Good morning all. Today is the first day of December. I know, it is a naturally occurring start to the month. But those thirty day months always seem to catch me by surprise. Like stepping down when you think there is another step only to find there isn’t one. I have that slight off balance with every thirty day month (February is always a little worse). Even when I remind myself it is coming, I still always feel slightly off kilter. But it is on;y a momentary issue. By noon the feeling will have evaporated. However we can’t hang around waiting for noon now can we? So off balance or not, let’s start the morning prompt. ready, set, go.
I like this one. I have no idea about the story attached to it, but I like the character. Or the beginnings of the character. She seems like someone I can work with. Once I find a story to put her into.
Wednesday, December 1st: It was cozy.
It was cozy. She turned the word over in her mind. Cozy. She tasted it’s flavor. It seemed to fit. Cozy was not a word she used in her everyday life. It didn’t fit. Her world seemed mostly composed of sharp angles and hard points. While there was some comfort in the familiarity of it, cozy was not a word she would use to describe any aspect of it.
This, this was certainly cozy.
She lay half curled in the middle of the four poster feathered bed. The pillows, save where her head rested, were plumped. Her head nestled in a crater of its own design cushioned, yet supported. Her position was relaxed.
When she arrived the night before she was so tired that she remembered only stumbling into the room, locking the door and shucking off her clothing on the way to the bed. She managed to get a shirt to sleep in out of her bag before she fell to the bed and unconscious oblivion, but that was about it. The finer points of the room were not noted.
Now, as she lay in the bed, relaxed and refreshed from a solid night sleep she could appreciate the details of the room. The bed was cozy and not only was her body in a relaxed position in it, but she came awake easily, calmly. She surfaced from sleep as though she was slowly walking out of the ocean. There was no jarring call to wakefulness, just a peaceful transition.
She could see very little of the room from where she lay, but the light coming in through the windows was soft, tentative and she doubted the time was much past daybreak.
Somehow she wasn’t surprised. While she was rarely left to wake on her own, what woke her usually arrived with the newly risen sun. It was a rhythm her body was used to. She thought about rolling over, closing her eyes and attempting more sleep, but found that despite awakening on her own, she was fully awake. She knew after the rigors of the last few months her body could more than likely use more rest, but it seemed disinclined to take it at the moment.
As she stretched and began to rise, she wondered if it was because her mind and body knew that today would not be like the past few months. The things that dominated her world were not present. As she sat up, she wondered if it was curiosity or eagerness causing the wakefulness.
As she sat fully up in bed, she realized it was probably her bladder. Her eyes scanned the room looking for relief. Despite the room looking like an eighteenth-century holdover, they hadn’t gone as far as chamber pots and she spied the fixtures of a modern looking restroom through the open door next to what she thought was a closet.
She slipped from the bed, her mind sighing softly as she left cozy behind and padded barefoot across the room. The bathroom was far more modern a vintage than the furniture in the bedroom, but it looked as if the 1920s were as modern as the establishment was willing to go. Still it was spotlessly clean and so white that looking at the porcelain fixtures, white tiles and white painted walls made her eyes water. The heavy scent of lemon and vinegar didn’t help matters.
Ten til Midnight 