove compartment, hoping to find a remedy there, gum maybe, but found nothing even as he spilled the contents onto the passenger seat and floor. The noise slammed against his eardrums relentlessly and his head pounded from the terrible pressure. God had his head pinched between a finger and thumb like a ripe grape, squeezing it. He rummaged through the mess on the seat and found a piece of gum. His mother's voice resounded through his skull, "If you're travelling from low to high pressure, chew gum to equalize it." He desperately reached for the gum and popped the piece in his mouth, chewing furiously. He thought maybe the pressure did ease a little, but he still wondered if any minute the windows would blow out, before or after his eardrums he wasn't sure. He was looking out the passenger side window when the green, scaly reptilian creature poked its face against the glass. He might have screamed -- he was pretty sure he had, but he couldn't hear it. The reptile knocked on the window. It didn't break. Then, the horn stopped blaring. He locked the doors with a push of a button, put the car in drive, and managed to leave the subdivision without knocking over any mailboxes or running over any children playing in the street, but he swerved twice to accomplish the feat and it was a close thing each time.

[Author's note: I have rated this 13+ but the two words that I am unsure about are heck and screw'em -- do these rate higher? Anyway, this is a character within a larger piece, but this section seems fairly complete within itself -- rate away!]