she received a phone call that somehow prevented her from staying a bit longer in the store.
She had to leave in a hurry, therefore she said goodbye to Damien handing him back the empty cup of the excellent coffee he offered her, and as if she wanted to repay him for his gracious hospitality, she pointed to a small statue in the showcase packed with various trinkets.
“This is nice, is it for sale?” She asked indicating a little statue of a man sitting on an old suitcase with a hat in his hand. As she looked at it better, she realized that she really liked it.
“For you it’s on sale” said Damien as he picked up the statue and handed it to Sonia, enjoying the chance to touch her hand.
When she came into contact with Damien’s hand, Sonia felt a shiver down her spine, a pleasant feeling, while she noticed that the man’s pupils widened and their colour went from emerald green into an indigo blue.
“Really, - said Sonia still under the effect of that sensation – how much is it? I like it a lot and I’d like to buy it for my office”.
“I told you it's on sale, so let's say eight euros and the promise that you'll come back to see me and to try an electronic cigarette, okay?”
Sonia opened her purse and took out the money, promised she would be back soon, maybe even on the next Saturday; she said goodbye and went quickly out of the store carrying the bag in which Damien had put the statue.
It had stopped raining, perhaps not for long. She looked at her watch, it was nine o’clock. Still nine? Maybe her battery was dead? She decided to check it out later, now she had to run back to work, or rather, to her Office.
Part six (a second chance)
She ran towards the bus stop, the bus no. 29 was scheduled for 9:15 and, if her watch hadn’t stopped, calculating her twenty minute stopover at the store, she had probably lost it. The next one would pass at 9:40. So there was no need to rush. Walking, she removed her watch from her wrist and checked the dial, which appeared to be running again and it signed 9:10. Sonia thought that some juice would do her good, to regain a little strength following the bad news she had received and her strange encounter. She entered the bar close to Damien’s store, the same one where Massimo had stopped due to his urge to smoke a cigarette.
It wasn’t a relaxing drink. As soon as they served it to her, outside she saw a parade of ambulances and police cars with their sirens on. People rushed out to see what had happened, even Sonia, who looked out and saw the cars trying to convey to a single lane, leaving room for the emergency vehicles, which were desperately trying to find a passage way in the traffic. From a distance, less than a kilometre away from her viewpoint, she could clearly see a black smoke cloud rising to the sky. For about fifteen minutes, she and many others, some patrons of the bar and others just passers-by, kept watching in order to understand what had happened. It had to be something serious.
Some rumours were passed from one person to the other, bringing back news that was mostly unreliable. Some said it was a bomb, some claimed that a tank truck had exploded, some already shouted about a terrorist attack, others said that it was a terrible car accident.
Sonia realized that the situation was getting worse. She would not have made it to the Office on time for her morning meeting, as she had promised her colleague who had called her earlier, so she thought it best to warn him of her delay or maybe even her impossibility to attend, which seemed to be the case. She went back into the bar and dialled her Office’s number.
Stefano, her colleague, anxiously answered following the first ring: “Sonia, finally! Is everything alright?”
“Yes, of course Stefano, why do you ask?”
“So you weren’t on that bus?”
“My God, no, - said Sonia, alarmed – what happened?”
“A bad accident, Sonia, they’re talking about it on the local radio station, the bus that you usually take, number twenty-nine, collided into a truck and caught fire. A disaster, they say that one person is dead and several wounded!”
Sonia recoiled. She couldn’t believe that such a thing had happened and that it had happened to her bus that morning, and at that hour. Yes... That hour... The hour her watch had stopped on, allowing her to avoid such a tragedy.
“I was late Stefano – said Sonia reassuring her colleague – so thankfully I didn’t take that bus. Now I see that there is a lot of traffic and I won’t be able to make it on time for the morning meeting. You can go ahead without me; we’ll catch up later, okay?”
“Okay Sonia, don’t worry!” And as Stefano hung up, she could hear the relief in his voice.
It was almost ten o’clock. Sonia considered that it would be better to go back home by foot, it wasn’t that far away.
The morning was gone now. Once home, she would try to put the pieces of the puzzle together, the absurd picture of a nightmarish morning, which ended luckily for her, compared to the tragedy if she had taken that unlucky bus no. 29.
Part seven (Damien’s resistance)
On Saturday mornings, especially a sunny one such as “that Saturday” of the end of April, Damien’s store was rarely visited, while in the afternoon there was always a lot of work, whatever the weather. Therefore Damien took advantage of that time to restore his manual regeneration atomizer, a job which gave him great satisfaction.
The work consisted in building a coil, namely a “spring” made by winding a resistance wire around a small screwdriver, forming a series of turns, very tight and not crossed, heated by a flame of a caramelizer and then pressed down again with pliers.
Finally this coil was mounted on two conductive towers, placed on a base, called “the heart” of the atomizer, and through this spring, he passed a cotton strip which he then put around it, after closing the whole device with the steel cylinder that was the pre-funnel of the atomizer.
Once he soaked the cotton with the liquid to be vaporized and once he assured himself that the resistance he built had the right value of desired ohms, once he set the right dispenser voltage, he pushed the button of his electric battery. Thus, the incandescent resistance caused the liquid with which the cotton was soaked to nebulize into the atomizer’s combustion chamber, coming out full of aroma and fluffiness, when a person inspired from the little tube called drip-tip. Every time he built a coil, he had the foresight to try its incandescence before he dipped the cotton into it, in order to be certain that the resistance became incandescent from the centre outward in a uniform manner and within the required time.
That Saturday morning, something extraordinary happened to Damien’s resistance, something which explains the need for the above explanation.
The coil had just been placed on the conductive towers, Damien had screwed the little screws that held the two ends of the resistance wire to the positive pole and to the negative pole, and was about to mount the stand on its battery to test its value, when Sonia stepped into the shop.
“Good morning!” said Damien. He sounded as though he was expecting her.
“Good morning Damien – said Sonia with a radiant smile – I came to thank you for the other morning, you have no idea how lucky I was to stop in here!”
Damien looked at her
