The Fifteen Minute Novel is a novel written fifteen minutes at a time with each week day’s section starting with the sentence from the previous day. At least it is attempting to be a novel. For now I am just aiming at one continuous story, worked on for fifteen minutes each day. Started Friday January 1st, 2021 (in case you want to search for the beginning. I can’t wait to see where it ends up. It could be good, or it could be a mess. We’ll have to see. For now, here is today’s fifteen minutes.
Day 128: Thinking he should hurry, James walked to the stairs to take a quick look at the second floor.
Thinking he should hurry, James walked to the stairs to take a quick look at the second floor. The upstairs tour didn’t take long. There were three bedrooms and two bathrooms. One of the bathrooms was attached to the largest bedroom and he assumed that was the master suite. The bathrooms had all of the necessary elements required to function and the bedrooms were empty boxes. The bathrooms had the same tile as the kitchen and the hall and bedrooms had the same carpet as the living room.
Having seen all there was to see, James went back down the stairs and hurried outside. In the time he was upstairs, Tucker managed to move both of the cars and the moving van was in the process of backing down the driveway.
“You might want to open the garage door,” Tucker called when the van stopped moving and the driveway was safe to approach. “We can stack anything you don’t have a place for there so you can still have space to move once everything is in the house.”
Nodding at the wisdom, James looked at the house keys and found the one labeled for the garage door. He unlocked the door and lifted the wide rolling door up out of the way. The garage was an empty concrete box that smelled vaguely of gasoline. Despite the scent, it was clean. Behind him, he heard the door to the moving van lift. James turned and saw two men extending a ramp from the back of the van to the ground.
He moved out of the way. Despite Tucker’s assertion that he was there to help James move, he had very little input. The two movers lifted and carted everything. There was some sort of company policy that prevented James and Tucker from helping with the lifting. James however acted a a strange sort of traffic director. Master bedroom, spare rooms, kitchen, living room and garage were the destinations he gave.
Most of the items were boxed and labeled so most of his efforts were in dealing with the few unlabeled items. The unloading didn’t take long. Most of James personal effects were stripped from his belongings as they might point to a life other than this one. All of his clothes were intact. They might not be considered appropriate for the accountant he was currently being, but they weren’t individual enough to make him as himself. They were generic corporate armor.
Mostly it had been keepsakes that were shorn from his possessions. ‘And even those weren’t exactly sentimental.’ He thought. Company awards were the bulk of them. Polo shirts and t-shirts with company logos or from events that the company sponsored was the next largest category. There were a few odds and ends left over from childhood but there weren’t many. His ex-wife’s obsession with having a catalog perfect home hadn’t allowed much space for sentimentality and when his mother picked out the furnishings for his new place post-divorce, she jettisoned most of what remained in the name of a fresh start.
‘I think this might be more of a fresher start than she intended.’
There were a few pieces his mother chose that were deemed to identifiable, but as most of the items were purchased at stores that sold multiples of items rather than individually crafted pieces, there weren’t many of those.
As the movers walked by with their items, what James could see looked like items belonging to a stranger. He recognized them in the vague way you remembered something that you saw at a dinner party, but they didn’t seem like his own things. He felt disconnected. As he watched the parade of possessions he wondered what in his effects he could actually pass to Morris that would even remotely look personal.
Ten til Midnight 