And once again it is Friday. We now have four more writing prompts in the stockpile of story ideas. Shall we try for a fifth? I think we should. And for those of you waiting for the August Chapter of Oak Hill, it has been delayed but will be coming. I read through later chapters, got a bright idea and had to go back and revamp this chapter so that the new idea made sense in later ones. It will be out soon though. But for now, the morning prompt.
Not quite sure what happened at the dinner party. But I do want it to be epic.
Friday, August 6th: We started towards our car.
We started towards our car. As we left we offered the same statements usually offered when leaving a dinner party. Thanks for having use. What a wonderful night. We must do this again sometime soon. The statements were all uttered. Smiles were given, but there was something flat in the delivery and reception.
We reached the car, maintaining our silence as we closed our respective doors, fastened our seatbelts and started the ignition. In fact, we stayed silent in our vehicle until we had driven around the corner and the house was no longer in sight.
“Well that was…” I began.
George nodded. “I was certainly something.”
“Yeah,” I replied. The silence returned, but this time it was a contemplative silence as we each tried to get a handle on the evening’s events. We expected a dinner party. In fact we expected a slightly boring dinner party. George knew John from the office. He worked with him on occasion but spent no real time with him. I met Lucy a few times in passing. She always seemed a slightly nervous sort of person. She tended to twitter on about things in a light girlish voice, paired with a high piteched laugh that always sounded both nervous and forced.
When she laughed it always sounded like the result of someone pulling the string on a dolly. It was inserted into the conversation because an external factor deemed laughter appropriate to the moment, not because she found something amusing.
I anticipated boredom followed by a headache and had in fact double checked our medicine cabinet before leaving to make certain the evening’s expected aftermath could be adequately dealt with.
Somehow the evening didn’t quite turn out the way any of us expected.
“Did you know there would be others?” I asked.
George shook his head as he slowed to wait at the stoplight. “No, John asked if we would like to join him and his wife for dinner. I only accepted because he asked when Mr. Patterson was within earshot. Otherwise I would have made excuses.”
I nodded. While I didn’t normally go within ten miles of his office, my own office being in the opposite direction, and had never met Mr. Patterson, I heard the stories. He tended to fixate on one thing for several months before something else caught his eye and he switched focus. At the moment his attention was directed towards turning the department into a community. Had he overheard George refusing the dinner invitation, there would have been consequences.
“Well hopefully that counts as doing your part for team solidarity,” I said.
“I expect it will.”
“At least it wasn’t…boring,” I ventured, trying to find an appropriate adjective for the evening.
George laughed. “No it certainly wasn’t boring,” he agreed.
Over all this evening featured a cast of people who, when looked at, would seem to be average people. There was nothing to state outwardly that they were anything out of the ordinary. They were the sort you would see at home improvement stores on the weekends, talking about building decks and giving a fresh coat of paint to the living room. In fact one of the women I did see picking out paint when I had to dash into the store for wood repair glue a few weeks prior. She was debating between eggshell and ecru for the walls of the living room.
Ten til Midnight 