Waiting to react

Abby had always wondered about Gerald. Gerald was one of the inpatients at St. Vincent’s mental hospital. Gerald was catatonic, but when she volunteered, Abby always tried to include Gerald. She liked to play cards with the inpatients, but she would often just talk with them. She wanted to let them know someone on the outside still thought about them. St. Vincent’s had its share of violent patients, but the staff was careful to keep anyone remotely dangerous out of the lounge when there were volunteers. However, when Abby visited the day previous, a normally reticent, but safe, Eduardo began shouting at Abby during a game of cards. He stood up to chase her, and he would’ve caught her before the orderlies reacted, except Gerald stood up, in all his atrophied glory, to be tripped over by Eduardo.

Tardiness

I was bad Sunday because of a damn board game. I didn’t make up for it because I was sick until today. Expect a story Sunday.

Doubt

David Atengale believed he was lost. He began to doubt the guide, Sergey. He began to doubt himself for paying the guide twenty-thousand rubles. He began to doubt the man who financed the expedition, his cousin Michael Atengale. David and Michael hadn’t spoken for over a decade until a month ago. The Atengale family was large and dispersed, their grandparents and respective parents had died, they were never close, etc. But then David received a call from his cousin, inviting him to lead an expedition. His cousin said he knew of a treasure buried about 250 miles northeast of Tomsk, near the Yenisey river. Of course, David was the only cousin who could speak Russian, Michael wasn’t allowed to leave th country for various legal reasons, and the expedition would consist of David and a guide he would hire in Yuzhakovo. So, David and Sergey continued on in their ATVs. Suddenly Sergey stopped. There was a 4-foot cube of gold sitting in the middle of the forest.

The murder

She really hated his music, but it was his car, his rules. She sulkily stared out the window, watching as the mirror image houses in suburbia went by. Her eye caught something that should not have been. “Turn around!” she said. “What? Why?” he responded. “I saw a girl getting tied up through a window!” she exclaimed. The car moved forward. He decided to humor her. After all, she hadn’t complained about the music. The car turned around. “Stop! It’s this house,” she said. She climbed over him to look out his window. In the window of the house, she did see a girl getting tied. But she was laughing with her father while they played with Christmas lights.

The Mailbox

(lol, first missed day. I was too confused after playing a 4 hour board game to remember what day it was. Anyway, here’s a story)

It seemed the green Ford Focus was trying to leave summer and civilization in the dust. It was barreling down the dirt road at nearly seventy miles per hour. Without a car in sight, the road was its entirely. The man driving the car was obsessed, possessed by an inescapable ritual. It was near enough to noon that some old-timer watching from an all-but abandoned farmhouse would see the sun blocked as the car went by. Since AgriCorp had taken over the farmland here, those old-timers were few and far between.

Across the flat earth, his goal was in sight. His childhood home. He could see the silo his father built, a beacon for his return. He stopped in front of the house, where there was an old mailbox. He gingerly opened it and reached inside. Nothing. His ritual was not entirely in vain; the postal service still ran. Every now and then he would find junk mail or a credit card offer, but never what he set out to find.

The Laundromat

He had finally worked up the courage to talk to her. After weeks careful glances while folding underwear, he knew he was ready. What more did providence need to tell him? They used the same detergent, bleach, and fabric softener. For more loads of whites than he could remember he had thought about her, and what he would finally say. He obviously couldn’t ask her for a quick cup of coffee AFTER laundry was done, he’d just have to time it so that he asked her when the dryer started. He had carefully been observing her patterns for the previous week, and although she hadn’t kept a precise schedule, the earliest she had ever shown up was one. And here he was, two-o-clock on a Saturday, watching for his linen love. Then he saw her, she was getting dropped off, and kissing her boyfriend good-bye.

Night

[Note: I published a story on Tuesday, but RSS seemed not to have caught it. If it happens again, I'll take more drastic measures.]

Things had been different since she started sleeping over; some things better, others worse. I didn’t know how to begin to judge some of the changes. One change, in particular, seemed pretty innocuous: leaving the light in the bathroom off at night. I, like many, need to urinate in the middle of the night, and I, as a man, prefer using light to guide my aim. But the change seemed reasonable, and so I consented. My biggest concern had always been forgetting about the seat, but so far either my memory or aim had always been true. While I can’t speak for memory, I can say my aim couldn’t have been worse. Little did I know that the heater had made it a perfect spot for a resting cat… At least I got a laugh out of the ER doctor when I explained why I signed in under the name Claude Balzac.

The veil’s thin at a mile high

I was abruptly hurled into consciousness. It was happening more often, but I knew the routine. Step one: location. I’m at a bar, it’s pretty crowded. Step two: action. There is a beer in my hand, and a boarding pass in front of me. Return to step one, I’m in a bar at the Airport. I should get to my gate. I checked my watch, thirty minutes until take-off. I looked over at the bartender, trying to gauge whether or not I paid. I checked my wallet, put down a five. I’m either a bastard or a great tipper. I turned around and… What the hell. I’m in a Quizno’s. This is worse than before, usually there’s a blackout before it happens. I turned around to make sure. What the hell kind of person puts a Quizno’s and a bar in the same retail space? I looked at my ticket: The Denver airport does. I stumbled towards my gate carrying what I could only assume was my duffel bag. I finally boarded. I could sleep. Respite. Then they came. One man, his mother, and his three ex-wives. The conversation that ensued could be described as confusing at best, a terrifying whirlwind of bickering at worst. As soon as I was sure I was to be lost in a sea of retrospective envy, the televisions lowered. It was time to hear about the safety features of the Boeing
737 aircraft. Then the comforting voice of the disembodied flight attendant began to talk to me. Using my name. And then I blacked out.

Twelve Angry Volts

There were only two left in the office. It was night on Friday and I was getting sick of waiting. I looked over to see who they were, as if it had changed in the last half hour. Arnold and Mark. The new guys. They were clearly terrified of the boss, and rightly so. Keith was the world biggest asshole, like something you’d expect on an elephant. But it was getting close to eight, they had been here thirteen hours. Keith must’ve shown them a car battery with leads or something. I returned my gaze to my monitor. The filters meant that all I could look at were company policy pages. Greg from IT had taught me how to look at the one nudie picture on the entire intranet, but by now I was pretty sure I could recite all four-hundred and eighty-thousand pixels by heart. Arnold and Mark stood up to leave. I suppose I could’ve been doing work, but that would entirely be against the point of my subversive behavior. I pulled out my lock picking gear and cruised over to Keith’s office. I opened the door and… Holy shit, I should have taken that car battery business a bit more seriously.

The Rant

Sam took a huge breath. He’d finally finished. “I didn’t know you felt that way,” Eugene replied. Eugene actually had known that Sam was pissed, and mostly took the opportunity to see how long Sam could vent before finishing. Four minutes and twenty-eight seconds. Five was the point that Eugene decided he would start acting on Sam’s expressed feelings. But Eugene would have to at least pretend like he had listened for the next couple of days. Eugene was pretty sure he was in the right, but these rants were becoming a pretty regular occurrence. Eugene counted this to be the tenth time. Anytime something happened ten times, Eugene felt the need to graph it. Ten was large enough for the law of large numbers to reveal something. So he went to excel and plotted the rants against every variable he could think of. Nothing interesting. He gave one last effort, and his final graph appeared. This one actually taught him something: It was a dick move to keep sleeping with your roommate’s sister.