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 216: For a long time he stared at the screen, fingers poised above the keyboard.
For a long time he stared at the screen, fingers poised above the keyboard. There was no real conscious thought. His mind was still a blank, and oddly heavy space. His fingers began moving over the keyboard and James found himself going to one of the old message boards that his particular group once used.
It had fallen out of fashion years ago. He doubted anyone even remembered he had the passcodes to it. He doubted it was even active and suspected it had been removed. He doubted any of them remembered it was there, if it was still there, somewhere in the ether, in the back roads of the internet.
‘One of the rural routes well off the information superhighway,’ James thought. The site loaded and prompted him for his password. James paused. He half expected to be greeted with a page not found message. The prompt for his password made his fingers hesitate over the keys. He was supposed to avoid any contact with anyone from his past life. He was supposed to stay away from all things associated with the James he used to be.
Was this a violation of the rules?
He wasn’t sure. ‘There were only four of us,” he reminded himself. Long ago James set up the message board as a way for the others to reach him when they needed him. Cell phone coverage was spotty then and he remembered wanting to corral the phone messages, thinking that if they had to type a message onto the board, they would at least think it through before just picking up the phone to call him to fix something. At that point, the calls were out of hand. They still used the phone for emergencies, but the message board was where the concerns, but not immediate emergencies went.
When it was in use, he checked it twice a day. After a time, the calls became less and less and the messages became friendly chatter, usually between the three of them rather than calls to James as they began to ease out of party mode and get their lives into a more controlled format. James still checked in periodically, but commented less and less, finally ceasing to check it at all.
He stared at the passcode prompt and thought about Tucker. Instead of clicking on his personal passcode, James clicked on the administrator page. He deliberately kept it as a separate identification. His hopes were that one of the others would eventually take over administrative duties and he would be able to let it go.
‘By then cellphones moved on and texting was habit,’ James thought. He entered his admin code and navigated to the page that would show him recent history. In this he expected a line about no activity in months, years even. In this too, he was surprised.
Ten til Midnight 