I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend, if it was a holiday for you. If it wasn’t, I hope you had a good regular weekend. As for me, I ate too much. Waaay too much. There was the large meal on Thursday and then the nibbling on left overs for the rest of the weekend. It was a lot of rich, once a year food and I am desperately craving a salad. I am also ready to get back into normal working mode. So let’s get started with the last writing prompt of November. Are you ready? Excellent. Start those timers and lets all see what we get.
Not quite where I thought maple syrup would take me, but start to something if I worked with it.
Monday, November 30th: The scent of maple syrup was strong.
The scent of maple syrup was strong. It stained the air and made it feel somehow sticky. He pressed the swinging door open and took a step through to the back. There it was, the cause of the sweet, sticky air. Gushed over the floor was a deep pool of the stuff, amber coated floor tiles greeted him and he stopped by the edge of its pool.
From his vantage point he could see into the pantry and saw the edge of an industrial sized container of maple syrup. Unlike many restaurants this place didn’t use the standard small prepackaged containers of syrup. As a place famous for their pancakes and waffles of all description, serving items like eggs and bacon as side items with the pancake meal, they stocked their own pitchers of maple to go with it.
Alan wondered how much the place went through in a week. He didn’t want to even contemplate the month or even the year’s tally. He could see the bullet holes in the plastic from here. The maple was the victim of several stray bullets. He knew at some point he’d look and see just how far into the pantry the bullets went. Partially, he knew it would help him track the movements of the shooter, but most of it was curiosity. He would wonder. And if he wondered about part of the crime scene then he would fixate on it and not focus on the rest. If he looked he could dismiss and move on. At the moment the door was clogged with the maple syrup flow. It spilled out of the doorway covering the entire pathway to the interior in sticky gold. There was only enough room to open the door and take one step inside.
The pool covered his entire walkway from here. And where the syrup left off, the blood began. He could see the blood pool and the right arm of one of the victims. The rest of the victim was concealed by the corner, the bend in the walls that would take him into the actual kitchen. The shirt sleeve had been rolled up and on the wrist of the body was tattooed a maple leaf. The hand stretched from the blood pool to the syrup one, fingers dipping into the pool of amber.
For a moment it looked as though the victim was merely lying on a sheet of red but had bled out maple syrup. He shook his head.
There was no way clear to reach the body, but he could hear movement in the back and no one had tracked their way through the pools. He knew if they had there would be a multitude of cursing as well as tracks. The pools were undisturbed. He did not want to be the one to disturb them and bring down the wrath of the technicians. Until he knew this spot was photographed, he would need to seek another way around.
He drew a deep breath and smelled the acrid scent of burnt meat. As he backed out of the kitchen and returned to the dining room, he wondered which of the victims ordered sausage as their side. As he moved across the silent dining room and to the secondary door leading to the back, he contemplated the victims and their possible dining choices. It made for more pleasant thoughts than why they never received their orders. Although that too, he would contemplate in time.
Ten til Midnight 