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Photo credit: Rainbow Delicious

So far this blog has been a bit of a mind-sharing activity with a few reviews of bars, restaurants and books thrown in for good measure. Today, I thought I might try something very different. I had a snippet of a story come to me last night and, while I haven’t written much of anything fiction-wise since I was in high school, I thought I’d give myself a chance to develop it. And, lucky you! I’m going to share it here.

Here goes nothing!

***

He’d been at this a long time. So long that the faces had blurred, if he’d even noticed them. So long that the names were gone. But they were something he’d never kept. When he thought back, all he saw was so-still bodies and red. So much red. He didn’t look back often.

He was alone and it had been this way for a long time. For someone in his line of work, you couldn’t keep anyone close. You had to be cold and numb so you could roll onto the next one and the next. You couldn’t stop. You couldn’t make connections. Because inevitably those connections would come back to haunt you, be used against you.

So, alone, he moved through the night, unseen, unheard. The only time he felt alive was when his phone rang and the voice told him what to do. Between the completion of each assignment and the next call, he floated aimlessly. Time didn’t feel real. He couldn’t tell you what he did. He didn’t even remember himself. It was like he waited in the darkness, surrounded by silence and the smell of copper and cigarettes, until the little electronic voice woke him up and gave him purpose.

This haze of doing and not-doing was all he could remember. There was nothing before it and he couldn’t imagine anything after it. His whole being was focused on his phone, waiting for what the voice in his phone would tell him to do. That was how it had always been. It was how he liked it.

***

I know it’s a little dark. Probably all that Stephen King I read in my teens and early twenties. I just typed it down as I thought it with very little editing. I didn’t really know where I was going with it and purposely kept it kind of vague and without much resolution. It was really just a small scene that came to me as I was getting ready for bed and I thought, ‘have a go at writing that up’. And so I did.