Good morning. we’ve reached the middle of the week and I feel fine. I woke up two minutes before my alarm today. While that isn’t much it was enough that I could blink myself into full wakefulness instead of being jarred out of a deep sleep by the alarm. That always makes my mornings run so much more smoothly. Brain jarring is not the preferred method of waking up. A necessary one I’ll grant you, but not preferred. So awake and not shaken, lets get this morning started with a writing prompt. Tools of word making at the ready? Timers set? Fabulous, let’s go.
This week’s theme seems to be secrets. Thus far every main character I’ve written has one. I think it may be because the novel I am working on I am trying to figure out which secrets get revealed and which need to stay hidden for a little longer. It seems to have spilled into other things. Nevertheless, I kind of like this one. I may come back to it.
Wednesday, February 16th: “You were expected an hour ago.”
“You were expected an hour ago,” he said tapping his watch face with his fingernail.
I smiled and nodded my head. I didn’t speak as I hurried to my assigned spot. Or Hailey’s assigned spot rather. Despite what my supervisor thought, I was supposed to have the day off. Hailey called me about five minutes prior begging me to fill in for her. There was some sort of emergency and she knew she wouldn’t be able to make it in.
I threw on my uniform and raced over as fast as I could. I was sure Mr. Duncan would notice the difference, after all Hailey and I didn’t look anything alike, yet he seemed not to notice the difference.
‘I just hope that if he marks down the hour lateness it is on Hailey’s pay sheet,’ I thought to myself as I settled into Hailey’s chair. This was not the first time I agreed to fill in for her and to be honest I was beginning to resent it. Each time it seemed there was some sort of emergency that could not be avoided.
We had been friends since we were kids and I knew she needed this job and wouldn’t be able to pay her rent without it; still I suspected her emergencies were simply that she didn’t want to come to work. I couldn’t blame her.
I slipped my earphones into my ears and then pulled the noise cancelling headphones that the company provided over them. I turned on my pod cast and began another tedious day of stitching together slipcovers. Sometimes they were for chairs, other times for loveseats or sectionals. Today I seemed to have gotten a batch of love seat covers.
The industrial sewing machine whirred at a steady pace and I was able to work quickly without paying much attention to the actual task. I focused instead on the information coming through my headset. Over the past year I had been teaching myself Cantonese and today I found a podcast in Cantonese. I wanted to see how well I learned my language lessons. This was not the first Cantonese podcast I had listened to and to my delight I was able to follow along fairly well. There were a couple of words here and there that I missed and when I heard them I paused and wrote them down phonetically on a note card I kept near the straight pins. Usually I was able to ferret out the meaning of the word based on the other words around it.
I hadn’t told anyone about my developing language skills. Just like I hadn’t told them about my on-line classes. All of the people I knew would consider them a waste of time. And perhaps they were. Maybe they would lead somewhere and maybe they wouldn’t, but I figured it was my time to waste and I could spend it however I wanted.
I realized my thoughts were slipping back into thoughts about Hailey and what she was doing with her free time. As a result I missed part of the podcast. I paused and rewound the podcast to cover the part that I missed, reminding myself to focus.
My focus was almost immediately shaken as when I looked away from my mp3 player, I saw the head supervisor, Mr. Duncan’s boss, staring at me.
Ten til Midnight 