Welcome one and all to the morning writing prompt. I hope your brains are ready to wake. I’m not entirely sure mine is, but never-the-less it is time. So without further ado…Get those timers ready, Stretch the fingers, and lets get the morning fifteen in. See you in fifteen.
Sigh, now I really want to know what Adam did for a living and why he chose a house here. I hadn’t worked out that bit by the time the timer dinged. Something to think about and work out later I suppose.
Tuesday, November 24th: It looked as though no one was home.
It looked as though no one was home. The house was dark and quiet. Like the others in this neighborhood it was set back from the street by a large swath of lawn. On either property edge was a thickly planted row of junipers. In the overcast afternoon light they looked just like large green triangles set along the border. They stretched up about twenty feet.
‘Like a child’s picture of a giant Christmas tree,’ Adam thought. ‘Without the ornaments.’ The impression was enhanced by the fact that the neighbors chose more deciduous trees to line their property edges on the other side of the fence and in the winter’s chill those trees were mere bare black bones behind the greenery.
The fence was a tall one on the sides of the house, providing privacy to all who lived there. It was eight feet tall towards the back, dropped down to six feet as it approached the garage and then dropped down in stepped sections until it met the side walk. There it met with the stone wall that formed the original border to the property. The gray field stones were expertly laied and topped with a limestone cap. The cap had a slight point in the center and then slopped down to the sides. It was a lot point, designed to encourage rain from draining off the sides and discourage those who would sit on it.
Adam stared at the house. It too was a bit of a hold over, although it had been upgraded and modified so he thought of it more like a Franken-house. A Queen Anne with too many face lifts to be recognized by her high school friends. He wasn’t certain if that officially qualified it for monster hood or not. As he studied the house and grounds he waited.
It looked better in the photos.
At least the few he remembered seeing.
While the house looked empty, someone was supposed to be here. The estate agent was supposed to bring him the keys and walk him through the details.
He shook his head. ‘My own fault really,’ he thought. He was too buys in the past few months to even give the images sent to him more than a cursory glance. He checked the inspection notes and found the house was sound. He checked with the authorities and found there were no leans on the property. He checked the price and found it was lower than he expected, but not disturbingly low, and he found it had more than enough square footage for him to live comfortably. Satisfied he authorized the purchase and let the process grind through while he worked on wrapping up his final project for the company. Once it was finished he would be released from his contract. Everything else took a back seat to that.
“I may have overestimated the amount of square footage I need,” Adam said to himself. He had always been bad at spatial arrangements. He generally lived in whatever space was handed to him. Sometimes it was a small apartment, other times it was a tent in a place humanity rarely visited let alone lived. The small spaces always seemed confining and he promised himself when he was done, he would change that, get more space. Looking at the house, he thought he might have gone too far the other way in his corrections.
Ten til Midnight 